You will recall the two stories HERE and HERE that I have written in the past week on Gordon Brown's ultra vires airport duty hike. Well here's another one.
It appears that the Treasury's failure to anticipate the need for parliamentary legislation for the rise in airport passenger duty has meant that tour operators are facing a £47 million bill for money they cannot claim back from passengers. The industry is expected to pay the duty for passengers who have already booked their flights way in advance.
Regulation 11 of the Package Travel Regs means that tour operators are unable to surcharge passengers who have already booked, unless the amount of the surcharge exceeds 2% of the holiday price, and only then for the amount by which it exceeds 2%. This means that tour operators will have to absorb the full amount of the cost for the bookings already taken. Taking A C Neilsen data, and interpolating this for the entire industry, it is estimated that approximately 4 million holidays have been sold for departures after 1st February. Accordingly, the tour operator industry is being asked to pay a sum that it cannot recover from customers of £47 million, before any sales directly by airlines is taken into account (according to figured calculated by the Federation of Tour Operators). One you include airlines in the figure it could well top £100 million.
Apparently the airlines and tour operators told the Treasury they would consider refusing to pay the money if they couldn't collect it from their passengers, but the Treasury's typically brutal response was to say that if they refused the legislation would be made retrospective anyway.
The tour operators have pointed out that all previous changes to APD have been undertaken with several months notice. This one has been introduced on 7 weeks notice, which also includes Christmas. Their evidence to the Treasury (which I have seen) says:
"The changes need primary legislation, and we need to understand the timescale for introducing that legislation. It will be challenging to make the necessary changes to the law by 1st February, and we would be extremely concerned if any change was effectively retrospective. Time is required to change systems and prices, and technically, it is questionable whether prices appearing in brochures can be changed at all without committing a criminal offence. Trading standards are inconsistent in their interpretation of this rule, but there are certainly some who would regard any price increase from that advertised in a brochure as constituting an offence."
So a measure proposed by Gordon Brown as a "green tax" is nothing of the sort. It's a classic stealth tax on business and one which could send a couple of tour operators over the edge. Well done Gordon!
UPDATE 2 JAN: The Daily Mail has picked up the story on Page 28. Can't find it on their website though...
31 comments:
STOP BLOODY WHINGEING !! What is all this 'ultra vires' bollocks ?? We are killing the planet with greenhouse gases - what would you propose ?
Fiddling while the planet burns ?
Cameron's nonsensical 'windmills and bikes' photocalls are meaningless - real action is what counts. If you can't do that or take tough decisions why are you trying to become an MP !
Anonymous, Brown made out it is a Green Tax. It is nothing of the sort. He introduced it without the necessary parliamentary approval and therefore it is ultra vires. It's not about whinging, it's about respecting Parliament.
It's this cunning plan he has... drive all travel agents/tour operators out of business, set up a quango to replace them and through the wonders of the national database you'll be allocated a holiday and automatically informed of where you're going and when.
Once they've sorted the bugs out, that is.
Ignore the likes of anon 1:15.
Such ignorance is widespread but reprehensible.
Anybody else not convinced that 'We' are killing the planet with greenhouse gases?
It is a green tax, actually - more or less as recommended in the Stern Report. Incidentally, are you being retained by the travel industry or any part of it? Only seems fair to ask as you seem to be their principal publicity vehicle.
It would be a green tax if it did anything to reduce air travel. it does not.
And no, just for the record, I am not being retained by any of the people who have interests in this. I gave up lobbying 11 years ago!
I am highlighting this because I think it is wrong that Gordon Brown should get away with imposing a tax which hasn't even been subjected to parliamentary legilsation when it should have been. I HATE the concept of retrospective legisaltion.
