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You and Yours: Subscription traps, Tourist tax, Ethical spending

Subscription traps, Tourist tax, Ethical spending

BBC Radio 4 - You and Yours, Subscription traps, Tourist tax, Ethical spending

Subscription traps, are you one of the 13 million that have you fallen in to one?

As subscription services grow in popularity so have the amount having issues with free trials, auto-renewal, and cancelling them – it’s called the subscription trap.

It’s estimated that over 80% of UK households have a subscription service – you can get them for everything now, from TV, films and music, through to expert advice, food and stationary.
As these services have grown in popularity so have the concerns of the subscription trap. This is where services are easy to enter yet difficult to cancel, and in some cases people unknowingly paying for subscription. 
We talk to one 90 year old who has just found out that he’s spent over £700 over two years for a service he’s never used. As always we’ll be giving you some advice on how to stop this happening to you, and if there is anything you can do if you fall foul to the trap. 

Tourism tax, you may have come across it if your travelled abroad, but increasingly they are being used around the UK as well. 
It’s not the law for places to charge it, instead they are run by Business Improvement Districts in places like Manchester, Liverpool, Blackpool, Great Yarmouth, Tweed Valley, Moray and Speyside, and Loch Ness.
We’ll be looking in to what this money is spent on, and how they impact the tourists.

And ethical spending, do you think about this when you’re out shopping? 
We talk to two friends who take two approaches when trying to be as ethical as they can in their own budgets. Then we talk with Fairtrade who are 30 years old in 2024 and say that ethical spending has grown even in the cost of living crisis.

Presenter: Winifred Robinson
Producer: Dave James

You can contact You & Yours by emailing youandyours@bbc.co.uk or using the hashtag #youandyours

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