It’s the great UK holiday scramble!
Demand ‘ten times higher than last year’ Prices up by as much as 50% Vaccinated older people lead rush
FEARS that travelling abroad will be impossible this summer have sparked a scramble for holiday cottages and campsites, with popular British destinations already full for August.
Increased demand has sent prices soaring by as much as 50 per cent, with some desperate holidaymakers resorting to outbidding or ‘gazumping’ each other for the remaining accommodation – even for a few nights’ stay in a treehouse.
Simply Sea Views, an agency with more than 8,000 cottages on its books, told The Mail on Sunday that Padstow in Cornwall is already 99 per cent booked for high season.
‘Only one property remains for the whole of July and August,’ a spokesman said.
‘Lyme Regis in Dorset is 86 per cent full for the whole of July and August. There is little left for the main summer holidays. Holidaymakers can forget Southwold in Suffolk, too – it is 100 per cent booked. There’s a similar picture in Tenby, Wales, which has only very slim pickings.’
Sykes, which manages 18,000 properties across the UK, is reporting that ‘super honeypot locations’ are already 70 per cent booked for August.
‘Occupancy levels last year hit a record 95 per cent and I think this year will be better,’ said chief executive Graham Donoghue.
‘If we get clarity from the Government tomorrow, demand will go through the roof.’
Travel Counsellors, which operates a network of 1,500 travel professionals in the UK, saw its highest number of UK holiday bookings ever last week, with sales at ten times the level they were at this time last year and 20 per cent up on week on week.
A spokesman said a majority of bookings has come from customers aged 55 and over, with many saying they were looking to get away after having the Covid-19 vaccine.
Bloomstays, a boutique agency with 50 self-catering cottages, has been forced to create a waiting list because of demand.
‘There is an air of desperation,’ says co- founder Rowena Owen. ‘ The pent-up demand to travel is huge. Bookings are up by 50 per cent on this time last year.
‘Anything with a hot tub, a pool, or that is beach-side is booked up from June through to September. We’ve seen a 30 per cent increase for Christmas bookings too.’
She said she has been shocked by guests attempting to gazump.
‘We’ve had people offering to pay the full balance straight away and £500 more in order to secure a property that’s already let,’ she said.
‘ I’ve been in the holiday rental business for 20 years and I’ve not come across it before.’
Demand for campsites and motorhomes has also surged.
At Yescapa motorhome hire, which covers the UK and Europe, almost half of the company’s campervans are booked for August.
James Warner Smith, editor at Cool Camping, which hosts more than 500 sites around the UK, said February bookings for the summer were up 300 per cent on last year.
Travel agencies are also reporting a surge of people putting their homes and land up for rental to take advantage of the staycation boom.
‘One guest was gazumped on a treehouse booking’
CROOKED businessmen have been caught offering to sell dormant companies in the full knowledge that they will be used to make fraudulent claims for coronavirus loans.
The Mail on Sunday today exposes the scam, which allows con artists to use the companies as a front to claim money under the Government’s Bounce Back Loan Scheme, then close the firms and vanish.
It is feared the fraud could cost taxpayers billions of pounds at a time when millions of families face financial hardship.
Under Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s scheme, firms can borrow up to £50,000 interest-free for 12 months, with the loan guaranteed by the Government. It has been a lifeline for small firms, but also provided rich pickings for fraudsters who disappear, leaving the taxpayer to reimburse banks.
To make a successful application under the scheme, fraudsters have to convince a lender that their company was registered before last April and is still operating.
That has created a l ucrative market in dormant firms. A search
‘Companies are going for ridiculous amounts’
for ‘limited companies for sale’ on eBay and Gumtree brought up dozens of firms for sale at prices from £900 to £9,000. Some stated that ‘no BBLS [Bounce Back Loan Scheme] has been taken’ – a signal that such a loan could still be sought.
Posing as a potential buyer, an undercover reporter contacted a trader on eBay who was offering two companies, each with ‘No debs/ no loans/no BBLS’. The seller gave his name as Shehroz Mukhtiar and when asked if he would sell one of the firms, he breezily replied: ‘Is it for bounce back purposes?’
Told that it was, he explained that he had a dormant company called Bexetex Ltd which was set up in 2014 and available for a cutprice £1,000 because it didn’t have a business bank account.