There probably are a few like you Billy, but, believe it or not, anthropogenic climate change is not a left wing conspiracy. It is happening now. You will not find any climate scientist, with the excpetion of the occasional attention-seeking crank, who believes otherwise. How we deal with it is another matter, and unfortunately people like anonymous@1.15 only encourage sceptics to think it's a greeny-communist plot. Green taxes could work if they're properly conceived, and if the money raised is actually used for green projects and not simply thrown into Gordon's big pot. Generally, though, people respond better to carrots rather than sticks and tax cuts in the right areas to encourage greener behaviour are a better option.
I dont belive we are causing global warming any more than putting taxes up will stop it.The stern report was dodgy science and did what gordon paid for,justify tax hikes on a trendy issue.If as is well known grapes were grown in yorkshire.then we are cooler now than then so this might just be a cool dip.what people also fail to mention is the increase in the suns output and the rise in water vapour.which all the tax in the world wont stop.
Working in travel industry myself, I've seen the problems 1st hand caused by this stealth tax.
It is not a green tax, just a tax on business.
It will not stop people flying, if we are serious about reducing carbon from flights we need a decent train network for a start.
"You will not find any climate scientist, with the excpetion of the occasional attention-seeking crank, who believes otherwise."
Except for a few thousand scientists, including the independent review board who determined that Hansen's 'hockey stick' graph was not justified by his data, the Russian science community, who believe we're heading into an Ice Age, the astronomers who've observed that variable solar output is linked to the rises of the last century.... and so on.
I suggest you read a bit more widely, you'd be amazed at the spectrum of professional opinion out there.
Of course, you'll have to search the scientific journals, these papers never seem to get much mention in the MSM. After all, they wouldn't want people to get the idea that that the oil companies aren't the only ones with an agenda, would they? There's an awful lot of government grant money thrown at global warming researchers, but only to those who agree with it. It sort of gives them an incentive.
Swift is quite right about GW, it isn't a green/socialist conspiracy, and it is real science.
Sadly, Gordon's taxes make it look like a conspiracy. I think this will actually damage the Green cause more than anything, because it is
a) Anti democratic
b) Will have absolutely no effect on air travel
c) Being done whilst the Government approves extra runways with the other hand
d) Just filling part of the budget hole
Keep on whinging about this Iain. I'm no fan of the airlines but who will the Treasury deal with like this next?
It is a universal principle of the philosophy of law that legislation should never be retro-active. If laws can be altered retrospectively, then there is no certainty of law, indeed there is no law.
The United Kingdom has an organic and uncodified constitution, but this applies in the UK just as it does in all those countries with written constitutional codes.
Retroactive taxation by stealth is taxation by stealing.
Anyone who imagines that Airport Tax has anything to do with 'saving the planet' is a natural-born sucker, whether they believe anthropogenic global warming is real or not.
The Department of Transport themselves have published their forecast for UK airport passenger levels by 2030:
Without the latest tax rise: 665 million.
With the latest tax rise: 655 million.
The fact is, this forecast is no more than a face-saving gesture. The difference is too slight for anything about 25 years from now, to have any validity whatever.
Therefore we can say with complete certainty that whatever this is called, it it quite decidedly not a 'green tax'.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the taxation career of our esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer, who discovered a few years back with the Petrol Duty escalator that as soon as it looks as if a 'green tax' may be in danger of actually having a 'green effect', it becomes untenable and politically suicidal.
Brown has instead carefully calculated what he can get way with in this area by calling something a 'green tax', but not making it big enough to actually change anyone's travel plans. After all, if fewer people flew tax income would fall and that would never do, would it? Or alternatively if it hurt enough to be effective he'd be kicked out and that would be even worse. Or both.
4.16. Goodness, perhaps I should take my Austen with more water over the new year; or watch 24 instead.
If the planet is facing environmental disaster due to our use of air travel and cars the simple answer is to ban both, of course that will not happen as it will cause a huge loss of revenue for gordon to piss up the wall.
Just because Al "love story" Gore says global warming is caused by man doesn't make it so.
