Here’s a strange thing: if you or I take a budget airline flight, we pay Air Passenger Duty between £22 and £110, depending on how far we go. But if we were to take a private flight, we wouldn’t pay any tax at all.
According to the Campaign for Better Transport, private jets are tax exempt, with around 67,000 flights a year enjoying the loophole. Because private planes are small and carry fewer passengers, CO2 emissions per passenger are about 12 times higher than conventional commercial flights, and can be up to 30 times worse.
It strikes me as rather backwards that the richest people in the skies pay the least, and that the most polluting flights are the ones receiving the tax breaks. The whole thing is upside down. Let’s see if Alastair Darling puts it right in his budget today.
The Air Passenger Duty was introduced as a flat fee in 1994, and then raised considerably last year. The industry claimed that airlines would immediately go bust, that small airports would collapse, and that places like the Carribean would be bankrupted by the tax rises. That hasn’t materialised, although it remains to be seen whether the new government in May will reverse it – David Cameron regularly thumbs a lift in private jets.
The irony of billionaires paying nothing for their Learjet flights is that the government always cites the poor as the main reason for keeping aviation taxes low, or for expanding airports. The evidence suggests otherwise, that the poorest quarter of the UK’s population takes 6% of the flights, while the richest quarter takes almost half.
The Earthbound Report 
The irony of tax-free flying for the rich is heightened when we remember the current campaign surrounding Robin Hood Tax