How to get a good job that's in demand... and AI won't steal

0:02Welcome to This Is Money Podcast, sponsored by Charles Stanley Direct. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and Simon Lambert today is Lee Boyce. And coming up, the jobs market might be stalling, but there are still roles out there with a chronic shortage of applicants. We tell you the most in-demand jobs right now. Elsewhere, experts are calling on the Chancellor to rule out any pensions raid in the budget to avoid lump sum removal frenzy. The mysterious new trend that sees airlines dramatically change flight times. And move over cash, mobile phones are increasingly becoming our payment method of choice.

0:35And Lee's not happy about that. And there is no issue too small that it will escape the notice of the This Is Money team. My roast didn't come with its unlimited Yorkshire puddings. Can I demand a refund? Don't forget, it's up to date with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. But first, a message from our sponsors. We know you love staying informed about money, so we think you'll love this. Charles Stanley Direct's financial coaching service gives you one-to-one time with a qualified expert, helping you make sense of your finances and feel confident about your next steps.

1:09So book your free 15-minute call today at charles-stanley.co.uk forward slash financial coaching. That's charles-stanley.co.uk at forward slash financial coaching. Remember, investment involves risk. Now back to today's episode. If the jobs market feels tougher at the moment, you are not imagining it. fewer roles, more applicants, and hours spent on applications with little to show for it. The number of new postings last month was down 3.8 % on July's figure, which came after a 9.2 % slump the month before. That's according to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation. With economic uncertainty, AI reshaping roles, and increased costs under labour, many firms simply aren't hiring.

1:51But wait, there are roles where there is a chronic shortage. So is it timely, Boyce, that we rethink our careers and become firefighters? Tell us about the jobs market at the moment. A seasonal blip firstly, or something a bit more concerning, a more worrying trend here? There's definitely a seasonal blip element to this in terms of the figures that you just read out, the 3.8 % fall in July and the 9.2 % slump between June and July. However, I would say that overall there is evidence of a bigger overall slump. So the same organisation, the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, said that the job market had been sliding since its peak in June 2023.

2:34There was 3 million active job listings then. That's now fallen below 1.5 million. That's a big change in the number of roles that are available. and I know that you're a relatively active user on LinkedIn I think there's definitely a new music on there at the moment with lots of people feeling a bit downbeat depending on what sector that they're in attempting to find work putting in lots of different applications that potentially being considered as a candidate but the number of hoops that need to be jumped lots of different interview rounds and it can feel like a bit of a thankless task endless task when you are potentially getting turned down and i've seen quite a bit on linkedin of people being turned up for being overqualified seems to be quite a lot of that going on at the moment and i think maybe for some they're just looking at a way of potentially changing career direction and looking into an area that they might not necessarily have thought of before because some some areas are running hot and of course we have the specter of ai looming over all of us and i think that this whole kind of uh thing at the moment about ai proofing your job are you in a job where you are safe from ai and i think that's a conversation that's being had across the country you go down the pub tonight and i can guarantee you they'll hear a conversation probably about ai is going to take my job and that whole fear of what it is but i remember we were speaking on this podcast not that long ago saying that ai can make our lives and our jobs easier it doesn't necessarily mean replacing us as workers which i think is what we we kind of in danger of getting into that mindset of you know it could help us with work so anyway um we have um indeed the jobs website crunch some figures for us and uh conor mccaffey actually said what's striking in these vacancies persist even in a joining calling jobs market so this is the 30 jobs that they're saying is crying out for applicants while more people are looking for work many positions are being overlooked or candidates walk away during lengthy hiring processes which goes back to that point i was just making that feels like there's quite a lot of hurdles to jump at the moment to get specific jobs so indeed went off crunched the figures for us and the idea of this was to come up with a list of jobs that had job roles open for 60 days plus on on indeed so top of the list of this is a specialist job which is unlikely that the majority of people will be able to take and that's a translator stroke interpreter right 89 of roles open for 60 days or more on indeed the average salary around about 24 000 pounds um but you go down this list and there are jobs in here that don't necessarily need previous experience or set skills but are seeing those still still seeing those persistent recruitment challenges so for example that male carrier jobs such as Royal Mail, they typically pay about 27 grand a year.

5:3281 % of those roles remain unfilled for more than 60 days. You know, there might be reasons behind that that there was a spell of the Royal Mail, a bit of dissatisfaction amongst workers for a time there. How's that kind of filtered through to people and their kind of willingness to go and be a postie? And as you said there, firefighters feature in the top 10. So even in the central public service roles facing hiring challenges. I always think with firefighters, the kind of need for firefighters has dwindled somewhat as you know homes have become safer you know kind of less of a fire risk than they're probably you could argue so 50 years ago but they are still struggling to get people in the job and maybe that's the kind of mindset again that people are in firefighters aren't hiring you know fire stations don't need firefighters well according to this indeed data that is actually uh not true and vets i was quite surprised by vets so veterinary surgeons 58 of roles open for 60 days or more on it on indeed we actually have some case studies in this story and we have dr david massey in here who owns a vets in leeds and he says that the problem with recruitment in the veterinary profession is retention of talent over the past decade or two there are more part-time vets which means you have to recruit two vets for the hours historically covered by one and he recommends work experience as a graduate to get a foot through the door so speak to local farmers riding schools throw yourself into every opportunity and he describes his job as the best one in the world um which i love that very passionate about being uh being a vet and because it's a lot harder though isn't it lee to sort of just go straight into veterinary i think it takes about seven years to train whereas a firefighter i think you're looking about three to six months and then you have sort of a two-year period i think um What's quite interesting about this list, I say, George, is that, you know, the 30 roles are very varied.