Despite it being obvious to him that any BBLS claim using the firm would be fraudulent, he offered advice on how to apply. ‘Make the accounts for dormant companies and then apply… That’s the only option left, otherwise it’s hard, if you don’t have the bank account.’
The 30-year-old had advertised another company, Healthenviro Ltd, which did have a business bank account, for £9,000. But he said he had sold it two days earlier.
Mr Mukhtiar agreed he would make the buyer a director of the firm as soon as he was paid. He also offered to backdate the appointment to last March. By doing so, he said there would be less chance of the bank suspecting fraud. ‘If you are looking for bounce back, you have to backdate it. If it’s not backdated, the banks will decline it… I’ve done that for a few customers.’
He claimed to have sold several firms to people intending to submit loan claims. According to Companies House, he has resigned as a director of ten firms since September.
Once we agreed a deal, Mr Mukhtiar, who runs a printing business in Luton, sent his bank details and a contract. But instead of a deal, Mr Mukhtiar received a call from The Mail on Sunday asking him to explain his conduct.
He hung up but later sent a message on WhatsApp, stating: ‘I am not involved in BBLS fraud. I have not applied for BBLS on your behalf. What you do after the purchase of the company only you are liable for, per the contract. Dormant companies were being sold prior to BBLS in good faith. Should you have applied for BBLS, it would be for you to honour the terms.’
On Gumtree, another t rader called Arafat was offering six firms – some with existing business bank accounts – for £1,100 to £6,000.
He told our undercover reporter: ‘Just to be straightforward, are you buying this company for bounce back loans?’ When the journalist said that he was, Arafat replied: ‘Yeah, that’s the demand these days. It’s best to be straightforward.’
He added: ‘ After you buy the company, it’s nothing to do with me anyway, I don’t really care. The procedure would be that I have to get a scanned copy of your ID and after you send me that, you bank transfer a payment. Then I can give you an authentication code of the company and you can make t he changes with Companies House, or I can make the changes for you, if you give me the new director’s details.’
He claimed he could organise an accountancy firm to provide fake invoices to help set up a business bank account. ‘They [the bank] ask for invoices and accountants’ letter. Obviously, you are not going to have invoices, so I can make them for you, and make the letter from the accountants,’ he said. Arafat boasted of how he and an accountant set up 50 companies in 2019 and have sold most of them during the pandemic – potentially raking in hundreds of thousands of pounds.
‘We sold the majority of them, some of them got bounce back l oans… companies with bank accounts are going for ridiculous amounts of money,’ he bragged.
But when this newspaper later confronted him about his business activities, he said: ‘My response is, I have no comment, I was just selling… This is not me, I don’t know what you are talking about. Please don’t call this number.’
Gumtree last night said it had removed Arafat’s adverts and closed down his account, saying it ‘does not tolerate fraud’.
The National Audit Office has warned that £26 billion of the £43 billion so far dished out under BBLS may be lost to fraud and defaults.
Last night, a Treasury spokesman said: ‘Government loan schemes have provided a lifeline to thousands of businesses. We targeted this support as quickly as possible and we won’t apologise for this.
‘We’ve looked to minimise fraud with lenders implementing a range of protections. Any fraudulent applications can be criminally prosecuted for which penalties include imprisonment or a fine or both.’
‘£26 bn handed out so far may be lost to fraud’
THE real Covid news gets better every day. Case numbers are falling. Hospital admissions are falling. Deaths are falling. The vaccination programme is a success beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. New, effective treatments are emerging. Spring, fresh air and sunshine are almost upon us.
Why, then, is there so much talk of keeping restrictions in place for the rest of the year? Why do some say that we should keep the so-called ‘Rule of Six’ for months to come and warn we might be wearing face masks for ever – yes, for ever – in some situations at least?
Almost every day there is some fresh reason to be terrified, whether in the shape of long Covid or mutant viruses. No wonder the public is confused. Will we be allowed to go on holiday or will we be told to stay at home as the sun shines? How long must we wait as lives and livelihoods fall apart?
We are rapidly approaching a crunch point for Britain. Do we treat the virus as an ordinary risk of life, much as we do with the other 30 respiratory viruses that have infected humans throughout history? This is the approach we have been promised since the beginning of the crisis.
