L

Lord Moylan (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 10 February 2026

Debate

Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill

Contribution

My Lords, we have worked our way through what the SAF is, and through the mechanism by which it is going to be subsidised and how it is going to fall on the passenger, but how much is going to fall on the passenger? What is it actually going to cost? How is it going to strike? How is it going to hit your pocket? We are not completely in the dark on this subject. We have The Revenue Certainty Mechanism Cost Benefit Analysis, produced by the department in May 2025. Paragraph 4.23 has a lot of hinting in it, but it comes down to saying about the revenue certainty mechanism that “the likely impact on ticket prices is between -£1.5 and £1.5, on average, per year”. I take it that the “per year” means that it will go up, in the worst case scenario, by £1.50 a year—so over a 10-year period, it will be £15. This is a highly speculative document; it has quite a large amount of numerical material attached to it, but it remains highly speculative none the less. Effectively, it has to guess the price of standard kerosene fuel out into future years, and the cost of SAF under mechanisms that have yet to be negotiated, so we do not yet know what they are going to be. None the less, that is the figure the Government are presenting to Parliament and the public as the cost and the pain of this measure. My Amendment 12, which is of capital importance, would require the Government to ensure that this prediction of theirs is not lost in the mists of time—that this document does not become waste paper. The Government should be required periodically—annually, as the amendment says—to produce a report showing what this is costing in terms of ticket price. That is not straightforward for producers of aviation fuel to calculate, of course, because they are at the top end of the supply chain and would not be able to know how it worked out; they could tell you what the levy was, but they could not tell you how it translated into ticket price. So that is what the amendment does, and it is essential because, in all this, we privilege the discussions we have with the foreign investors that are going to build these plants, and the discussions we have, to some extent, with the fuel producers on which the levy is going to fall. It is very easy, as I say, to forget the voice of the consumer and the people who, year after year, will pay more to travel. It is a significant sum if you are a family of four going on holiday, and we should be reminded of that through the Government putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak, and agreeing to report on these effects every year out into the future. I beg to move.

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