7:23Some of them do require training. They do require qualifications and they do require specialist knowledge. But there are roles in this that you could point out that don't need that whatsoever. And I think actually the kind of best thing to do with this list is a kind of part and shot here. It's to have a look through it and just go, actually, you know what? I could retrain to do that or I could look into it and find out what it is that's required to do it and you know we are kind of in a jobs market when you've gone from three million active listings two years ago to one and a half million active listings now for some that might mean that are out of work and looking for work might have to adapt and and look for something new and look to retrain and look to do and that might be frightening it might be scary but there is a lot of help out there and there's a lot of ways to retrain doesn't necessarily mean years of going through university expensive university course um it just varies from role to role and we actually had another story which i won't talk about too much uh on this podcast but there was a list that we had of if you're over 50 uh you know a list of jobs that you could retrain in um you know you're not over the hill just because you're over 50 no you know you might have another sort of 20 odd years of of work ahead of you if you want it um and that list that we had that i won't read out but it was a massively popular this week people are interested in this at the moment and i think it is just the music of the joist market and and what's going on i agree with you about the the linkedin i don't think i'm prolific but i am on linkedin and i have to say that it's changed there the mood music is a little bit more dour.

9:10But I was actually reading an article in a newspaper the other day about the proliferation of applications through sites like LinkedIn, which only require a click a button and send, which means that people who are... Simon's nodding there, and I wanted to get Simon in on this because, Simon, I've never recruited anyone. You have many over many years. what from your perspective is the situation like with a boot on the other foot as someone who does hire people is that the case are you getting an absolute flood of applications no no actually it's quite interesting journalism is is not uh an industry where it's actually particularly easy to find people when it hasn't been for some years which is a total turnaround from from how it used to be it always used to be the case that there'd always be someone else to come in and do your job and certainly when I, 20 years ago nearly, before I started at This Is Money, I used to work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Luton.

10:09That was my first job. After I went to university, I tried to get jobs as a journalist with my English and philosophy degree and discovered that nobody wanted people with English and philosophy degrees from Leeds University, even if they did have a 2-1 and they'd done some work on the student newspaper and things like that what they wanted was somebody with journalism qualification not a journalism degree but a journalism qualification and you could either go and do a master's to do that do it in a year or you could do a six-month short nctj national council training for journalists course which i did i went to harlow and did that and while i was doing that i lived at home at my parents house and had to do work experience once a week as part of that work experience i ended up doing it in luton for the luton news and the herald and post my first choice was actually the Watford Observer as a Watford football fan and a much bigger Watford football fan at the time but instead I found myself working behind enemy lines because basically the editor at the Luton News came back to me and said yeah great come in yeah we'd love you to do work experience once a week and then while I was waiting for my course I went off to Australia and me and my wife who my then girlfriend now wife went and visited a place called Kenilworth which was close to where we started off traveling around from like near the gold coast and kenilworth obviously shares its name with kenilworth road and we went there and we went around we went into the local pub and we spoke to the landlord there we managed to get some photos they wrote on a white board you know kenilworth says hello to all loon town fans got a photo of the cafe home of the kenilworth whopper sent back a story in the pictures they ran it as a spread in the in the paper while i was away and the editor then a guy called john francis was like this is great well done kind of thing so i went there did did a day a week and everything worked in luton after a couple of years of working in luton which is good because like okay it's a weekly paper but it had a couple of weekly papers it had one of the first free sheets that was really good at the time it's a really good tabloid newspaper and then the luton news had a long heritage and i also did a stint on the dunstapool gazette which was a bit different you know but it was fun used to go wander around looking for stories go to the pub talk some people find out if anything's happening anyway after a couple years doing this to cut a long story slightly shorter i'd had enough of working in luton and living at home my parents house so i decided to apply for jobs i spent an unbelievably long time applying for jobs i applied for every single journalism job that there was going that I was even vaguely interested in and some that I was not interested in.

12:46It was tough finding a job and eventually saw a job advertised for a reporter that this is money. I was like yeah that sounds good. It's part of the daily mail. I looked it up it's part of the daily mail. I actually thought I was going to be a business reporter but turned out to be more personal finance. Went along had an interview with my old boss Andrew Oxlade. We hit it off and he offered me a job. So it was great took it from there but it took a long time to get that job that's very different nowadays it's a very different market we really struggle to find young journalists and graduates when we're applying for roles and we we've always had a thing of bringing people through and then training them up that pipeline has has dried up a bit and i think that's maybe the case for quite a few sort of specialized industries um but what i do know is that you know there's somewhere there are structural reasons for that and there is also in in journalism because there's less local newspaper journalists nowadays because a lot of local newspapers have either shut or seriously shrunk local news is in a sorry state but what you want when you're recruiting to go back to your question as well is you want someone to have shown that they're actually applying for the job that you're advertising that they have researched who your company is and what they do and that they've shown a reason why they want to come there and evidenced the skills that you've requested and hopefully you know maybe tailored their cv towards the role you don't have to do that but i would say always send a covering letter explaining why you want the job why do you want to work there what is it that you've done that would make you stand out it is astonishing the number of people who don't bother to do that nowadays um and even though we ask for it and i think that's the thing that makes the difference the thing that can make the connection but what i do think to go back to your point is i've got a suspicion that somewhere potentially within the linkedin system there is something that means it's this goes a bit awry and doesn't quite work properly because it's suspicious the number of applications we get when we do put out job adverts that don't come with the requested covering letter.

