LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Murder on the dance floor

[Re: Clubbers scaling back makes for a ‘challenging’ year ahead, July 26]

It is unsurprising that nightclubs are having a tough time. Our population is getting older and in lots of towns and cities we simply haven’t got enough younger people to sustain big nightclubs for the whole week.

Older consumers are responsible for half of all high street spending and leisure is one of the big growth areas for this group of the population.

Grasping the opportunity doesn’t (necessarily) mean night clubs for older people. The demand for live music driven by Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Queen, Elton John and Paul McCartney shows that people of all ages want a nighttime economy that works for them. To deliver the potential of the nighttime economy, we need to move from the assumption that only 18 year olds want to go out into towns and cities after 5pm. For younger and older people we also need public transport that continues late into the night and we need toilets that don’t close at 4pm.

David Sinclair

[Re: We were never going to have a great British bonfire of the tax system after Brexit, yesterday]

Tim Sarson May have forgotten there used to be no VAT on high value purchases by tourists so there was never any reason for Sunak to remove it. All the government needed to do was nothing. By fiddling with VAT we have damaged our retail sector and the economy. Sarson’s account of policy since 2016 is a report of Remainer and Rejoiner stupidity and not a comment on what Brexit could have given us.

Andrew Smith