Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 107)
TUESDAY 23 JANUARY 2007
MR ROGER
WILTSHIRE, MR
ANDY KERSHAW,
MR ANDREW
BARKER AND
MR BARRY
HUMPHREYS
Q100 Chairman: I understand, but
the motorist will tell you that he or she pays tax every day at
the petrol station. You do not pay anything.
Mr Barker: If we pay tax it has
to be something that forces good behaviour on airlines and achieves
the end result of fewer emissions. That must be the case.
Q101 Chairman: Therefore, you do
not know what the right tax is but you should be paying some tax
up until 2012?
Mr Wiltshire: I think the right
tax is one that creates an incentive for the industry on the one
hand to improve its technology and on the other an incentive to
the consumer to take action himself.
Q102 Mr Mudie: Would not a more effective
tax be one that hit you rather than the passengers and therefore
gave you the incentive to do something? The passenger's incentive
is not to travel, but if the tax is on you as an industry you
will be in a negotiating position in which you can say you will
do something to save tax. But you are really out of this; it is
the passenger who is involved in it?
Mr Kershaw: From our point of
view the difficulty is that a tax is not effective in meeting
environmental objectives. If what we want to do is reduce climate
change impact we need to find effective mechanisms to do that.
Q103 Mr Mudie: One of the suggested
ways of doing that, if we accepted it, would mean that you would
spend money, not the passengers. But at the moment it is the passengers
who are being hit.
Mr Barker: But any kind of tax
impacts the money we have to spend ourselves.
Q104 Mr Mudie: You made £97
million last year.
Mr Barker: It impacts us straight
away.
Q105 Mr Mudie: There are bigger players
here and there must be a lot of money in this industry.
Mr Barker: The tax already is
one and a half times our profit and the amount of money we spent
on new aircraft last year, 70% of which was to reduce emissions.
Therefore, that money just goes away from us; it affects us directly.
Q106 Chairman: You are happy to pay
tax—or do you not want any tax at all?
Mr Barker: We are responsible
entities and we are happy to pay tax, yes.
Q107 Chairman: I get the feeling
that you are advocating zero tax.
Mr Barker: We are talking about
environmental matters.
Chairman: We need to read the evidence
to get some idea of what the airline industry is about. I think
that you are effective in your message elsewhere; you get people
on planes to go here and there, but your message in terms of environmental
taxation is pretty dense. I get the feeling that you have been
hauled to the table. You have shown no initiative yourselves and
anything that you have to do will be very complex. If you could
write to us in six months to say what initiatives you were taking
that would help us. Thank you for your evidence this morning.
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