All bar two UK MPs have received emails protesting at the high rate of air passenger duty (APD) following a half-day campaign at several airports less than a month ago.
The ‘Hands off our Holiday’ campaign by the Airport Operators Association (AOA) and airline representative bodies Bar UK and Bata saw 30,000 leaflets handed out to passengers at nine airports on the morning of July 11.
By the middle of this week the Hands off our Holiday website had attracted in excess of 54,000 unique visitors, who had sent more than 16,500 protest emails to MPs.
The AOA reported 648 MPs out of the 650 in the House of Commons have received an email, many of them multiple times. This extraordinary success was achieved by about 150 people handing out leaflets for a few hours. It dwarfs all other efforts so far in the campaign for a reversal on rising APD rates and demonstrates the depth of feeling on the issue.
AOA chief executive Darren Caplan said: “If we campaign strongly enough, we can prevent the double-inflation APD rise planned in 2012.”
There has been a flip in the most-emailed MPs since the peak holiday season began. Up to July 24, the list of ten MPs who had received most emails on APD featured only members of coalition-government parties and included three cabinet members and a minister.
The latest top-ten includes just one cabinet member and six Labour MPs. Six are MPs for London constituencies. The ten are:
- Mark Field, (Cities of London & Westminster)
- Frank Dobson (Holborn & St Pancras)
- Emily Thornberry (Islington South & Finsbury)
- Julian Brazier (Canterbury)
- Andrew Smith (Oxford East)
- Vince Cable (Secretary of State for Business)
- Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central)
- Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar & Limehouse)
- Jane Ellison (Battersea)
- Kate Hoey (Vauxhall)