Scotland Bill

Debate between Graham Stringer and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Monday 29th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

Amendment 36 would, in essence, have opposed clause 16 standing part of the Bill, because I want the Committee to explore the specific issues related to air passenger duty and the more general principles about tax competition between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom that may well evolve from a discussion on air passenger duty.

Some of us who voted to set up the Scottish Parliament in the first place now think that, although it seemed a very bold decision at the time, it was less bold than it might have been and that if we had the benefit of being able to go back in time—we do have the benefit of hindsight—the proposals that the Government are making might well have been those that should have been put before the House after the 1997 general election, with us now moving towards full fiscal autonomy for the Scottish Parliament. It was a fundamental mistake to set up a Scottish Parliament with mainly spending powers and no tax-raising powers, apart from the plus or minus 3p on income tax.

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. One of the mistakes is that there is no incentive for the Scottish Government to grow the economy. A great example that we have in the Hebrides is that the Scottish Government have put a road-equivalent tariff on to the ferries. This has grown the economy in the west of Scotland, but the increase in tax revenue is not going to the Government that funds it but to Westminster, which gives no extra cash and further incentives to roll it out further across the west coast. It is similar with childcare and a number of other issues.

[Graham Stringer]

The hon. Gentleman makes a pretty fundamental point about devolution. When the House was making a decision to devolve powers, it would have been sensible to settle on a grant basis that was fair between Scotland, England and Wales, which the Barnett formula was not, and then allow the Scottish Parliament to raise taxes on that basis, so that if it wanted better-quality services, it could have had higher taxes and, if it was more efficient, it could have had better services or lower taxes, and so on. That is a very clear principle.

[Mr MacNeil]

The important point I am driving at is that, if the Scottish Government had proper control of their taxes, they could have grown the economy more and that growth would have delivered far more than the zero-sum game of who has got and has not got what in the UK. It is the ability to grow the economy that tax powers would give that is really fundamental.

[Graham Stringer]

If the hon. Gentleman is saying that Scotland, or any other devolved authority, should benefit from the initiatives it takes and from its own efficiencies, I agree completely. We are moving that way, but the Bill does not move far enough. No Minister or shadow Minister has been able to explain to me, in any of our debates, why we should have the unfair funding in the Barnett formula.

Those are the basic principles. I now want to explore how, if taxation is devolved to the Scottish Parliament, the United Kingdom Government will respond to competition. Air passenger duty is a very good example. As I understand it, the SNP intend to reduce air passenger duty by 50% and then reduce it to zero. That is quite a sensible policy for the SNP to follow. For that matter, it is a sensible policy for the United Kingdom Government to follow, because a number of consultants’ reports have shown that there is almost certainly likely to be a benefit for the whole United Kingdom if air passenger duty is taken away.

Every other country in the European Union has moved either to very low rates of APD or, as in the Netherlands, to zero. It is therefore a sensible policy, but the Government do not seem to have a clear position on what they will do about the very unfair competition between regional airports.

[Mr MacNeil]

Air passenger duty is a perfect illustration of what I said earlier. If the Scottish Government decided to lower APD and that upped the rate of economic activity in Scotland, they should benefit from the fruits of that activity. The benefits should not go to Westminster, because it would not compensate the Scottish Government for that initiative.

[Graham Stringer]

On 20 January, the Chancellor of the Exchequer told the Treasury Committee, in response to a question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) about that very point:

“I think the best approach to dealing with this concern, which I think is perfectly legitimate, is to cross the political boundaries of our two parties to try to find a solution that helps these regional airports that can be affected by an air passenger duty decision north of the border.

HMRC has done some work on this and I think it anticipated that Manchester airport would lose around 3% of its traffic and Newcastle could lose around 10% of its traffic. That was work carried out a couple of years ago… I think you and I—I made the same offer to Ed Balls—could work to help regional airports in the north of England if the Scottish Government were to go down the road of dramatically cutting its air passenger duty.”

Further to that, the Chancellor told the House of Commons on 27 January:

“We have a couple of years to work this out—it does not have be done tonight or tomorrow—and we can work out a plan that protects the brilliant Newcastle, Manchester and other regional airports.”—[Official Report, 27 January 2015; Vol. 591, c. 726.]

What progress has been made on that? This is about a loss of 3% and 10% of business, which are not trivial amounts.