15:01So I would say, you know, in that kind of instance, maybe it's always worthwhile trying to find out an email address for that person and contacting them directly. Can I just say one more thing on this jobs list though? Right. The moment you talk about jobs at the moment, AI comes up, you know, there's this worry about AI taking people's jobs and some of the stuff going on in the jobs market might be to do with AI. Now there is also talk that companies are discovering that they're not getting a great return on their investment with AI so that might be about to turn around because there's concerns over this AI boom at the moment the amount of hype that's gone into it.

15:38But when you look at some of these jobs what's really interesting is that some of them look like the kind of jobs that you think AI would be taking. translator interpreter transcriptionist tax associate cost manager these are all the kind of white collar jobs that we're having people talking about being taken by ai maybe what's going on here is some of these roles are quite specialized and they're the thing where it has to be right. So yes, maybe you can replace some of what your tax associate does with an AI program that can crunch it much faster. But you need a tax associate who knows what they're doing to check the stuff.

16:26Maybe, you know, with your transcription, I know with transcription, you can do this, like using an online service that I would normally use Google Translate. And then when I was on holiday, I had to chuck an email from the owner of the property we were staying in into google translate but then i wanted to copy it into notes and it was really annoying me and i was like oh i should use that ai thing people are always talking about so put it in chat gpt and it worked much better right but if you're transcribing something to the level that a business needs it's got to be right and i mean look the ai stuff is really good we can put we could put the recording of this podcast um via zoom through otter right which is a great transcription but it will not be entirely right if you were going to type that out you're going to actually publish that and give it to someone you need a human to go through that translator interpreter i mean you can literally just talk into your phone now and then hold up to someone and then someone talks into their phone and then holds it back but is that what you need in a in the kind of scenario where you actually need a translator or an interpreter what you're going to sit there talking to your phone and hold it across i mean it might be fine for a casual meeting but you know and i think that's where maybe people should think about this stuff is like what can they do that makes themselves stand out over and above the ai and the computer you can listen to an ai generated podcast if you want i mean there might be people listening to this you've got to like 15 minutes in going bloody oh i think i might switch to one next time around but don't don't because we are here we are really here i know those two are here i know they're not holograms we haven't gone to like abba voyage level yet nobody wants to listen to an ai generated podcast do they surely that's just like the stuff that the guff that fills the the internet nonsense kind of thing you know it's auto generated to stick some ads in and like off we go kind of thing but you could there's a concern about journalism isn't there writing stories but you just you're just going to a end up with stories that are all written exactly the same and seem exactly the same.

18:25B, they're not going to be very low quality. C, the news will eat itself because it won't have anybody actually finding out new news for the news to write about. And finally, you need a human to check that that stuff is right. And that's what we do with all of our stories. We have humans who check that that stuff is right. And humans who know their patches and know their areas and check that that stuff is right. Because anybody who's read a Google AI overview knows that sometimes it's not quite right you know regardless of the literary quality or the journalistic punchiness of your ai overview it's sometimes not quite right so do us a favor when you do read an ai overview don't just read the ai overview and then go away click on the link next to it go to the original publisher check what it actually says do your own bit of checking and also it basically does all of those publishers out there who are still trying to produce journalism a favour because AI overviews and things like that are really damaging the news industry.

19:32All right then let's move on. I know we don't like talking about it but budget speculation this week has been around pension lump sums and people are taking action so let's just let's just go over that because currently over 55s can take 25 % tax-free lump sum from their pots up to 268 ,000 £275. But there are fears that limit could be reduced, costing a higher rate taxpayer, particularly thousands and even tens of thousands of pounds extra in tax. So many people, as we're seeing and we have been seeing over the last year, are raiding their pots in anticipation, an irreversible move. Experts are calling for some clarity around this to stop this happening.

20:14Lee, what are the rumours? to stop this happening and then you crucially missed out the word again again yeah this is exactly uh the scenario we found ourselves in ahead of the last budget uh in which there was lots of rumors swirling around including about um this pension lump sum in fact in the last financial year there was a 60 60 percent surge in tax-free cash pulled from pensions um amounting to 18 billion pounds that's a massive uptick and people have decided to take a pension lump sum there's quite likely to be another run-up now and what a lot of experts are saying is just bring some stability into people's personal finances and just rule out that you're going to do this or rule in that it is on the table then people can make an informed decision and unfortunately we're getting into position now we're in October the budget will race around pretty quickly even though it's a late one this year and it appears people are going back to doing the same thing that was happening last year and we've had fresh sort of alerts from experts just saying you know you've really got to take your time and make sure that this is the correct decision for you because we've had two statements from the Financial Conduct Authority and HMRC the FTA saying there's no right to cancel a tax-free cash withdrawal although some pension providers might voluntarily offer this option to customers if they wish but you have to be careful you have to make sure that it is reversible on the whole i would treat it as an irreversible decision and hmrc have confirmed that any tax consequences cannot be undone if you do cancel so the withdrawal will still count towards someone's tax-free lump sum limit which is currently 268 275 pounds even if it is unwound now Tanya Jeffries our pensions and investments editor has kind of done a sort of five things to think about before taking a tax-free lump sum from your pension right so the first one is do you you do not necessarily need to take it all at once depending on your type of scheme or even at all if you don't have a good reason to spend it now number two think about whether you will need the money later if you're in good health and all being well could live in a long time.

