SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Dec. 5 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Podemos Canarias has celebrated that the Ministry of Transport has decided to study “finally” declaring as a Public Service Obligation (OSP) some air connections between the Islands and the Peninsula to lower the prices of plane tickets, as it has been defending and demanding the purple formation since 2018.
This has been stated by the general coordinator of Podemos Canarias, Laura Fuentes, for whom this measure represents “a first step in the right direction and an opportunity to guarantee once and for all the right to mobility in the face of abuse and speculation by companies aerial”.
As the general coordinator recalls, already in 2018 several proposals were presented in the Congress of Deputies, “which were voted against by the Canary Islands Coalition (CC), the Popular Party (PP) and Nueva Canarias (NC), to limit prices through the OSP”.
The proposal, announced by the Ministry on Tuesday of last week, intends to take advantage of the OSP in order to set limits on the rates charged by airlines on flights between the Canary Islands and the Peninsula, using an instrument that already works on inter-island flights and in other outermost regions such as Azores. For Laura Fuentes, this measure “will avoid exorbitant prices and facilitate the mobility of residents and Canarians living on the Peninsula.”
“As the National Market and Competition Commission (CNMC) and associations such as ‘Canarios Sin Alas’ already warned in 2018, the 75% subsidy without a prior price limit was generating a bubble that we canaries ended up paying out of our pockets, since the policy of subsidizing airlines without putting caps on prices generated an increase of up to 60% in tickets,” said the top leader of Podemos Canarias.
For this reason, the fact that the Ministry of Transport “endorses the regulation proposal is very good news for the citizens of the islands, who have been suffering abusive and excessive rates for years.”
“It is time for the institutions to put the right to mobility of our people at the center against the interests of multimillion-dollar companies that only understand the language of profit and excessive enrichment,” he concluded.
