EDITORIAL - Demand more from Britain

We, too, welcome George Osborne's move this week to bring a level of rationality and parity to Britain's discriminatory airline passenger duty (APD).

But unlike Jamaica's tourism minister, Dr Wykeham McNeill, and his associates in the Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO), this newspaper does not believe that the region can, as yet, claim a "complete victory", for there is more that Mr Osborne, the United Kingdom's (UK) finance minister, should be asked to do. The region should, therefore, not yet end its campaign for the reform of the APD, in which our sister publication, The Voice, Britain's leading black newspaper, led the way for more than a year.

The APD is a carbon-footprint levy applied by the British government on air travellers from that country, based, ostensibly, on the distance they fly. But that, really, is not the case. For the distance is not measured by actual miles flown, but based on that between London and the capital city of the country to which a person is travelling. That threw up oddities that placed Caribbean tourism destinations at a competitive disadvantage.

For example, the distance from London to Jamaica's capital, Kingston, is just under 4,700 miles. It is shorter from London to Washington, DC; around 3,660 miles. But the distance to, say Hawaii, one of America's big tourist destinations, and a direct competitor to the Caribbean, is more than 7,000 miles.

But under the APD system, an individual travelling economy class from London to Montego Bay now pays an APD of £83. For the person flying to Hawaii, or, perhaps Orlando, the rate is £67.

That near 20 per cent difference between the two rates is, of itself, significant, but its cumulative effect is even greater for a British family wanting to take a vacation in the Caribbean. There is little doubt that APD has been a major contributor to the sharp decline in UK tourists to the region for the past six years - some countries by as much as a quarter. In Jamaica, for instance, the drop in 2012 was more than 16 per cent, for an annual average decline, since 2005, of 6.3 per cent.

The disparity caused, as Mr Osborne acknowledged this week, the "great sense of injustice" harboured among Britain's Caribbean nationals, and to which he has responded. Except that his removal of the band in which Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean fall, thus bringing the region on par with the USA, will not happen for a year.

establish parity

We believe that Mr Osborne, and the British government, should be prevailed upon to implement that change immediately so as to urgently establish parity between the Caribbean and other holiday destinations. In other words, the APD on flights to the Caribbean should be lowered to £67 - now!

Further, while the April 2015 change, as now structured, will mean a 14 per cent reduction of the rate of the APD for the Caribbean, that new economy-class APD rate of £71 will be around six per cent higher than what travellers to US destinations now pay. As part of compensation to its Caribbean partners which bore the brunt of the disparities of the past, Mr Osborne, when the new arrangements kick in, should, at least for one year, freeze the APD rate at the current levels on travel to this region.

Dr McNeill and the CTO should begin to make that case now!

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