FOUR in 10 holidaymakers are now equally or more likely to have their ‘main’ holiday in October and beyond, rather than the traditional summer period.

A poll of 2,000 adults found 67 per cent would consider switching their ‘main holiday’ to the autumn period.

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Whereas 60 per cent are likely to take shorter holidays in the summer and October, rather than one longer trip.

Nearly half (48 per cent) believe holding off until October provides them with better value for their trip – estimating it will save them over £400 per person by travelling a few months later.

And 18 per cent even think they can make their money go further by picking up holiday clothes and essentials in the post-summer sales.

Seven in 10 went on to agree that value for money is the biggest driver when booking a holiday.

Paul Sokes, from M&S Credit Card, which commissioned the research, said: “Our research has shown a growing trend of holidaymakers opting to get away in October, or later in the year.

“With 36 per cent saying they can still seek out the sun in Europe and further afield later in the year, now is the perfect time to take a trip.

“This not only allows travellers to make the most of the quieter holiday period, but can also unlock significant cost savings.

“With value for money top of mind for many of us when planning a holiday, October getaways can offer an opportunity for savvy travellers to make the most of their holiday budget whilst enjoying their their time away.”

When it comes to these autumnal getaways, sunny breaks in Europe lead the way, followed by a UK-based city break.

As one in five (19 per cent) estimate they will take the chance to go on more trips in October, or later in the year, in the next five years.

When it comes to organising their trips throughout the year, cost of accommodation, what the weather will be like, and cost and availability of flights are the most important factors.

And researching destinations, planning itinerary and booking flights and hotels are the ways in which travellers get excited for their excursions.

In fact, 90 per cent get their children or younger family members involved with holiday decisions and 46 per cent have even let them pick the location of the holiday.

Nearly two in three (64 per cent) have taken this approach because they want them to be more a part of the planning process.

But it’s not just the location young holidaymakers are influencing, with 54 per cent being allowed to pick activities, and 40 per cent selecting what sights to see.

The average age children, or younger travellers, begin having a say in holiday planning is nine.

Paul Stokes added: “Planning a holiday is increasingly becoming a family affair, as younger travellers are getting more involved in the decision making process.

“Involving younger family members and travellers not only teaches them decision making and budgeting skills, but also helps build excitement for the trip ahead.

“This collaborative approach can also make for a more enjoyable family experience, making memories everyone will remember.”

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PureGym plans to make the US its second-biggest market, with more than 300 sites by 2030, as it pursues a $105mn deal to buy dozens of outlets from collapsed chain Blink Fitness.

The UK’s largest gym operator last month offered to buy “a substantial portion” of Blink’s estate, which consists of 67 locations in New York and New Jersey, after it was put into Chapter 11 by owner, gym group Equinox, in August.

A final deal is subject to court approval, with PureGym having been given “stalking horse” status, putting it in pole position ahead of an auction for the assets that will take place on October 28.

“[The deal] will give us . . . great credibility in the market for further expansion of either our owned and operated sites . . . or that we can build around that stronger franchising relationships,” outgoing chief executive Humphrey Cobbold told the Financial Times. He will become chair next month with Punch Pubs boss Clive Chesser taking over as CEO.

“The US is the largest fitness market in the world, and if we can build a position and a growth runway in the US, it potentially transforms the scale of the group as a whole,” said Cobbold.

PureGym, which specialises in low-cost memberships, operates three sites in the US under the Pure Fitness brand, all near Washington DC. Cobbold said acquiring nearly 60 sites from Blink with their 350,000 memberships and rebranding them under the PureGym banner would help it find franchise partners more easily and scale up.

“It is a capital-intensive business . . . it would take us at least five and probably nearer 10 years to open as many sites,” he said. “If we have in the range of 300 plus sites in North America by 2030 that would be transformative for the business.

“The UK will be at 600 or 700 sites by then,” he predicted, compared with nearly 390 today.

Cobbold’s global expansion ambition comes as the group searches for the next source of growth following its rapid rollout in the UK thanks to its affordability — monthly options start from £13.99 at one of its Manchester gyms — and rising demand for “wellness” services, especially after the pandemic.

The UK’s budget gym segment — dominated by PureGym and its rival The Gym Group — has more than doubled its share of the private gym market by revenues over the past decade to reach 19 per cent, according to a PwC report published in March.

PureGym, owned by US private equity firms Leonard Green & Partners and KKR, has more than 600 gyms across six countries including Denmark and Switzerland, but more than 60 per cent are in the UK. It opened 20 new sites in the first six months of 2024 with a further 20 to 25 expected for the rest of the year.

The company, which has nearly 2mn members globally, increased revenues by 11 per cent to £300mn in the first six months of 2024. However, it posted a pre-tax loss of £30.5mn as finance costs rose.

PureGym’s offer for Blink consists of $105mn cash as well as the assumption of certain liabilities, such as customer creditors and certain employee-related costs.

