Your second flight of the year may need a reason

A consultation paper drafted for a group of transport and climate ministries would give every adult a personal aviation allowance: one untaxed return flight in each calendar year. The second flight would remain available at a surcharge, and would require the traveller to state a purpose. The purpose would be chosen from a dropdown menu. In the draft annex the menu runs to eleven entries, and the last one is leisure.

Nothing in the scheme would forbid a journey. The allowance would not cap flights, refuse bookings or ration seats; it would price them, and it would record them. The first flight of the year would cost what it costs today. Every subsequent one would carry a levy that rises with each booking, reduced or waived depending on which line of the menu the traveller selected before payment.

“This is not a permission system,” a spokesperson for the working group would be expected to say. “Nobody would be refused a flight. The traveller would simply be asked to say, in a structured field, what the flight is for. We regard that as a modest request, and we accept that it is the part people will write about.”

The difficulty would not be the levy. It would be the menu. Bereavement would sit at the top, because somebody has to put something at the top. Serious illness in the family would sit under it, then wedding, then birth, then care of a dependent relative. A parent's eightieth birthday does not appear on the list at all and would have to be filed under other, family — a phrase the booking screen would render in grey.

Within a season, travellers would learn which entry passes through the system with the least friction, and would select it. The scheme would not notice, because the scheme verifies nothing: it collects a declaration and applies a discount. What it would produce instead is a national dataset in which illness among relatives appears to peak in the second week of August, and again in the week before Christmas.

The distributional case is the strongest part of the design and the part least discussed. A large share of flights is taken by a small share of people, and a flat tax on tickets falls hardest on the household that flies once. An allowance with a rising levy does the opposite. The scheme would be fair. The dropdown is what people would remember.

Nothing has been adopted, funded or drafted into law, and the paper says so on its first page. But the machinery it describes — a per-person budget, a declared purpose, a structured field — is not technically difficult, and is the ordinary shape of every allowance ever administered. The novelty would be the subject matter. It would be the first time a form asked a person to rank, from a fixed list, the people worth travelling to see.