Hello, it's Saturday the 23rd of October and thanks for joining me, Simon Calder, for the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List and the travel desk of the Independent, which as you can tell, is currently at Chipponham in Wiltshire on the train to Bristol Temple Meads.

Today, though, I don't want to talk about the railways.

I want to talk about air passenger duty because it is going to change.

We think in the budget, which is coming up this coming Wednesday.

Now, how is it going to change exactly? Nobody knows,

because that I guess is market sensitive information, but the Guardian has a fairly comprehensive

leak of what is going to happen. But before we talk about that, let me explain what

air passenger duty is, where it came from and where,

in my opinion, it is going. Air passenger duty was introduced in November 1995 by the then-chancellor

Ken Clark.

And later he talked to me about it.

And he said basically, air travel, a bit of a luxury thing, wasn't being taxed at all.

There's no tax on aviation fuel.

So I thought, he told me, that it would be good to have some kind of tax. And's exactly what he did initially it was very straightforward

five pounds for a just a any flight in economy and that included both directions if you were on

a UK domestic flight and then 10 pounds if you were in

business class. What could be simpler? Well clearly it was too simple for some and so we

got a gradual increase in the complexity of it and of course the rates and 2006, the then-Chancellor Gordon Brown dramatically increased

air passenger duty, basically doubling it overnight. By then, the long-haul version had got

more and more expensive. And we eventually ended up with a system where you had air passenger

duty for European flights. Then anything from 4,000 to 6,000 miles was slightly higher and anything

above £6,000 was enough to trigger the highest rates.

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