It is happening that is a fact, what isn't a fact is the cause.
well, if we didn't have morons in this world pillocks like Gore/Blair/Brown wouldn't have a job, so I expect we will all have to go through with this bollocks.
Im going to throw some more coal on the fire.
Its a tax on wealth and nothing else and is typical of Brown.
As for New Labour obeying the law!! They dont give a toss about such small matters. Only small people obey the law.
The sooner Brown clears off to the Socialist Republic of Scotland the better for the English.
If you want to see what Scotland is really like read the Scotsman and in particular the letters section. They think they have a thriving economy and they have 144000 net taxepayers in a nation of 5 Million!!
The thought of Brown being in charge of the Country terrifies me
This fact(144000 net taxpayers in Scotland ) came from a Labour supporting Quality newspaper !!
Note to anonymous 1:15, Swift, & co:
You are all SO last century.
As usually, Greenie believes are rubbished by the facts by the time they gain some sort of popular belief.
Straws in the wind:
(1) The whole anthropogenic global warming idea is predicated on the so-called 'Hockey Stick' which is supposed to show warming happening like never before. But this is now utterly demolished. This 'work' of Mann, Jones, Hansen & co., and of course that well-known scientist and self-proclaimed internet-inventor Al Gore, is heading rapidly towards laughing-stock status, and the prophets of anthropogenic global warming with it. (I think that before all that much time we may well find this whole 'Hockey Stick' farrago episode exposed as perhaps the greatest fraud in the history of science--certainly in terms of research funds extracted under false pretences from sucker politicians.)
(2) 1998 was the warmest year world-wide since accurate measurements began about 1850 (but the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm Period clearly had many warmer years) and every year since 1998 has shown a downward trend. (2006 is no exception. It was very warm in the UK; it was unusually cold in North America. What matters is the GLOBAL temperature.)
(3) The Ice Patrol Iceberg counts shows that, contrary to what the doom merchants would have us believe, the rate of ice break-up in the Arctic (for example) is now actually very much less than its peak in the mid-1990s, and as low as it was 100 years ago.
http://www.uscg.mil/lantarea/iip/General/icebergs.shtml
(Ice has actually been breaking away from the north and south polar regions continually since the end of the last Ice Age about 18,000 years ago. We've managed to cope so far.)
(4) The real global temperature record tracks sunspot activity much more closely than CO2 levels do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspots
The Maunder Sunspot Minimum matches the Little Ice Age almost perfectly. The 'Hockey Stick' denies the Little Ice Age happened, although it is historically certain it did. Sunspot activity clearly seems to have peaked about 10 or 15 years ago and looks like it's starting to fall back now, as can be see.
So:
-- Wouldn't you say a pattern is emerging here?
-- Wouldn't you say that solar activity is at the very least a more convincing warming cause than human-induced CO2?
Which leads on to the following thoughts:
-- The warming is almost certainly natural and in line with earlier warming periods such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm Period, so there is nothing humanity can do to stop it, or, come to that, needs to.
-- It has almost certainly already peaked, so there is nothing to get excited about.
Do you think someone should tell Windmill Dave?
Brown takes more than 42% of UK GDP and buys his way to power with it.
Does anyone remember hurricane katrina
and others (so called global warming proof) last year none at all (proof of
global warming again) erm what next.
the weather and climate patterns on this small planet are all powered by the sun and if as it does the output varies then things change down here.To
suggest we can alter that is arrogant
nonsense.the climate will change and we will adapt or die thats the way the world works,deal with it.
once upon a time there was a big powerful leader who thought he could sit in his chair and tell mother nature what to do.
His name was cnut.
Jumble the letters about a bit and that sums up all the kind of people who buy into all this climate change bollocks.
To be fair to Cnut, or Knut, or Canute, what is supposed to have happened is that he grew tired of flattery from his courtiers. When one such flatterer gushed that the king could even command the obedience of the sea, Knut proved him wrong by practical demonstration: by commanded the waves to go back, which of course they did not.
