How many flights do you take a year? Purely from the fact that you’re reading this on Ski Flight Free, the chances are that you may at least be trying to cut down.
The aviation sector is projected to be the single biggest source of emissions in the UK by 2050 due to the steadily increasing demand for flights, according to the Committee on Climate Change.
The richest 10% use the most energy
The facts are that the richest 10% of people in the UK use more energy on flights than the poorest 20% use energy on everything in their lives.
Do you take four flights a year? That’s more than 92% of the country
We already know that it’s a small minority of people who take the most flights.
Data from the National Travel Survey has shown that only 8% of the British population take four flights or more to overseas destinations every year, while almost half take no flights at all.
So if you take four flights in a single year, you are taking more flights than 92% of the country.
1% of people took more than 50% of flights
A Freedom of Information request in 2019 showed that 1% of English residents took more than half of flights abroad in 2018 – a figure hugely out of proportion.
It’s time for a Frequent Flyer Levy…
‘Frequent Flyers’ gain tax free benefits by accumulating air miles, when they should instead be paying
The Green Party have proposed a progressive tax on the most frequent flyers – a fair policy that most people would come behind if proposed.
This could be deployed so that the first flight in a year incurs little or no tax and it so does not penalise annual family holidays, but the levy then ramps up for each additional flight.
A levy for frequent flyers would make post-pandemic holidays cheaper for the UK’s poorest households and raise £5bn a year for the Treasury, according to research from the New Economics Foundation.
A levy would help the UK reach its carbon reduction target, reduce the amount of flights taken by the richest, and level-up the opportunity for the less well-off to travel overseas.