This will result in not only an economic benefit for Scotland, but in real competition, which will come in two forms: there will be competition for passengers on short-haul flights, for which APD is £13 per passenger, and for those on longer-haul flights, for which it is £71 per passenger. Obviously, the same amount is paid for the return flight. A passenger from Newcastle therefore has an incentive—this applies to large families in particular—to travel to Edinburgh or Glasgow in order to save some money. Someone travelling long distance from north America or China has the same incentive.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stringer]

I agree with that perfectly sensible point.

The Government may have a number of possible solutions, and I hope that the Financial Secretary will be able to respond in some way. Manchester airport has made the case strongly to the Government that there should be an air passenger duty holiday on new long-haul routes, and that would be helpful. The Government could devolve decision making to other parts of the United Kingdom as well as to Scotland, although it would be difficult to find a mechanism for doing so. The Government could also agree to compete with Scotland, because if there is no competition, there will be an unfair loss of jobs through lowering the rate of air passenger duty.

Such solutions seem sensible to me, given the experience in the rest of Europe and, indeed, in the rest of the world. The tax was brought in not for environmental reasons, as is sometimes said, but entirely to deal with the hole in the budget after the 1992 general election. It is an inefficient tax: consultants have estimated that it costs the economy more than it brings into the Treasury in cash. Even if the Financial Secretary cannot give an absolutely definitive answer today, I hope he will assure us that he is willing to look at some of the sensible responses to this new competition in tax regimes.

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman has been very kind in giving way. The tax is about more than just a hole in the budget; it is actually a demand-management tool for Heathrow and perhaps for Gatwick as well. If airports are full, APD is a demand-management tool that might work. It is certainly not helping in Edinburgh, Glasgow or Manchester. The solution is not to worry about each other, but for us to be rid of it, and for the Government to keep the demand-management tool in airports that are already saturated.

[Graham Stringer]

I do not agree with the point the hon. Gentleman makes in his fourth intervention. Demand management is not the solution for our regional airports, which have huge extra capacity, but if I went down that line, I expect you would rule me out of order, Mr Crausby. I look forward to the Financial Secretary’s response.

Regional Airports

Debate between Graham Stringer and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Tuesday 15th July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) on a real tour de force; I do not think there is any airport in the UK of any significance that he missed out in his speech. The importance of aviation to Manchester, other regional airports and the whole of the UK came out extremely clearly in his remarks. He said that in round terms aviation is worth £50 billion to the UK economy, but in fact we could not have a modern economy without aviation. While the people who measure these things put the figure at around £50 billion, if we took aviation out of the system we would not be left with the economy minus £50 billion; we would be left with a very small and primitive economy indeed.

However, as my hon. Friend hinted, there is a paradox at the centre of aviation policy in this country: if we add up all the capacity on all the runways at London and regional airports, we find that we have more than 21 times the capacity that we need for aeroplanes to land in and take off from this country, but on the other hand Heathrow is congested because aviation depends on a hub system internationally. Heathrow is our major, indeed our only, hub airport, and it is congested. Many airlines would like to get in there but cannot. Airlines have cut off routes to the rest of the UK because that hub airport is full, yet we do not have the routes that regional airports, including those in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and the east midlands, would like.

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman asserted that airports rely on a hub system, but that is an arguable point. I gently say to him that the hub system did not come about accidentally. For about 50 years, the UK had bilateral air agreements specifying that only London airports could be used. If there is a hub system, perhaps the most logical hub would be Schiphol airport, with its five runways. However, as we know, the reality is that a huge number of political choices contributed to the hub system, and similarly a huge number of political choices have been made that are not helping our regional airports. Specifically, they are not helping on APD, as the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) said.

[Graham Stringer]

There were a lot of points in that intervention, but I do not think that the key point about hub airports is that until recently most flights needed—some still do—bilateral agreements to get into Heathrow. The real point about hub airports is that we need that efficiency of transfer traffic in order to thicken routes that would not be viable at other airports. I will come on to APD shortly.

We have this paradox; we have loads of runway capacity, but insufficient runway capacity at Heathrow. That means that our aviation industry, which is vital, is not as good as it could be. My hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East mentioned businesses such as Google moving to the north-west and having headquarters there. However, KPMG has moved its European HQ to Frankfurt because of the lack of runway capacity at Heathrow.

