Fury over air tax hike

Passengers and airlines will be forced to foot the bill for Gordon Brown's hike in tax on air travel as he announced that airline passenger duty would double to £10 for short-haul flights and rise to £40 for longer journeys.

The new charges will come into effect on February 1st next year and have provoked an angry response from both airlines and green groups alike.

In response to the announcement, British Airways said that the hike was "highly regrettable" and that air passenger duty was "an extremely blunt instrument" in reducing carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, easyJet said that Mr Brown had unfairly targeted the aviation industry insisting that the chancellor has a "wholly inconsistent approach to different types of transport".

Andy Harrison, chief executive of the low-cost airline, said that increasing airline passenger duty "is the wrong tax for the economy and the wrong tax for the environment" because it does not provide airlines with an incentive to operate cleaner aircraft.

However, the changes have not pleased green campaigners either. Friends of the Earth director Tony Juniper said that "key green initiatives have been ignored" in the report and that those planned to be introduced are nothing more than "inadequate".