BUDGET airlines are overwhelmingly used by richer people taking an ever-increasing number of foreign holidays, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) will report next week.

The Government has claimed that raising the cost of air tickets would be unfair to poorer households, who have come to expect a foreign holiday each year.

Stephen Ladyman, the Transport Minister, said in September that he felt “uncomfortable” about raising the cost of flights. “A tax on aviation isn’t going to stop rich people flying on holidays, it means poor people won’t. The wealthy won’t notice £10 on a ticket. The poor certainly will,” he said.

But The Times has learnt that the CAA will announce that the social profile of air passengers has hardly changed in the past ten years, during which Ryanair and easyJet have grown from tiny operations to become two of the biggest airlines in Europe.

The survey will strengthen the case made by David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, for imposing green taxes on flights.

The CAA wants to dispel the belief that budget airlines have made air travel more inclusive and that raising taxes on flights would disproportionately affect people on low incomes.

Ryanair sells millions of return tickets costing less than £40, but the poor still cannot afford all the other costs of a foreign trip, such as hotels and meals, the survey says.

The study, which is based on interviews with 200,000 passengers last year, will show that Ryanair passengers are just as wealthy as British Airways passengers despite paying lower prices for their tickets.

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The average income of passengers at Stansted, the main base for Ryanair, rose above £50,000 for the first time last year.

Leisure passengers at Stansted had an average household income of £983 a week, more than 50 per cent higher than the national average of £601. One in seven had incomes of more than £80,000 a year.

Those in social groups D and E, which cover low-skilled workers and those on benefits, took only 9.5 per cent of leisure flights at Stansted last year, despite making up 27 per cent of the population. The As and Bs — professionals and senior managers who make up 24 per cent of the population — took 41 per cent of the flights.

Stansted and Luton, which is the base for easyJet, have the highest proportion of frequent flyers among major airports. Half the passengers at those airports had made more than three return trips in the previous 12 months, compared with 42 per cent at Gatwick and 39 per cent at Heathrow.

In a leaked letter to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, Mr Miliband last month proposed that air passenger duty should be doubled to £10 to address the environmental impact of flights. He also suggested making air tickets subject to VAT.

He wrote: “Aviation fuel is untaxed, air travel lightly taxed. We cannot leave it untouched.”

The Government has said that it is keeping open the option of environmental taxes on flights but favours emissions trading, under which all airlines operating in the European Union would have to buy permits for each tonne of CO2 above an allotted level.

This week, the European Commission announced that emissions trading for airlines would not start until 2010, two years later than the Government had planned.

• International efforts to reduce global warming by reducing carbon emissions have had virtually no impact, new figures show. A study by the Global Carbon Project, an international research organisation, suggests that carbon dioxide emissions have increased four times faster since 2000 than in the previous ten years.

  At a conference in China, Mike Raupach, chairman of GCP, described the trend as “very worrying”.

  He said: “It indicates that recent efforts to reduce emissions have virtually no impact on emissions growth. Effective caps are urgently needed.”

  The analysis, commissioned by Unesco, will be presented in full at the climate talks in Nairobi, which continue next week.

  The study shows that the increase of CO2 levels in the atmosphere was 3.2 per cent from 2000-5. For the whole of the 1990s it was only 0.8 per cent.

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