(Now try to imagine Tony Bliar growing tired of flattery...)
But the lesson is good. We humans are just not powerful enough to change the climate, either by accident or design.
Live with it.
A thought occours to me about people supporting "green taxes" its the same thing that drives powerful people to acts of self degradation, its guilt and
paying tax is punishment and makes them feel better.It royaly pisses me off.
I wonder if this could turn out to be NuLab version of the poll tax.
When all is said and done this will hit the very people that labour target for votes, the "working class" families looking for a cheap summer break for the family. The same target group that can not take advantage of out of season breaks, because the nanny state will punish them for taking their children out of school. Instead they must wait for the summer holidays and be stung with peak rates.
The fact that this will hit home in a more dramatic fashion will cause more outcry from the masses than most of Brown's stealth taxes
2b0r02b:
I'm not going into the AGW thing again because we've been here too many times, but I do question one thing:
"We humans are just not powerful enough to change the climate, either by accident or design. "
Well, we had a good demonstration in September 2001. The lack of planes in the skies changed the daily temperature range in the US due to the lack of contrails:
http://facstaff.uww.edu/travisd/pdf/climatepapermar04.pdf
"We humans are just not powerful enough to change the climate, either by accident or design."
Yes, this is the mantra I use to reassure myself but is it in fact true?
I do my best to balance the effects the envirogreenies obsessions may be having on the climate but am I doing enough? I made a point of burning all the Christmas wrapping in the garden on Boxing Day and left the car ticking over on the drive most of New Year's Day but it's only a small contribution to global CO2. How can I do more?
Inspiration strikes!!!!
If I install an electric fan on my roof and leave it running 24/7 will it cancel out Dave's bloody windmill?
pj:
If you want to cancel Dave's windmill I think the average output required would be about 660kW/year, or 1.8kW per day. Running a 150W outdoor light would suffice, you don't need a heater. Anyone buying a small windmill for use in an urban area is wasting their money, windspeeds are not high enough, whatever B&Q tell you.
Black external pipes for water heating, though, are a much better idea, and economically viable. Forget solar panels except for off-grid supplies.
Building some 1GW nuclear stations would be by far the best idea...
dr random
Thank you for your kind advice.
I have purchased a suitable electrical fitting on E-bay and it will be airfreighted over from Shanghai next week. The supplier assures me that it was manufactured using coal fired electricity and contains no recycled material whatsoever.
A so-called green tax imposed in response to a report written by an employee. How convenient for Brown.
Can we have a tax on beer and fizzy pop cos its full of CO2 (boo hiss) and cows cos they fart earth killing methane and forest fires and will gordo give us balloons to breath into then he could weigh it and tax us again. damn i could be running the treasury with "radical""robust"and "stake holder"ideas like this.
The tax itself is really a side-issue, and given the size of Britain's CO2 emissions relative to the rest of the world it is classic gesture politics. I don't even know if it's been set at the level that Stern prescribed in his report and is thus a Pigou tax. That's just details. What is utterly horrendous is the retrospective nature of the legislation and as Iain points out, the fact that it is ultra vires. Ultra vires laws under the British Constitution are considered one of the greatest threats to the Rule of Law and as such had fallen into almost complete desuetude until the ascension of Le Roi Soleil Tony Blair (l'etat, c'est moi) and his evil Mazarin Gordon Brown.
Another nasty spot of retrospective taxation is the change in the law on UK residency which now counts dates of arrival and departure as days spent in the UK for tax purposes. Had the change been prospective, then that would have been plain old money-grubbing. But to apply it in retrospect is to penalise bona fide decisions made according to published advice. That kicks away one of the central pillars of Common Law: that a person should be able to predict the consequences of his actions vis-a-vis a given law without the fear that the rug will be pulled out from under him.
This really is a most foully illiberal government and I am glad I got out when I could.
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