Meeting of the Parliament 03 June 2014
I start from a position of enormous advantage in the debate, because I was brought up to believe that all tax is evil. My experience of a career in politics has tempered that only slightly; I now believe that tax may be a necessary evil, but it is evil, nonetheless.
Occasionally, a tax comes along that causes everybody to round on it and attack it because of the damage that it is doing. Air passenger duty is exactly that kind of tax. It is therefore no surprise that we find ourselves debating APD once again, having debated it on 20 November 2012.
To be perfectly honest, not a great deal has changed in the interim. One of the things that has not changed is the fact that the SNP is still desperately quoting the York Aviation report. The only difference is that the report has, a year and a half down the line, been demonstrated to be out of date and unworthy of our concern.
Nevertheless, I will go into some more detail on the report. It claimed that by 2016 increases in rates of air passenger duty could result in 2.1 million passengers being lost to Scotland and that £210 million less would be spent in Scotland per year by inbound visitors. It also suggested that the initial doubling of APD in 2007 had had the effect of reducing the number of passengers by 1.2 million across the country. It predicted that the knock-on effect of APD would be that the Scottish economy would lose
“inward investment, trade and competitiveness.”
However, the figures that have been produced since show that, in 2013, Glasgow airport handled 7.4 million passengers. That figure is up from 7.2 million in 2009 and bucks the trend that was predicted in the York Aviation report. Edinburgh airport had 9.2 million passengers, which was up from 9 million in 2009. The figures appear to indicate that there is a growth trend. That trend is at its greatest at Aberdeen airport, which handled 3.5 million passengers in 2013, compared with only 3 million in 2009. It therefore appears that, even given the recession that we have gone through, the predictions in the York Aviation report have not materialised.
Nevertheless, I found myself agreeing with a great deal of what the minister said in his opening speech about the economic impact of taxation.