Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Thursday the 21st of September and so therefore a very happy autumnal equinox to you,

unless you're listening in the southern hemisphere, in which case welcome to spring.

I'm looking at what the prime minister is saying and what the

government is doing about climate change and in particular about aviation. It's a really interesting

thing where you have the Prime Minister saying,

the proposal to create new taxes to discourage flying, I've scrapped that.

I've obviously been trying to find out what proposal that was because, well, I may have been sleeping when I should have been reading, but I

simply wasn't aware of one. Therefore, people are thinking, well, hang on, proposal to create

new taxes to discourage flying. When did you come up with it so that you could scrap it? Well,

it turns out that it wasn't a proposal from the government at all.

It was a reference to something which the Climate Change Committee had said in a report,

which was to incentivise alternative transport modes, prices of air travel ought to be

more expensive relative to lower emission modes. Yes, I can see that that's a perfectly reasonable thing

for a climate change committee to say, but it's not quite a proposal to create new taxes to discourage flying.

Anyway, if Rishi Sunak wishes to say that it is, that's entirely up to him.

Of course, there's many outside voices saying we want new taxes to discourage flying.

We want to have a quota system whereby

approximately everyone gets one flight a year allocated people who want to fly more will pay

a penalty now i think that is an absolutely um unlikely event um that uh you would ever get anything like that because frankly how do you cope with

people who are flying from from other countries what's to stop people just thinking okay well

I'm going to hop on the train and go to Paris or Amsterdam and I'm going to fly from there so

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