Meeting of the Parliament 08 May 2019
Last week, the Scottish Government made a welcome, if overdue, commitment to strengthening our emissions reduction targets and to accepting the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendation of a target of net zero emissions by 2045. Labour welcomes that decision, as a target of net zero emissions has been our position for some time and reflects the urgency of the climate emergency that we face. However, those targets are not worth the paper they are written on if they are not backed by the policies that are needed to deliver them.
That is why the Scottish National Party’s proposal to cut air departure tax was not only the wrong policy when it ditched it on the eve of this debate but the wrong policy when it was proposed in the SNP’s 2016 election manifesto. It has been the wrong policy every day since then, as SNP minister after SNP minister has queued up to justify the policy and attack Labour when we have questioned it. The SNP amendment says that a cut in air passenger duty is
“not now compatible with the more ambitious targets that Scotland wishes to pursue”,
but it never was compatible, and Labour’s long-standing calls to drop the cut have been vindicated by the SNP’s U-turn on the issue.
That U-turn should have been made a long time ago, because the Scottish Government’s own analysis has consistently predicted that a 50 per cent cut in air departure tax would be bad for the environment, adding more than 60,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent to the atmosphere each year. The strategic environmental assessment of the policy raised concerns that a cut to ADT would drive a modal shift away from rail towards short-haul flights, yet it is only now that the SNP seems to realise that pursuing policies that would actively increase emissions from transport is damaging to the environment.