22:37Number three, if you're investing your pension and do so wisely, your pot could continue to grow and boost how much you have available to withdraw in tax-free chunks over the long term. Number four, when you take anything over and above your 25 % lump sum from a defined contribution pension, from then onwards, you can only contribute£10 ,000 a year and still get tax relief. That is crucial. That is a crucial piece of information to digest and understand. And number five, be aware that if you reinvest the tax-free cash back into your pension, you might fall foul of pension recycling rules, another crucial thing to get your head around, which is aimed at preventing people trying to seek an advantage by getting extra tax relief.

23:14They are five things you have to ask yourself before you are tempted to do this. I don't want to get into all of the speculation, Georgie, that we've got six, what, six, seven weeks until the budget. I don't even think really that this is that much of a speculative story, i.e. it's more people or experts are warning not to just go and rush ahead and do this thinking that something might happen and there was a Rathbone survey out this week suggesting that 27 % of people in the past have regretted withdrawing a lump sum from a pension it's one in four people claims they regret doing it now we've had people write in you have a look in the comments section most people are saying they don't regret it you know most people that have done this They say they don't regret it.

24:00They knew what they were doing with the money and that these rules are good and a good thing to be able to utilize as a part of your sort of retirement arsenal, which is fine. But we do also have, I would argue, quite a clued up readership in which they do really fully digest the financial news and do kind of kick the tires on any kind of decision like this. But it's people that just kind of really rush into it and maybe rush into doing it at too early an age. you've really really got a careful consideration into this George you really careful consideration yeah I was reading an article about a pensions expert who decided to do just this and one of the considerations he said was I'm going to use utilize ISAs obviously but then what if the government decides to to change those as well how much of an impact is all this having Simon especially the pensions being caught up in the inheritance tax net well this is the big driver of this is that from April 27, pensions are going to be included in the inheritance tax net.

24:59And that changes the game for a lot of people. If you've got a defined benefit pension scheme, then broadly speaking, you're not affected because you don't have a pension pot that could be inherited anyway, but you are going to get a nice, chunky, guaranteed income in retirement. So that's people who built up final salary, career average pension schemes throughout their working lives of which there are still people retiring for whom a lot of their pension wealth is that from the private sector or public sector workers now both of those sets of people you know in defined benefit schemes can also take tax-free cash and it's it's a big perk for those people they like it because it's a lump sum but what it does is it reduces the amount of income that they're going to get in retirement so that's something that you should carefully weigh up It's like, yes, the idea of 200 grand, right, tax free in one go sounds great.

25:55But what are you going to miss out on in terms of that income in retirement? There's also going to be inflation adjusted. OK, your income will be protected against inflation from your defined benefit scheme. For defined contribution savers, it's a slightly different thing to weigh up because the pot's theirs anyway. and that's where they've got the risk of it being added to their estate for inheritance tax now take the scenario of somebody who is retiring um uh with a defined benefit contribution pot that they've been saving into for their entire working life okay there's not that many of those people around because a lot of them would have been defined benefit savers but there are people around who are in a defined contribution situation so in that instance it's the choice between keeping invested and taking the money the tax-free cash sounds good and you might have a plan for it if you're going to pay off a mortgage say actually you've got an inheritance tax liability you know you've got enough to live on and you want to give away some money this is a really good way of doing that take the money out give it away now start the seven-year rule going okay that's absolutely fine it's totally acceptable thing to do um or you've got plans to spend the money on something people so often use it and perhaps to do home improvements they might use it to move home most people be downsizing in that scenario but maybe they might use it to do that they might even have plans to go right i'm going to get a car i'm going to do home improvements i'm going to put it into a bank account it's going to fund holidays and the advantage is it's tax-free but you've of course got to bear in mind that you could just withdraw ad hoc sums from your pension under the wonderfully named UFPLs system where the first 25 % of every amount that you take out is tax-free and the rest is taxed.