There are two solutions. One is blindingly obvious but has got caught up in party politics. I hope that the three political parties can keep a united front and support whatever comes out of the Davies report. However, my view is simply that we should build a third and probably a fourth runway at Heathrow, because this country is falling behind in its international competitiveness.

That is the hub issue, but what do we do about the second issue, which is the capacity we have in the regions? How do we attract extra airlines to our major regional airports? There are three things that we can do, but Governments have not been good at doing any of them. First, I can see no reason at all why there should not be a completely open skies policy in every regional airport outside London. Why should any airline in the world that wants to fly into the UK, take passengers and go wherever it wants not be able to do so? If it could, that would create jobs and benefit any airport that it operated from.

The Government have gone part way there by granting fifth freedoms to airlines coming here, but there is also the right for UK and other airlines to object to those freedoms, so that measure has not brought about the benefit that it could have had. Having completely open skies with rights for everybody and no right of objection for other airlines, whether British or not, would benefit our regional airports, particularly the bigger ones such as Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham, but also some of the smaller ones. That is the one thing that we could do that would help the regional airports.

Secondly, as was mentioned both by my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East and in interventions, there should be a change in APD. Let me say clearly that APD is a bad tax. The PricewaterhouseCoopers report last year—I think it was published just before Christmas—showed that if APD was abolished, the UK economy would probably grow by 0.5%. I understand why Treasury Ministers, and Transport Ministers for that matter, say, “We don’t want to lose the revenue we’ve got”, even though other countries such as Holland and Ireland have scrapped APD and their economy has benefited as a result. Even if we cannot prove what would happen by creating theoretical models for this country, we can see what is happening elsewhere, follow the example of other countries and scrap APD; that would be the ideal way to approach the issue.

However, if scrapping APD is too much of a step for naturally cautious Treasury Ministers, we should adopt a step-by-step approach and measure what is going on. We could abolish APD for children, which would be very popular as APD is a tax on holidays as well as on business. Equally, we could abolish APD in the winter, when airlines find it difficult to make a profit; go to any UK airport in November and there will be people rattling about in it. Also, there could be a holiday—not with buckets and spades, but on taxation—for new routes, so the Treasury would not lose any money. In addition, APD could be reduced just in the regions. There are lots of different ways of approaching the problem of how to get rid of a bad tax, which would be beneficial for the regional airports. The Transport Committee looked at APD and recommended that the Government consider it in greater detail. On top of that, the Government should look at practical experience elsewhere, and adopt a step-by-step approach in this country.

The third point, already referred to by my hon. Friend and in interventions, is the importance of surface access. If we compare our airports with continental airports, many airports in north America and airports in the far east, we find that our train links are poor. Our biggest international airport—indeed, the biggest international airport in the world—is Heathrow, but apart from the Paddington link it does not have a mainline rail route going into it. In what country would one of the world’s great airports not have a mainline route going to it, so that people could not get to it by train from many other parts of the country? That is simply poor.

The Transport Committee is holding an inquiry into rail. We recently quizzed Network Rail and the Office of Rail Regulation about how they assess railway lines going to and from airports. I have been on the Committee on and off for a long time, but I found the answer pretty extraordinary: they do not assess them any differently from routes to anywhere else. We should, as the Davies commission recommended, change that approach so that we give priority to our airports. That would take traffic off the roads, help to support the airports and help to attract traffic into them.

The Committee looked at the example of Stansted, which could be part of the solution to some of the congestion in the south-east system. The rail line to Stansted is poor, and the sooner we get a decent fast rail link, the better. We can argue about whether the journey time should be 30 minutes, as Stansted thinks, or whether it can be reduced only to 40 or 45 minutes, but it should certainly be reduced; that would benefit everybody.

In Manchester, we have made our own arrangements in a sense. We have paid for the southern link to the rail system at Manchester airport, as well as for part of the northern link. With other Greater Manchester MPs, across all parties, I had to fight the Labour Government to get the tram link. All airports really should have decent surface links—preferably rail or, in some cases, rail and light rail.

I will finish on that point. Aviation is vital to our economy. It is not as good as it should be. We need to make sure we use the assets we have, invest to make them work better and certainly sort out the south-east system, which will help our regional economies as well.