Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 26th of September.

If you've been kind enough to listen for the past couple of days, you will have heard a number of voices talking about, well, first of all, Rob Burgess from Head for Points, talking about Club Europe and other business class services within Europe,

and my colleague Natalie Wilson, waxing lyrical about the possibility of flying to Australia on budget airlines.

But, of course, there is another side to this debate, and that is the concerns about the impact of aviation

on the environment. To find out more about that, I've been back to talk to Anna Hughes. She is the

director of Flight Free UK, and in particular, we've been talking about the idea of a frequent flyer levy where people

yes and that would include me who fly a lot would be taxed really quite heavily for the flights

that we take i've been finding out more more from Anna about how this could work.

So there's lots of talk about a frequent flyer levy, which is what you've just described.

You would have, the more you fly, the higher the tax rises for each subsequent flight.

And it makes sense in many ways because we know that there are a small

number of people take the majority of flights. So it's in the UK here it's 15% takes 70% of the

flights. So in order to bring down the amount we fly, it makes sense to go after the people who

fly the most.

And one way, you know, taxation does change behaviour.

So if it's, I think the Green Party view is that ultimately the tax increases so much

to the point where you just simply cannot afford to fly anymore if you're taking multiple flights.

So, yes, I see the value in it I

and I feel that there needs to be regulation in that way and the behaviour change needs to come from

both sides so there would need to be regulation in the form of taxation and and maybe flight caps

and that more comes down to airports so if we could cap the form of taxation and maybe flight caps. And that more comes down to airports.

So if we could cap the number of flights that an airport can operate, then that doesn't come down

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