27:44The money that you get out of your pension that is taxed is taxed at your income tax rate. So most people pay 20 % income tax on most of their pension income. There are more and more people who are tipping into the 40 % one just like there are more and more workers who are tipping into the 40 % one there are some people who end up paying 45 % on it because they've got big pensions and they're still working and various other things they might have other income but it's usually the kind of 20 % tipping into 40 % so if you keep your pension lump sum invested right it can grow free of tax and then you can get some more money out of it and if you go okay well the alternative is if say they took the lump sum to zero and I couldn't get any pension tax-free lump sum anymore what would happen is when i took that money out i would get taxed but if you're going to get taxed at 20 on that money that's not that much right and the difference between taking it now and then parking it in a very in a low rate cash account which a lot of people do and keeping it invested if you keep it invested within perhaps with reasonable returns three to four years maybe five you'd have achieved the hurdle of beating that 20 tax that you would have paid anyway and you will continue to make investment gains even if you're going to pay 40 tax there is the scenario where perhaps you you only need to leave it invested for maybe six or seven years and so on so that's why it can be worth keeping that money invested in your pension pot but as you said this inheritance tax thing is weighing on people's minds and it's taken a lot of people for whom inheritance tax was not an issue into a scenario where inheritance tax is an issue and if you're retiring at 65 and you want to have a comfortable retirement based on the plsa figures you will need a million pound pension pot and if you have been saving into a defined contribution pension pot for the whole of your life rather than a defined benefit one you probably might have a million pound pension pot now previously you know you've got a 400 500 000 pound house and you've got some savings and assets you didn't have to worry about harris's tax now you do chances are you're not going to die until after the age of 75 i can't remember what the median age is for like people dying at the moment because i think it's something like 78 right and by which point you're going to run that pension down slightly so you're not going to be passing on the whole thing and actually you might live into your 90s and you might even get to the point where you've spent it all and enjoyed your retirement and then it's not an issue but what is weighing on people's minds is the what if i die tomorrow and then like the government just swipes 40 of it and it doesn't go to my family now if you've got a spouse and it's going to go to your spouse obviously it passes inheritance tax free so you don't need to worry about that but not everybody's in that situation so you can see why people are going well do you know what i'll take the money out now especially if they're thinking of giving it away that's it the part one

30:58I'm joined now by Blerem Gashi of Charles Stanley Direct for our weekly Investing Explained feature. Blerem, a short but sweet question from a listener. Can I pay into a SIP for my 12-year-old daughter? The short answer is yes, you can. And you can open it and pay into a SIP for your 12-year-old daughter. the annual allowance for children is around£3 ,600 gross per tax year or another way to explain it is that you would contribute£2 ,880 and the government will top up£720 in tax relief the main thing to be aware of with contributing to a pension for a child is that the money is locked away until she reaches the minimum pension age currently is 55 but it's going to change to 57 in 2028 and god knows what it will change to after that point um so it's not money that she'll be able to use for you know university or buying a house but starting a pension now can give her decades of growth for what she can use at retirement.

32:01Laram thank you very much. Thank you. Welcome back. The power of this pod. Do you remember last month we covered a reader's question about her big change in a Wizz Air flight time back from Rome. It caused her, there was a problem with an Uber, etc. But the whole principle of it, the fact that Wizz Air had changed the flight time so hugely, it was a massive inconvenience. But actually, Simon recounted a story where he'd been in the same situation. And so they thought, hang on a minute, is there a wider issue going on here? And yes, it appears that there is. So you've been telling us all your examples where flight times have been hugely changed, causing big disruptions to your holiday plans.

32:43Simon, take up the story. So we had a suspicion on this podcast a few weeks ago that this was a thing, a thing that is happening more and more. i've been hearing quite a lot of anecdotal stories of people suddenly having flights that were booked ages ago having their times moved dramatically and we're talking four or five hours here often you hear stories of i booked a flight in the afternoon so i wanted a flight in the afternoon all of a sudden i'm flying in the in the at night time i would never have booked a flight at night time or all of a sudden i'm flying early in the morning i would never have booked a flight early in the morning and you know when you just start to hear more people telling you about stuff and you think there's something going on here because i didn't used to hear that many people telling me about these things obviously flight times have always changed right but you're like this definitely sounds like it's on the up well we put that shout out and we had quite a few emails back from people with some quite astonishing stories.

33:50Now, I must admit, this is still something of a mystery. We do not know exactly why the airlines are doing this. If you work for an airline... And we know we have lots of airline people who do listen because do you remember the, well, I can't remember when it was. It was a couple of years ago. We had all these pilots getting, get in contact. Tell us, tell us what's going on. Yeah, right. Get in contact. Tell us what's going on here why are airlines moving flights more are they moving flights more um or have we just started noticing it but also what it turns out is that the airlines can get away with this and the way that they're getting away with this is that the civil aviation authority says if your airline makes a scheduled change it should notify you of this at least 14 days in advance significant changes may entitle you to a refund or alternative now what's happening is they're doing this more than 14 days in advance so i've booked a flight at nine o 'clock at night because i want to fly at nine o 'clock at night all of a sudden they tell me it's three o 'clock in the afternoon like months after i've booked it this is no good for me i contact my airline they'll say sorry you know we've moved it but we can offer you a refund as the caa says the thing is if they give me a refund then i have to go buy a new flight and my flight that i bought a few months ago for nine o 'clock in the evening is now obviously much more expensive.

35:13The airline says, sorry, we can't offer you an alternative. We can only offer you a refund. What they should be doing, according to the Civil Aviation Authority, although they don't appear to be doing, and according to our consumer rights lawyer, Dean Dunham, is if the flight has moved by more than five hours, which is what is generally considered to be substantial, then you should be able to demand that they put you on another airline's plane and that they pay for the difference, i.e. that kind of alternative. He said, the problem is airlines do tend to argue this. So it can be very difficult to get them to do that.