Or do we try to eliminate the virus from the UK altogether – the so- called Zero Covid approach, a route I believe is now favoured by a worrying number of influential voices in science and in Government?
This is a political choice, not a scientific one – and I’m concerned at what I see. In my view, Zero Covid is authoritarian, involving a systematic denial of basic humanity. And it is probably impossible to achieve.
Little has been said openly so far, but behind the scenes the battle is very real.
Some of those at the very top have signalled their scepticism about Zero Covid. The Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, has spoken about living with the virus and reducing the deaths to a level of 7,000 to 10,000 a year, which is comparable to the number caused by seasonal influenza.
His deputy, Professor Jonathan Van- Tam, has repeatedly stated that he does not think that Covid-19 can be eradicated from the United Kingdom. Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, has been clear that people want to return to a normal way of life – including attending football matches – and will not tolerate restrictions for too much longer.
Yet there are other, more cautious voices, too.
HEALTH Secretary Matt Hancock has mostly obfuscated when asked direct questions about Zero Covid. The furthest he has gone is to ‘hope’ we can learn to live with Covid-19 like the flu – but only when, later in the year, every adult in the country has been vaccinated. The Welsh and Scottish governments have been clear that they wish to eliminate the virus, not manage it.
And what of Sage, the Government advisory mechanism? This is a loose network of specialists with many sub-committees, including infection specialists on Nervtag (the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group), public behaviour experts on Spi-B (the scientific pandemic insights group on behaviours) and the mathematicians on Spi-M (the scientific pandemic influenza group on modelling).
But at the heart of SAGE is an inner clique with the ear of Ministers and journalists – and it seems to favour Zero Covid.
However, it is the Government’s actions that speak the loudest of all – effectively closing down foreign travel with strict border controls, quarantine hotels and the draconian ten-year jail terms for those failing to comply. This looks like an elimination policy to me.
The Zero Covid lobby might not win in the end. I profoundly hope it does not. But even now its influence is casting a pall over the success of the vaccination programme. And this damaging caution is preventing us from imagining – and grasping – the true possibilities that the vaccines offer for the weeks and months ahead.
Of course I can see the theoretical attraction of Zero Covid in this country. It seems a clear and decisive way to escape from the nightmare of the last year. Border controls and quarantines would remain in place in an attempt to prevent the infection from being re-imported. It would
also contribute to the global Zero Covid movement, an attempt to end the problem for the whole world for all time.
The practice is likely to be different, however. The only infection to be completely eradicated from the planet is smallpox. Yet this took 200 years from the introduction of vaccination to its final elimination.
The final 30 years were an unprecedented effort of international collaboration, at the height of the Cold War. Bear in mind, too, that smallpox is more easily diagnosed than Covid- 19 – which is often present with no symptoms – and that the smallpox vaccine gives lifelong immunity, which is unlikely in the case of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. We should understand this, too: Zero Covid envisages a total reconstruction of our way of life – diet, housing, relations with other species, travel and work, enforced by micro-management and aggressive policing. Like all utopians, its advocates think the ends justify whatever means are required to achieve them.
The nearest working model of Zero Covid can be found in China, where the strategy from the outset was to have no infections at all.
David Rennie, of The Economist, describes life in Beijing today: ‘Every time you step outside your door you have to use a smartphone to scan a QR code – every shop, every taxi, every bus, every metro station. You have no privacy at all – it’s all built around this electronic system of contact tracing…
‘We basically don’t have the virus here, but… it’s very hard to know where Covid containment starts and a Communist police state with an obsession with control kicks in.’
For us, though, there is better news. The success of vaccines and their rollout means we can be confident that living with Covid- 19 need be little different from living with any other respiratory virus.
This is what both clinical trials and actual experience have shown and why we have spent millions of pounds buying vaccines and delivering them. What was the point if nothing was going to change? Do we not believe the evidence?
The benefits are being confirmed each day both by real experience in Israel and – it has been reported – by unpublished UK data.
Above all, we must hold on to this fact: vaccines protect us against the chances of serious illness or death. They probably reduce the likelihood of you infecting other people, too, but that is not what matters. Sitting on a bus next to someone who is coughing and spluttering might be unpleasant but it is not a death sentence – not if you have been vaccinated. Your biggest risk is of a mild illness.
