Has Labour taken it literally when people said they are ‘doom and gloom’ and are now giving discounts to theme parks and kid’s attractions as a bit of fun?

[speckledpinkhen]

Whilst these are all quite ‘sweet’ initiatives and will help some families. Lower price theme park entry and cinema tickets don’t really help average working families with the cost of living crisis. Am I just being a grump?

That was meant to say gain “weight” obviously.

@Araminta1003I think these same kids will do exactly the same this summer. Trust me!

@Araminta1003and strangely Labour have the power to ban social media for under 16 but don’t want to do it!

I mean I do not have a problem with them doing stuff for families who cannot afford a holiday and have to do a staycation. Covid was bad enough. Kids deserve to get out and about and have some experiences, whatever social demographic they are from.

In London, the buses are free for all kids until.16 (as long as you get a zip oyster). There are still loads of libraries and tons of free museums, parks and events. Surely every child in the country deserves some of that. If they do not get any at all, they lag due to where they were born.

@speckledpinkhen - the parents of some of the kids will just enable it if there is a ban and get a VPN. Bans don’t work well for some people in the UK. We know that.

What is the problem with offering more families the chance to have some fun during the school holidays and a cheaper biscuit?

So now it's crap because it's helping all businesses, including ones that benefit from having larger attractions in the area or are transport services? And that it's only helping for a couple of months when they would ordinarily make the majority of their income, so would be the ones where a decline in footfall could cause complete collapse?

If you move those goalposts any more they'll end up looking like flagpoles.

Tinkering around the edges as usual

I don’t know much about the benefits system post 2010, I just remember what it was like under Blair and people signing on literally signed a piece of paper once a week to declare they had looked for work. How does it work now for those who are unemployed? Do they have to apply for so many roles a week and prove this? What happens if they intentionally put rubbish applications in?

I’m genuinely curious how it works now and how much more difficult it is to be unemployed.

We don’t qualify for benefits so whilst I’d love discounted theme parks, cinema trips, buses, extracurricular clubs and anything else between, we just deal with it and pay full whack. Usually can’t afford big ticket trips out like theme parks or zoos without clubcard vouchers or something.

I think the best (and fairest) thing they could do is to increase tax free allowances because that would benefit everyone. So many policies seem to be targeted at specific groups when in reality lots of people are struggling & need support but maybe don’t fall into those groups.

It isn’t like that any more and hasn’t been since at least 2010. In fact I think work coaches have been a thing since New Labour at some point.

So basically you have to prove that you’ve applied for quite a few jobs every week. If you don’t do this they stop your payments and they also stop your payments if you turn any job down or you fail to show up at an appointment with your work coach.

Yet another one of these posts on this subject. There's always someone whining about someone getting something they're not.

Whinge, whinge, whinge.

Yes - people play the system but equally the system lets them

work needs to pay and If that doesn’t happen, where is the motivation for people to work

Because Brits love a collective moan about almost everything.

I don’t understand how this will work in practice, and suspect a lot of these parks and attractions will increase their prices or pocket the extra themselves.

Already seen one attraction fairly locally griping online about the cost of having to reprint gift vouchers and change their prices lists and advertising boards.

You're getting discounted theme parks, cinema trips and free buses this time. Everybody is.

@NeverDropYourMooncup what she is saying is when you don’t have access to benefits but have to live on very little a discounted theme park ticket doesn’t count for much. As it’s still an expensive day out!

@bobby81this xxx

Exactly. Our closest one is a 1.5 hr drive away for starters but it’s a nice gesture. It says it’s up to the businesses to pass the discount on, does this mean they can technically opt out?

Labour is full of thick as mince idiots pretending that they know what they doing. They have been found out.

And now the are re arranging the deck chairs as Titanic sinks. The desperation is palpable and ‘not a clue’ sums up their approach. They are completely and utterly out of their depths.

Labour lowering tax to encourage spending and growth?
I wonder how much this will cost attractions to implement for a couple of months. It will take done accountant and technology effort.

Short term tinkering costs money.

We don't all have friends gifting us £5m

The software providers will have already started implementing the updates to largely deploy automatically (normally overnight) as part of the existing service contracts/subscriptions to accounting software. As VAT can and does change in scope and from effective dates already, it's not particularly onerous to implement a change for a short period. Even if there are still accountants that use ledger books rather than software, they're not going to be confounded by the idea of the rate of VAT being 0% on sales over an eight week period, as it's not any different in practise to updating the rate on sanitary products from 17.5% to 5% in January 2001, to 0% in 2021 or extending it to period pants in 2024.

Same way the changing of FSM entitlement will be rolled out into educational software - literally the only things that need to be manually done are a) deploying the update if a school has decided to not use a support service with automatic updating or doesn't want to use one that is provided for free - process is take a backup, log everybody out, go into the server, deploy the patch, let it run, drink coffee and return (the connection to the payment and tills system is ongoing) - and b) somebody typing in the amount credited for FSM into the payment system management section if that's changed - a ten second job.

We don't all have friends gifting us suits, glasses and concert tickets.
But that's also completely irrelevant to this thread.