Best In-House Consultancy Collaboration Finalist: A Fair Tax on Flying and PLMR

Objective/brief

• The UK has the highest air travel tax (Air Passenger Duty) anywhere in the world.ï‚·
• Despite success in the 2014 Budget in reforming the banding of APD, AFTOF saw an opportunity to secure a further cut to this damaging tax.ï‚·
• PLMR was appointed to work alongside the AFTOF group to deliver a clear and targeted campaign calling specifically for the abolition of Air Passenger Duty (APD) on children’s flights by the 2015 Budget – together, the Scrap the Tax on Family Flights campaign was created.

Strategy 

The Conservative-led government needed to show that it understood ordinary voters ahead of the 2015 General Election. PLMR and AFTOF saw this as an opportunity to position scrapping child APD as the way that:

• The Conservatives could show they understood budgetary pressures on families in austere times – i.e. that many people were struggling to afford a well-deserved family holiday or visit family abroad.
• The Government could meet its own ‘family test’, where every domestic policy must be examined for its impact on family life.

Target audiences

To be successful, the Scrap the Tax on Family Flights campaign needed to mobilise both the public and key political stakeholders including marginal MPs who would support a campaign that, if successful, would directly benefit their constituents. Key to the campaign’s success was AFTOF and PLMR’s collaboration to ensure all target audiences were effectively reached with tailored information - so that the Government felt under pressure to act on this issue from a number of sources.

1. The public, especially mothers, were engaged through a social and traditional media campaign with the aim of making them campaign advocates:

Traditional media: PLMR engaged consumers by securing national and regional press coverage, and by liaising with organisations such as Mumsnet for support. Members of AFTOF in turn led the approaches to the trade press they already had strong relationships with, to secure ongoing positive coverage for the campaign and further industry support and mobilisation. Launch coverage included the Sunday Express splash, BBC Breakfast, ConHome, Mail Online, The Spectator, BBC regional radio, local and trade press coverage.

Social media: PLMR managed the campaign’s Twitter and Facebook accounts to engage the public. Key to this was the design and creation of an interactive online APD calculator where the public would input their destination and child passenger numbers to create a fun e-postcard showing the user how much child APD they would have to pay. The e-postcards could then be tweeted or emailed to the Treasury, shared via Facebook and/or emailed to friends and family. Each postcard included the person’s constituency, highlighting that each person was a potential Conservative voter.

At the same time, AFTOF members used their own strong social media presence to tweet/retweet and post/repost key campaign messages as well as transmitting their own tailored campaign calls. PLMR supported this activity working closely with AFTOF in-house social media teams, as well as providing them with guides on how to support the campaign, including key messaging and ready drafted tweets and posts. Virgin Atlantic, for example, secured a tweet and a blog from Richard Branson on the issue.

2. Engaging MPs and Treasury officials

Key MPs and Treasury officials were provided with briefings that showed the cost to the Exchequer of scrapping APD for under 12s would only be £50-60m (1.6% of the £3 billion the Treasury expected to raise from APD that year) - a small price to pay for huge popular support. The briefings drafted by PLMR were only possible through a close collaboration with the AFTOF Stakeholders to provide industry data and work to ensure the documents were as robust as possible given each trade bodies’ individual stance on the issue of APD. 

Marginal MPs were shown that the campaign connected with their voters, motivating them into action. With this in mind, strategic polling was commissioned and the results linked the campaign to Conservatives winning in marginal seats. 

All key MPs received briefings including: 

• Key messaging;
• Template press releases for their local press;
• Campaign logos to share on their website;
• Template letters to send to the Treasury calling for child APD to be scrapped.

Andrew Bridgen MP agreed to be Parliamentary champion, applying pressure within the Conservative Party. Andrew was approached due to his close relationship with AFTOF member Manchester Airport Group, and then worked closely with PLMR to secure ongoing national coverage, as well as an Early Day Motion (455), which PLMR worked to secure 39 signatories for.

Success

The campaign exceeded its aim of scrapping APD for under 12s in the 2015 Budget: In his 2014 Autumn Statement, Chancellor George Osborne announced not only said that he would scrap APD for children under 12 from May 2015, six months in advance of the AFTOF target date, but that this would be extended to children aged 12-16 from 2016, an additional tax cut of £60m per year.

Early reports from travel companies show that some have seen a staggering 24% increase in long-haul flight bookings among families with children under 12 since the APD cut came into effect, and a third of people with families believe that abolition of child APD has made flying more affordable. AFTOF’s collaborative work with PLMR to engage the key stakeholders was integral to the campaign’s success.