35:58And whilst you're trying to get them to do that, the flight that you would actually like to be on is going up and up and up in price and getting further and further away from you so what do you do you either do one of two things you accept the flight the new flight and you move but some of these stories are astonishing we had uh one reader who is going away um just sorry one listener who's going away just after christmas uh booked a lunchtime flight on december the 27th thinking they could drive up to heathrow from the southwest and it wouldn't be stressful the 1 p.m flight would mean a 6 a.m start for the four-hour drive but it was manageable then all of a sudden they were informed the flight times changed both the outward journey and the return of five hours earlier the lunchtime flight is now 8 a.m so they would now need to be at that airport at 5 a.m so they would actually need to be leaving to do their journey and leave enough time for traffic although i doubt there'll be any traffic at that time on the boxing day 27th evening at about one o 'clock in the morning so they're going to have to buy hotels they're going to have to stay in a hotel near the airport they've also had it moved earlier on the way back so they're going to lose the last day of their holiday their point is they would never have booked these flights and they can't go book new flights now because they would be far more expensive another couple jetting off for some winter sun they had theirs changed and then my favorite one was uh j wheeler okay who only had his flight changed by 10 minutes so he looked at the email and he thought fine and accepted it right but what was not clear was that they had also changed the airport the message just read the flight was leaving from london but he was meant to be flying from luton and what they had actually done was change the flight from luton to gatwick so it's 10 minutes no but it was the other side of london right so they would now have to change the return flights to luton so buy new flights or face traveling 70 miles in the early hours of a Sunday morning.

38:00The options to return to Luton were limited. So they're now returning a day later. The flights cost the same, but EasyJet charged them£60 in admin fees to make the change because they'd accepted it. But he was like, but I didn't realize you changed the airport. Now, until we contacted EasyJet, they didn't do anything. Okay. But to be fair to EasyJet, okay, they did now offer to help out. an easy jet spokesman apologized and has offered to pay for the train fare to gatwick as a goodwill gesture he says as mr and mrs wheeler's original outbound flight was no longer operating from luton we moved them to the next available flight from london gatwick which was departing within a few minutes of their original departure time a few minutes and roughly an hour and a half's journey but you know just 10 minutes um so yes it says customers always have the option of choosing a refund or rerouting but that doesn't sound a rerouting it's like but it doesn't sound like they were actually given that option because what should be happening i would argue is that the when they speak to easyjet customer service they should say okay we can swap you to a flight solution there is no flight to loot in that day we can talk you to a flight solution a day later you will not have to pay the admin fees for transferring you know maybe that's just customer service error but this is definitely a thing there's definitely something going on here lee honestly i'm shaking my head there terrible isn't it lee i mean let's be honest they're not doing it it can't be any other reason than their own benefit oh definitely yeah that's exactly what's going on and actually in that first case study that um someone spoke about the the family driving up from the southwest you know having to leave at 1am we didn't mention they've got three children three young children you know So that's the thing.

39:45As a parent, I book flight times that are convenient to us as a family. If we have to get out of this house at a certain time in whatever, 3, 4, 5 a.m., I've made that mistake in the past. I book flights on the strength of the time that they fly out. And actually, I think reading this story and kind of having investigated this, I think there needs to be some rule changes to it. because the thing is 14 days is not long enough to be able to change plans. And if you haven't got a free cancellation hotel, wherever it is that you're going, you know, how are you going to change plans? It's very difficult to go, actually, no, that time isn't convenient for me.

40:24I'm going to cancel that. But it's very unlikely, unless you have some absolutely brilliant cancellation policy on wherever it is that you're going to stay, it's very difficult. So I think there needs to be new rules around this. If they're going to make it 14 days, I think if it's between 14 and 60 days, say, that that's changed, then there needs to be some compensation or way of being able to change plans around. You know, because 14 days, two weeks, when you've had a holiday booked for a year, is way too short a run up. And actually, we tried to find out quite a lot on this story. You know, for example, how many flight times are being changed like this?

41:04Completely shrouded in mystery. we cannot find this information. It's not easily readily available for each airline to tell us how many flights have been affected by this policy. And is it worse than it was pre-pandemic? Because the gut instinct is it feels like it is. But very difficult to find out. If there's going to be more of this happening, there needs to be better rules in place for travellers because it's simply unfair. I absolutely agree with you, Lee. And I'm just going to use my own example because it's all about me. anyone who's seen the images on my instagram of my back screen on zoom it's full of football scarves that i've got from around the world i travel and a lot of people do they don't go on two-week holidays sometimes they go for just long weekends so i often book football match and then my flight will be in the evening afterwards you change that you've stuffed my entire weekend anyway elsewhere while we've got um the rant on lee's not happy he's not happy bunny uh from this weekend and let's stick with sport as well his beloved south end united will no longer be accepting cash payments a pattern that we're seeing up and down the country and not just in football stadiums last year cash usage shrank to below 10 for the first time on record as mobile phones are becoming the increasingly popular way to make payments i have to say i'm quite new to the game lee i've only recently started but you're not happy are you i'm not happy i'm not going to rant though georgie because i understand the way the world is moving we love a good rant lee it makes for a nice podcast yeah i know i know but i'm getting being calm in my in my in my later years you know i'm ready to retire in my cardigan and a cup of tea and stop ranting about things they um there was uh some data out this week from uk finance say nine percent of uh all transactions across britain last year uh were cash that's incredible collapse from 2014 when nearly half of all payments were cash and it was in a gradual decline even before the pandemic uh went down to sort of 24 something like that in 2019 and then pandemic really was the final now was more of us were kind of pushed onto using contacts payments remember all that campaign cash is dirty all that nonsense that went on um all of that has added up to yeah and the innovation that has happened in the world of payments in terms of contactless payments have fast become a very you know taken up technology and mobile phones you say three and five adults now believed to make mobile payments I mean I must admit I don't but I just use my debit card because it works for me and I use cash because that also works for me this data was quite quite a strong piece of research from UK of financial duty kind of parts of it made me feel a little bit sad um the two parts that made me feel the saddest by 2034 cash will make up just four percent of transactions that's its prediction and that will make it harder to withdraw cash and spend it it already is becoming harder uh each month that goes by and the other thing is that the report described a third of adults 17 million people now live largely cashless lives using cash once a month or less last year compared to 1.2 million who mainly use cash that's quite sad i think that's quite sad that it's largely cashless but at the end of the day i was thinking about this if you think about your own personal spending is nine percent of your spending cash or is it likelihood is you are tapping your debit card or putting in your pin and paying that way i would hazard a guess that it's a lot of people that just use card payments and what i'm not ranting about here is oh stop using your card and you go fully into cash that's not what this is about what this is about is uh having choice taken away from us and having choice taken away from us at a rapid speed um in which it's kind of i find it quite annoying that i can't spend cash in places and cash is a better way to budget i I would argue on the whole.