In court filings, Blink said it had assets and liabilities of between $100mn and $500mn and around $280mn in debt. PureGym, meanwhile, said in September that it had secured commitments from an investor that will give the low-cost gym operator more than £450mn in available funds.

Good morning. We write a lot about the economic and geopolitical consequences of Brexit. But public policy ones are neglected — the consequences of a prolonged period from 2016 to 2020 when the government didn’t concentrate all that much on domestic public policy, before being hit by a global pandemic which, necessarily, took up much of the government’s focus.

One particular example of that is the crisis in special needs education in England, the subject of an excellent piece by Amy Borrett and Peter Foster which you can read here. Some further thoughts from me about the political causes of the problem and how that will shape much of the new government’s choices, not just in special needs education.

Where next for Send?

Here are two things that sound like they ought to be more closely related, but aren’t: since the 1990s, diagnoses of autism in the UK have increased by more than 787 per cent, a trend that is prevalent across much of the rich world, while since 2015, the number of autistic pupils in England with a formal Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) has more than doubled.

There’s a live debate about what is driving increased diagnoses of autism and other special needs — environmental, social, changes in diagnostic criteria — and I am going to go for the wet centrist answer of “it’s probably all of the above”. There are many contributing factors: our changing economy means that more people with various disabilities will need and receive diagnoses, the fact that in 2009 less than half of all local authorities had adult diagnostic centres and now essentially all of them do, environmental and social factors such as having children later, plus changing diagnostic criteria.

But the vast, vast majority of these diagnoses do not end with a child getting an EHCP. The big change is the passage of the 2014 Children and Families Act, which made almost all additional special needs funding conditional upon receiving a formal EHCP and deprioritised trying to educate as many children with disabilities in mainstream education in favour of special schools. (There is much more on this, plus an excellent dissection of Kemi Badenoch’s recent intervention on the issue over on Sam Freedman’s Substack.)

Obviously, when you make accessing funding conditional on passing a formal hurdle, you are going to increase the number of formal applications. And one problem is that meeting the cost of EHCPs has proved to be more expensive than the previous system, and it has not resulted in better outcomes for children with disabilities.

Now, it’s important to note here that the 2014 act had a lot going for it. To take an issue that is dear to my heart, it repealed the requirement of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to give “due consideration” to race, religion and ethnicity in adoption. Of course, many people never consider adoption and many of those considering it are unable to do so. If you further restrict and discourage adoption on racial, religious or ethnic lines, you are going to, as the pre-2014 system did, end up with larger number of ethnic minority people waiting longer and longer to find their families.

There’s also an argument, albeit one that I am less sympathetic to than Sam is in his Substack, that the 2014 changes helped to usefully raise standards in mainstream education. I am dubious about this, but you know, I could easily be wrong! We can’t test the hypothetical here.

Now what should have happened in around 2018, and in the universe where the In-Out referendum had gone the other way, I suspect, was for the education secretary or the chancellor to clock that this aspect of the 2014 act was having a perverse impact and for a policy fix to be brought forward. This is what normally happens: to take an example in a very different area of public policy, successive governments have tweaked immigration legislation, usually with the same aim in mind as the previous government, whenever it has produced results it hasn’t wanted, or failed to produce the desired outcomes.

In some ways, from the perspective of the Labour government, this is a policy area where it has a real opportunity to get better outcomes for less money. It’s not like, say, healthcare, where there are global trends forcing healthcare spending upwards and thanks to the UK’s model of provision, an awful lot of the revenue raising responsibility falls on the state.

But it is a politically fraught topic and one with the potential for lots to go wrong.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to the soundtrack of the excellent new musical London Tide while writing my column.

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• Hunt ‘rejected’ employer NICS rise | George Parker got Jeremy Hunt’s verdict on Reeves’s decision to increase national insurance contributions for employers. “From a government point of view this is a politically painless tax rise, but from an economic point of view it’s an absolute disaster,” the shadow chancellor said.

• Unite hotel under SFO probe | The UK Serious Fraud Office is investigating a hotel and conference centre in Birmingham built by Britain’s second largest trade union that has been valued at tens of millions of pounds below its construction cost. 

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Inheritance tax (IHT) receipts for April to September 2024 were £4.3bn, up by £0.4bn compared to the same period last year.

The figures, released ahead of the upcoming Budget by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), show a trend of rising IHT revenues.

The £325,000 nil-rate band (NRB) threshold for IHT has remained unchanged since 2009, while the residential nil-rate band threshold, introduced between 2017 and 2020, provides an additional £175,000 allowance under specific conditions.

Gross tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) for the same period reached £406.3bn, an increase of £11.1bn year-on-year.

Meanwhile, receipts from income tax, capital gains tax (CGT) and NICs amounted to £226.8bn, up £6.2bn from the previous year.

Laura Hayward, tax partner at Evelyn Partners, said: “The steady annual rise in IHT receipts has been ingrained in recent years as inflation has dragged more assets and more estates over the frozen nil-rate bands.

