Oliver Dowden flew on a near-empty RAF plane to the UN general assembly in New York this week, the Guardian has learned, prompting criticism that he wasted taxpayers’ money and caused unnecessary damage to the environment. The deputy prime minister travelled on a 158-seat RAF Voyager with only a few advisers and defence personnel, sources said. The aircraft is usually used to transport senior ministers with large delegations of officials, journalists and occasionally business executives. Rishi Sunak has often been criticised for flying relatively short distances by helicopter, which opponents say demonstrates a lack of commitment to tackling the climate crisis. Those criticisms were renewed on Wednesday as the prime minister prepared to give a speech rowing back on some of the government’s most significant climate policies. Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general, said: “Oliver Dowden may think that deputising for Rishi Sunak means replicating his private jet lifestyle, but it is wrong on every level for him to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money using the biggest government plane to fly to New York, when there were any number of scheduled services he could have used instead. “That is wrong on cost grounds, wrong on environmental grounds and wrong on the basis of the ministerial code. It just shows that this is a government no longer interested in doing right by the British people, and no longer serious about net zero, but just set on enjoying the trappings of power at taxpayers’ expense for as long as they still can.” When asked about the flight, a government spokesperson said: “Travel costs will be published in the usual way.” Dowden flew to New York on Tuesday to attend parts of the UN summit, where tackling climate crisis has been a key theme.
Sunak came under fire when Downing Street announced in August that he would be the first prime minister in a decade not to attend the UN general assembly. The Guardian revealed earlier this month that that decision was taken after he was warned he faced exclusion from key climate talks if he could not show that the UK had clear and ambitious policy measures to meet its net zero targets. On Wednesday, the UK conspicuously failed to sign up to a pledge to take ambitious action to make sure carbon emissions peak by 2025. Against this backdrop, Dowden chose to use the Voyager plane with just a handful of senior officials, no press and no business executives. When Boris Johnson used the Voyager to fly to New York for the same summit in 2021, it cost £365,693.34. However, the former prime minister took 45 officials and more than a dozen journalists with him on that trip, unlike Dowden. It is understood that Tuesday’s flight did include a small number of Ministry of Defence officials who were due to travel elsewhere in the US. As an alternative, Dowden could have flown directly from Heathrow to New York’s John F Kennedy airport. Even if he had travelled in business class and booked only a week in advance, that would have cost about £8,000.