45:04And I still every payday, you won't be surprised to know that I take out a nice little chunk of cash. And I use that as my kind of fun spending money for the month, my off grid spending. Now part of that off grid spending is that the football, I go to Rootsall, I try and get to five to 10 games a year, really old school stadium, I've been going for more than 30 years, absolutely no improvements or anything has happened in that time. You know, you go into the supporters forums and i don't even use the bathroom anymore the ground is that that rotten uh if i'm being honest but it is it's part of the experience it's part of going to the football i don't really care i'm there to watch the football and i do spend a few quid when i'm there you know like to get a box of chips bit of bother all get a program maybe get a pint if i'm feeling adventurous you know it's quite nice to do that this week without really any kind of notice there was a notice that went out that it will transition to a cashless stadium.

46:04It's going to transition to a cashless stadium just overnight from the Aldershot game tomorrow. We've had all of these supporter surveys in recent times because I'm lucky enough to still have a football team to support because we were really on the brink of going bust and the thought of never being able to go and watch football routes or watch Southland again was a real prospect. I just think it's now you're now saying that cash isn't good enough to spend in the ground and it's almost like the last bastion for me, the last place I would ever expect to go cashless, that is how old school Rootsville is it feels alien to not be able to spend cash there not that you'd want to spend much cash there the burgers are like concrete, the bovril is scalding hot it's part of the charm the bovril is hotter than the earth's mantle I don't know how they make it so hot But, you know, it's absolutely incredible.

46:58And I'm not going to lie, next time I go football, I will be having my bother all. I'll just be smuggling it into a well-placed thermos frask when I go inside and I'll just forego the chips. I can still, the one place you are still allowed to pay cash, you can still buy a programme in cash. It's then the chief executive of the club, though, put out this big statement and said, by moving to cash and contactless payments across our bars and kiosks, we'll be able to serve fans more quickly, reduce queue times and ensure transactions are simple and secure but two thoughts on that are i've hardly ever seen a queue uh at that place because the offerings that are in the ground aren't exactly great if the offerings were different if it was like better food better drink and it's like right we're now doing contactless to because everyone's going to be wanting to eat burgers that don't taste like concrete i'd get it but it's like that and also transactions are simple and secure i mean cash is simple and secure isn't it well i don't know but i absolutely hate not being able to uh choose how i i pay for something and that includes the other way around very few and far between places do this but definitely like barbers and when i say this you'll know what i mean it will just be cash only uh and i don't like that i'm like well why can't i pay card and this is only this is a cashless venue why can't i pay cash and that's just my attitude of anything it's like i hate being coerced into something I think a lot of what's going on around cash is that.

48:24Take away the choice. Of course, then cash usage goes down because you can't use it. I do think it's a real issue. That's the thing. It's options, isn't it, Lee? I don't really mind when it's cashless because it makes no odds to me. But I will charge that the hottest thing I've ever eaten was a pie from Hartlepool. And the most disgusting was some broth effort with a massive lump of fat from Kidderminster. Do you still do that, Kidderminster fans? Yeah, that was a surprise. when it's done. That's in my mouth. Massive. It was like the size of a conker of fat. Right. We're sticking with food. And finally, what a reader question.

49:01We spoke about Dean Dunham earlier. Well, your consumer rights lawyer has got a real peacher here. Peacher here is that word? He's got a real pearler here. I don't know what the expression is. Either way. I went to a local pub for a Sunday roast and on the menu it advertised that it It came with unlimited Yorkshire puddings. When I asked for a top-up, the waitress said I'd been given an old menu and the meal no longer came with unlimited Yorkshers. I asked for a discount on the bill, but the manager said I couldn't have one. Lee Boyce, I don't know why, I think this is a question for you. Do you think this is a question for me?