Of course, it would be better if people with symptoms stayed at home for a few days – and we should find ways to encourage that – but vaccination means there will be no justification for face coverings, empty seats and constant sanitisation.
There is no need for endless testing or vaccine ‘passports’. If you visit another country, you are protected by your own immunity. Perhaps your holiday will be spoiled by a mild infection, but who among us has not been unwell abroad?
There is no point to an elaborate system for testing, tracing and isolating because the spread of the infection does not matter. And once you understand this, then the case for the whole system of control and restriction falls apart.
Unfortunately, the past year has created its own vested interests. Contact tracing was the biggest contributor to UK economic growth in December 2020. There are big contracts, large research grants and an endless vista of construction projects refitting buildings to new ventilation standards.
Some advisers enjoy the glamour of their TV appearances and the sense of power that goes with any apparatus of control. These interests are protected by the prevailing culture of fear and the exaggeration of concerns such as virus variants and
Why spend millions on vaccines if nothing is going to change?
long Covid. These are things to study but not a cause of alarm. Viruses vary all the time but rarely shift to a degree that makes vaccines or therapies totally ineffective.
It is true that some vulnerable people have been reluctant to accept the vaccinations on offer and may remain vulnerable. But this problem is not beyond the reach of a well-organised information campaign, such as we are now seeing.
Living with Covid challenges vested interests – but will also release us to do things that are more useful and economically productive than living in fear, inevitably poorer, endlessly seeking permission for this or clearances to do that.
It was misleading for some to claim, as they did last spring, that the infection was no worse than a bad flu. It is a nasty disease, difficult to control and it has killed far too many people. But now we can take influenza as a benchmark. Vaccination brings the risk posed by Covid down to levels humans have lived with for millennia.
If we would not do something to control flu, why would we ever do i t for a population vaccinated against Covid? It is time to seize the opportunity we have given ourselves. As levels of immunity rise we must demand that controls fall just as rapidly away.
We have every right to the ‘old normal’ of human contact, joy and celebration – not a soulless ‘new normal’ of Government control, impoverishment and continuing misery.
THE owners of £ 20 million new penthouse suites at Battersea Power Station in London will have s o me hi gh- f l yi ng nei ghbours including pop star Sting, survival expert Bear Grylls… and a family of peregrine falcons.
The birds – dubbed the Ferraris of the air because they can fly at speeds of 200mph – have been nesting at the site for two decades, finding refuge in the former power station’s iconic chimneys.
When the 160ft structures needed to be taken down and rebuilt, developers spent £100,000 on a new lattice tower as a temporary home for the birds of prey and their chicks.
The £ 9 billion redevelopment project is now in its final stages with the first residents due to move in within weeks, but one of the last tasks will be to build the falcons a new permanent home inside the Grade II listed building.
‘They are Battersea Power Station’s oldest residents, having lived in the building since 2000,’ said David Morrison, a bird expert who is looking after them. ‘I have supervised two separate breeding pairs during my tenure and remarkably the most prolific period for breeding for the birds has been during the current redevelopment with a total of 19 juveniles being born.’
A worker at the site, who asked not to be named, said: ‘When we first started we had to place mannequins in high-vis jackets with Arnold Schwarzenegger masks around the construction site so they would get used to humans being in their space.’
There are 253 apartments in the former power station, along with a cinema, shops and US tech giant Apple’s new offices.
In 2014, Sting and his wife Trudie Styler bought an apartment offplan in a block at the site designed by US-based architect Frank Gehry and Britain’s Foster + Partners.
Grylls also bought his flat there off-plan in 2015. He plans to live there with his wife and three sons.
Studio flats start at £865,000, fourbedroom family apartments cost at least £4 million and penthouses are £21.5 million. The power station had been empty since it was decommissioned in 1983 and was finally bought for £400 million by a Malaysian consortium in 2012.
In the 1950s, the peregrine falcon population in Britain almost collapsed due to the use of a pesticide called DDT.
DDT was banned 30 years later and since then, numbers have increased dramatically.
In 2000, there were just three breeding pairs in London. There are now more than 30.
Now they will have a plum spot overlooking the River Thames.
The regeneration of the power station is part of a wider development of a 42-acre site that includes an extension to the London Underground’s Northern Line.