The Reporter

The Reporter

Touting an idea Batten down the hatches and run for the hills (don't drive there; you may find that filling stations have run dry) because a stack of gloomy money and consumer news seems to suggest everything is turning to custard. House sales plunging to their lowest levels for 30 years; thousands of homeowners in negative equity; shares of banks and housebuilders in freefall; warnings that oil could hit $250 a barrel; unemployment and child and pensioner poverty all up; and some City experts predicting interest rates will rise within months. It's all pretty grim, so let's talk about something else - like Britain's Got Talent ...

The government has been looking at how to tackle the problem of touts buying up stacks of tickets and then selling them on at vastly-inflated prices. Ministers are looking at limiting the number of tickets each person can buy - which sounds eminently sensible, as well as pretty obvious. So the Reporter was somewhat surprised this week when he logged on to authorised agency Ticket Zone, which is offering tickets to the Britain's Got Talent live shows featuring teenage breakdancer George Sampson, Kate and Gin, and the other "stars" of the ITV programme. The website advises buyers they "cannot order more than 50 tickets at a time". 50?! No wonder we've got such a problem with touts ...

Day of no rest It would appear that last Sunday certainly wasn't a day of rest for the bods at.....continued below

Advertisement starts

---

---

Advertisement ends

Catholic Building Society. Emails announcing that the tiny society (one branch in London's Westminster, seven staff and 4,000 members) is merging with its bigger rival Chelsea Building Society, dropped into journalists' inboxes at the somewhat ungodly hour of 10.30pm last Saturday. Presumably, many of those journos would have been straight on the blower the next morning to find out more, Sabbath or no Sabbath. To make matters worse, much of the talk will have been about filthy lucre; members of the Catholic are in line for windfall payouts as a result of the merger.

Park and deride The London Evening Standard says it has found the UK's most expensive car park: the Pavilion Road multi-storey in Knightsbridge, not far from Harrods. "Drivers must pay £43.20 for a six-hour stay at the National Car Parks facility," it reported. The AA president was quoted as saying that "in most car parks in central London it costs more to park your wheels for an hour than employ a babysitter".

Financially smart or just plain sad? Part one: It has emerged that one in 10 people working in the private sector say they would take a pay cut to move to a job that offered a final salary pension scheme. The research by financial services firm MetLife Europe also found that just 15% of people in the private sector have access to a final salary scheme, compared with the vast majority of the UK's 5.8 million public sector employees. However, it would also be interesting to know what proportion of people lucky enough to be in a gold-plated company pension are reluctant to move jobs because it would effectively mean taking a pay cut ...