The Green Party agrees with recent letter writers to The Citizen and columnist Hugh Worsnip (6/06/03), that Gloucestershire airport should not be receiving support from Gloucestershire Council Tax payers.

We urgently need a fundamental re-think on aviation. The recent boom in air travel has been artificially stimulated by colossal tax breaks.

The Green Party have published a report that shows the huge hidden costs caused by the aviation industry which society as a whole has to bear. These costs are estimated to be £4 billion per year and include air pollution, ill health and as Citizen letter-writer T.Hart (27/06/03) points out, noise.

The £10bn which aviation contributes to the economy is far more than outweighed by the £4bn hidden costs, £8bn tax breaks, and £9bn balance of payments deficit due to the fact that far more tourist money flies out than flies in.

Far from benefiting everyone, only 38% of us use planes yet they are so heavily subsidised that we each pay £180 annually to the aviation industry. This annual tax-free gift from every man, woman and child in the country to the aviation industry is unjustifiable when our rail services are crumbling.

In addition to economics and the loss of land, there are also the bigger issues like climate change? Aviation is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gases.

Aviation should pay its true costs in the economy and tackle its huge social and environmental downside. We must put an end to the multi-billion pound tax breaks (1). Fares would then rise, the demand would fall and expansion would not be required at airports like Gloucester.

Philip Booth, Gloucestershire Green Party.
(1) The essential elements of the Green Partys' sustainable aviation policy include no new runways, rejection of unsustainable growth rates for air travel, including aviation emissions in the UK's overall CO2 reduction commitments, ensuring the industry pays for its impact on health and the environment through measures including emissions charges, a noise levy and an end to public subsidies and tax exemptions, fixed limits to airport 'sprawl' development and traffic congestion around airports and support for less environmentally damaging alternatives, such as rail travel