49:35Are you trying to say I'm the sort of guy that would eat unlimited Yorkshire puddings in a pub? I'm complaining if you didn't get one. Yeah, absolutely right, Lee. You'll actually be surprised to hear in this instance, Georgie. I'm a bit kind of like, oh, really? I like a Yorkshire pudding they get me wrong but it's the cheapest bit of the roast dinner probably on the whole what does it cost to make a Yorkshire pudding like 10 100 % yeah exactly nothing per pudding what are you going to do fill yourself up on Yorkshire puddings instead of like the other stuff on the Sunday roast is quite nice the actual answer to this from Dean is that if you were handed a menu that promised a Sunday roast with unlimited Yorkshire puddings then legally that wording becomes part of the contract between you and the pub and the Kashima Rights Act 2015 makes it crystal clear that goods and services must be supplied as described and the description on the menu counts in other words consumers should always get what it says on the tin and then you put in brackets with a bit of humor or the menu um so you do have rights here and you should have been given them or i would have thought that the probably the thing that would have made the most amount of sense in this scenario is just to have given you a free roast dinner and just have just forgotten about it and take that menu out of play and make sure that it doesn't happen again um dean starts saying here about you know he could write to the manager explain that the wording form part of the contract cite the consumer rights act the pub still won't play ball you can escalate the matter to trading standards or the small claims call i mean that feels to me like extreme measures you'd have to be incredible and the other thing i'll say here is the hospitality industry you know isn't exactly having a smooth ride of it at the moment and i think that they're pardon the pun but probably bigger fish to fry um than kind of you know going too much off a tangent it's like so i always put this down as an honest mistake category if it's an old menu that's floating around that hasn't been taken out i'm kind of like i think most i was going to say sane people but that's not fair most of us would just go oh okay then that's one of those things i don't know if i would escalate it to the point in which i'm started to threaten true word with the manager you know unless it unless it's a pub you hate i mean if it's a pub you hate and i don't know why you're in there in the first place but if there was a little bit kind of like come on let's give the hospitality industry a break let's give pubs a break let's support them let's not try and get them investigated by trading standards because they made a slip up on a menu you know that's my that's my view and no one can be that petty honestly that they take it that far but i do think look i get it they're going through a really difficult time but can you like can you be that stupid as a as a pub not just like you said what is it pennies for a yorkshire pudding and you could have turned this into a great pr win for yourself saying well actually that's an old menu we don't do it but for you we'll give you some do you know what i mean you cannot turn it i'm out with a hundred yorkshire food on the table just go here we go then and just like love them all like it doesn't match you know hospitable like it's in the name so what i think the key issue here is how many of these old menus were floating around if you just had one on your table and everybody else on your table had a different menu um then that's fine or you just had some old menus on your table and they weren't anywhere else but if the pub has got old menus everywhere and everybody's got the same menu that says unlimited Yorkshire puddings on it and then people are ordering it and they might not have gone for the roast they might have gone for something different instead and then finding out after the event then that that is an issue but I have I have two important things to say on this firstly Dean's remedy which is in situations like this the law gives you two options a repeat performance brackets that is the unlimited puddings as promised or if that's not possible a price reduction to reflect the fact that you didn't get everything you were sold.

53:27You were perfectly within your rights to ask for money off the bill. So that does create the wonderful scenario of someone asking for a repeat performance, being given a repeat performance, but perhaps not on the same day. For example, being invited back, maybe to sit by themselves, a specially laid table, and to get their meal with unlimited Yorkshire Prillings while everybody else in the pub only gets the two that they are usually allocated. But maybe the pub could play it a bit fast and loose and say okay fine but you got the roast so we'll only give you the unlimited yorkshire puddings so you could find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to go back to the pub to sit alone and just eat a pile of unlimited yorkshire puddings and nothing else secondly yorkshire puddings could be improved in my mind and i've always thought they could be improved if they were full of sausage meat and long-term listeners will know that this is a criticism I share with mince pies, which do not actually have mince in them, but some fake thing called mince meat.

54:24In the north? Minced pies had actual mince in them. They'd be so much better. They do in the north. It depends where you go. When I lived in Yorkshire, the minced pies were mince, which is a surprise if you're not expecting it. Anyway, Simon, stat of the week, please. 1 000 tim martin of weatherspoon's fame says if britain had 1 000 businesses like weatherspoon's no one else would have to pay any taxes at all so this is what he said in its financial results today in the last financial year weatherspoon its customers and employees generated a total of £838 million of taxes for the UK government.

55:09The total tax raised by the government in the last financial year was£858.9 billion. Therefore, Weatherspoon generated approximately one in every £1 ,000 of all UK tax revenue. In other words, the country only needs about 1 ,000 companies like Weatherspoon and no one else would have to pay any taxes at all. How is that for sunlit uplands? If we just had 1 ,000 companies like Weatherspoons, none of us, none of us would have to pay any tax. I would love it if Rachel Reeves delivered a budget that involved a plan to remove tax for everyone and replace it with 1 ,000 companies as successful as Weatherspoons.

55:57I don't think that's going to happen. We can wait and see though, Simon. Just imagine that. Right, that's it for this week. You can keep up to date with all the latest Breaking Money news just to go to thisismoney.co.uk or you can download the app if you have any comments or questions for the team or anything you'd like them to look into. Simon? You can email us at podcast at thisismoney.co.uk. Crazy flight stuff. Keep it coming. Tell us about it. Also, any of the stuff on the AI jobs. And this Weatherspoon thing. I've tasked Mike, our business editor, with writing a story and finding out if this is actually genuinely true.

56:28but if you know something about whether we could have 1000 weatherspoons and not pay any tax at all then please send us send us your views podcast at this is money.co.uk and comes to this is money.co.uk forward slash podcast and if you like our podcast we're not raters wherever you found us it helps other people find us too