“Any changes aimed at increasing the IHT take beyond this fiscal drag effect are likely to reap outsize results over the coming years as the baby boomer generation reaches average mortality.

“So, it’s no surprise IHT is at the centre of Budget speculation again, with firm reports claiming business and agricultural property reliefs will be reformed and the gifting rules revamped.

“We have spoken to many people this summer who were bringing forward plans to gift substantial assets, not just to start the seven-year clock ticking, but also to pre-empt an expected CGT rise.

“It’s not out of the question that the chancellor could also look at the nil-rate bands, as the residential NRB has come under criticism for discriminating against those who can’t or don’t want to leave their main property to a direct descendant.”

Alastair Black, head of savings policy at Abrdn, said: “Families will be closely watching the upcoming Autumn Budget for any changes to IHT, with rumours rife that the chancellor will look to raise tax on inheritances to help fill the now reported £40bn target.

“One of the more likely changes would be to bring pensions into IHT’s scope. But I doubt they will go to a full 40% charge as they won’t want to encourage consumers to use up their pension more quickly. It’s a balancing act. Further actual tax revenues could take a long time to come through, so changing the gifting rules to simplify and shorten seem likely too.”

Chancellor Reeves ‘wrapping herself in a straight jacket’ ahead of Budget

David Denton, technical consultant at Quilter Cheviot, said: “IHT is a highly emotive issue, and it has been ripe for reform and simplification for many years given it is full of impenetrable and irrelevant details in need of review.

“Historically, inheritance tax has been viewed as a tax on the wealthy, but this is simply no longer the case. IHT is one of the most hated taxes in Britain and can be incredibly polarising given the rich can often avoid it by employing expertise to help them navigate the complexities of the tax and the available reliefs, while those without such resource can be disadvantaged.

“If reports are true and Labour opts to make IHT more punitive, it could choose to balance this by modernising gifting laws. Simplifying the IHT regime and increasing the annual gifting exemption could ease the complexity of transferring assets and help families pass wealth on during their lifetime. Raising the gifting timescale would encourage earlier wealth transfer, potentially boosting consumer spending.

Andrew Tully, technical services director at Nucleus, said: “For IHT, changes could be made such as scrapping or updating the rules on agricultural land and business relief. Currently, a person can claim up to 100% relief on the inheritance of agricultural land if it is being actively farmed. This could be reduced, or certain limitations placed on the maximum value of the relief.

“Changes could also be made to the IHT benefits of holding shares on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM). AIM shares need to qualify for Business Property Relief and be held for more than two years at the time of death to qualify for IHT exemption. However, this may run contrary to the desire to increase investment in UK businesses, to drive further growth.

“Advisers can help clients mitigate these taxes by setting up trusts, making use of gift allowances, spousal exemption and using a pension to pass on wealth to family in a tax-efficient way. Additionally, equalising assets between spouses and civil partners, and making use of the “no gain no loss” disposal, could mean all exemptions can be utilised and household income increased if there is a disparity in the rates of tax each spouse pays.

“Alternatively, people could hold assets within a tax-efficient wrapper such as an Isa, pension or bond.”

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The top US consumer finance watchdog has finalised long-awaited “open banking” rules that it hopes will inject more competition into a market with more than 4,000 lenders and make it easier for customers to link their bank accounts to newer apps.

The rules announced on Tuesday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau bring the US more in line with the UK and Europe, which had previously codified rules around how financial data is to be shared.

“Too many Americans are stuck in financial products with lousy rates and service,” said CFPB director Rohit Chopra. “Today’s action will give people more power to get better rates and service on bank accounts, credit cards, and more.”

The CFPB has been working on the so-called Section 1033 reforms for eight years, which stem from a provision in the 2010 landmark financial regulation Dodd-Frank act. Since the law was passed third-party apps that are linked to an individual’s bank account have proliferated, without clear rules on how information should be best shared.

The information can be shared through an API (application-programming interface) that allows two websites to easily communicate with each other. But “screen scraping” — where consumers share their bank log-in details for bots to copy their financial information, a practice that regulators have taken a dim view of — is also still used in the US.

The CFPB’s rules will compel banks to put in place systems that will facilitate consumer access to their financial data such as transaction history, account balances and payments details. The CFPB said it was requiring this data be made available for free, and that it hoped these rules would deter the use of screen scraping.

The issue of whether banks could charge a fee to third-parties for data sharing had been an area of contention. Banking lobbyists had argued that banks should have the option to charge a fee given the costs of building systems to facilitate the data sharing.

One aim for the rules is to make it easier for customers to use third-party apps and also stimulate more competition among banks. The US has about 4,000 banks, which range from behemoths such as JPMorgan Chase with more than $2tn in deposits to local lenders with tens of millions of dollars in deposits.

Banks with more than $850mn in assets and fintech companies will be subject to these new data sharing rules.

Advocates for open banking also argue that it could pave the way for greater adoption of direct account payments in the US, known as pay by bank, as a viable alternative to credit and debit cards that typically charge higher fees.