Why the Lake District could drop a congestion charge on summer visitors
Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said funds raised could be used to improve the environment and boost the local bus service.
He told The Independent 's daily travel podcast: 'On those summer days when people are sat in hours and hours of traffic, I'm sure many of them would want to have access to a good public transport system, which currently there's no other way of paying for.
'If people come from around the world and experience the centre of Ambleside – full of cars on a on a hot day and lots of smoke and traffic fumes – that isn't the product we're trying to sell international visitors.
'A visitor charge might work in big cities, but a congestion charge might work better in the Lake District, because that congestion charge in the Lake District would probably be variable.
'You wouldn't charge it in the winter, you wouldn't charge it on quiet days outside the school holidays, but what you would do is probably target charging people when congestion was a natural issue and then put in place free park and ride and other services as a compensation to those that would otherwise have to pay it.'
New data from the Scarborough Tourism Economic Activity Monitor revealed a 14 per cent drop in the number of visitors to the Lake District overall and a 18 percent fall in day visitors in 2024 compared with 2019. There was a smaller fall in both visitors and revenue over the previous year.
Mr Murison said: 'Compared to European destinations, we don't offer the things that many visitors expect, and that's because of our wide underfunding of local government, which means that visitors come to the UK, but they maybe don't get the brilliant experience we would want to give them.
'You can make a strong argument that the council there, for example, in Westmoreland & Furness, has a significant financial burden that comes from the visitor economy.
'If you could invest more in the proposition, you can make travel more sustainable
'I'm not wedded to one particular solution to find the way to raise the money to invest in growing sustainably our tourism economy – I just want to find a way of doing it.'
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Times
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- Times
All back to Balmoral! The royals are up to their Highland games
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It was to Balmoral that Lady Diana Spencer was sent to be 'vetted' before her marriage — a test she passed with flying colours. It was from Balmoral that Fergie was banished, after the repose of the royal breakfast table was ruined by front-page pictures of her toes being sucked. The castle is well stocked with wellies, walking sticks, fishing rods and waterproofs, its heavy wooden front door invariably propped open with a curling stone and attended by a footman in a scarlet uniform. Dogs and children run wild. The interiors are a carpeted riot of flock wallpaper, tartan curtains, ornaments, stags' heads and oil paintings, creating an effect much as Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen might design after too many Tunnock's teacakes. And while Keir Starmer may view his invitation as an honour or an ordeal, he will at least be spared having to join in with 'kick the can', a royal form of hide and seek that prime ministers were required to play when the King was a boy. 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BBC News
2 minutes ago
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How a cowboy builder ripped off his customers – and got away with it
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Retired social worker Jim McGinley reported McMaster to police in late 2022 after waiting more than a year for work to start at his home in Uddingston, North had paid the builder £3,000 to "secure his services" for internal a months-long wait for planning consent, Jim says that McMaster became "evasive" and stopped returning pair eventually fell out after Jim left a negative online review about his business, VJL that he had been "the victim of a con", he contacted said: "Police were very diligent and seemed very keen to present it at court… They felt that he was a fraudster, a bogus builder."McMaster – full name Alexander Russell McMaster – was charged with fraud, accused of obtaining the £3,000 by pretending he would carry out construction work at Jim's when the case called for trial at Hamilton Sheriff Court, prosecutors announced the case would be discontinued because McMaster had repaid the money in the weeks before said he had agreed to drop the case after discussions with the Crown."The reason we went to court was because we wanted to stop this happening to other people," he said."On discussion with the procurator fiscal, it became clear that perhaps taking the money was the best option. 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McMaster has a string of businesses listed on Companies House under different variations of his name – most of them reporting by the Daily Record newspaper in 2006 and 2013 revealed how his old businesses left customers in debt after closing Alex McMaster Builders remains active. A note on the Companies House website states that a strike-off action had been temporarily suspended after someone objected to the attempt to dissolve the BBC attempted to contact the builder between December 2023 and February to answer allegations he was a rogue did not respond until he sent a text messages stating that he was "unavailable".However, we managed to approach McMaster in person outside court this asked whether he planned reimburse his other customers and whether he shut VJL Builders down to avoid paying them away with a friend, he made no comment.
Times
2 minutes ago
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That noisy distraction in the office? They're called boomers
This just in from the buzzing boomer complaints line: yet another grievance with Gen Z concerning their office etiquette. No, it's not our limit-testing approach to appropriate office attire, nor our preference for working from home. What's bugging them now is the fact we are (checks notes) too chatty. Wait, wait — not just chatty. My apologies. Apparently our innocent deskside socialising is loud, disruptive and — more than anything else — quite annoying. A tribunal has just ruled that office oldies who are disturbed by 'noisy and disruptive' younger colleagues are not in fact victims of age discrimination. The ruling came after an administrator in her sixties brought a claim against her former employers, saying it had been hard to work in the office because of the 'extreme time-wasting' and loud socialising of her co-workers, who were mostly in their twenties and thirties. Well, as a representative of the younger generation, I'd like to issue this carefully considered response: pot, kettle. I sit in an open-plan office surrounded by forty, fifty and sixty-plus colleagues. Let me tell you: there is a good reason I have noise-cancelling headphones. • How rude can you be to your colleagues? Where to begin on the long list of communal workspace no-no's I witness (tolerate) on a day-to-day basis? The tech gap is probably the most triggering place to start. As one friend put it, many of her boomer colleagues 'need to go to internet school'. This fact would be forgiven if they didn't constantly make it our problem. There is a marked lack of adaptability that verges on laziness when it comes to computer users of a certain age in my office. I am regularly pulled away from my own work to help with enormous technical feats such as logging in, using the printer or — most dreaded of all — opening Slack. That's if they bother. Some senior colleagues, refusing to download certain essential workflow programs on their own computers, come and use them on mine instead while I am expected to — quite literally — stand by. I am probably too amenable, but I am also not someone who will say no to their boss, not even if it means giving up my chair. Then there are the phones. Why are they never on silent? Why are you taking the call at your desk? Ditto that Zoom meeting, without headphones on. We have plenty of private rooms for exactly these purposes. The rest of us don't need to listen in. It's arrogant and it's boring, and it's a reason why we occasionally prefer to work at home. • Do Gen Z just not understand work meeting etiquette? Noise, generally, is an issue. Boomer office volumes are obnoxious. Where colleagues my age use WhatsApp or internal messaging systems to communicate, our elders tend to just shout from one end to the other. There is also no respect for the fact that I am clearly trying to meet a project deadline. Having my headphones on seems to be an invitation to sit down and have a meandering chat. If I see my bosses are in head-down mode, I do my best to leave them alone and divert anyone who might be on their way to distract them. When the tables are turned, they see it as an opportunity to start telling me about their kitchen renovation. Nearly all fail to read the pained look in my eyes, and I can't help but feel they think my work is simply less important. Or perhaps they just have less to do. Also overheard at my office: very loud sneezing, grunting and snorting. Misogynist, inappropriate comments. Singing. For a long time at work, I wondered why I found it hard to concentrate and if perhaps I had undiagnosed ADHD. Then I started working from home a bit more and hiding away in private offices when I needed to meet deadlines. Turns out I just needed a quiet, boomer-free place to work.
