For those of us frustrated that the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has been offering the wrong solution to the right problem, there has recently been progress, of a kind: she is now offering the wrong solution to the wrong problem.
One of Labour’s key policy goals was to “kick-start economic growth”, a goal that would save a lot of trouble if they could achieve it, but one that was always going to be easier to say than to do.
Perhaps that is why the chancellor has looked for a quick crowd-pleaser. Her recent announcement of “Great British Summer Savings” (really?) promises to fleetingly cut VAT on children’s cinema tickets, children’s restaurant meals (a definitional headache) and visits to the zoo, along with free bus rides for under-16s and tariff suspensions aimed at giving us cheaper chocolate biscuits. (Families are more likely to need help when the energy crisis bites in the winter months, but it’s possible that the chancellor thinks that anything that happens after September will be somebody else’s problem.)
It would be giving this policy too much credit to call it a sugar hit; it’s more like a dusting of saccharine. A small, temporary, rather scattershot tax break is just moving small change around the economy. If you are prosperous enough to take your children to restaurants and amusement parks, you’ll save a few quid at best, and can look forward to the bill in due course. While you wait, you can ponder whether the chancellor really has nothing better to spend her scarce resources on.
Much of the money, in any case, is likely to be snaffled by the companies in question, which are under no obligation to pass on the tax cut. Those in the spotlight may decide that it would be prudent to make a show of doing so. Yet many theatres, theme parks and museums have no direct local competitors and will surely be tempted to pocket this brief summer bonus.
And if they do pass on the full benefit to customers? Merlin Entertainments, which runs Legoland, Alton Towers and Thorpe Park, has promised to do just that. But have you been to Alton Towers in a school holiday? Whatever families gain in lower ticket prices, they are likely to relinquish in longer waits for rides. The only real solution is to increase supply — an intriguing thought, no?
Still, it is nice to see rollercoasters on the front page, because for an insight into what ails the UK economy beyond the nearsighted unseriousness of successive governments, theme parks are not the worst place to start. They may have little practical significance but they make a fine symbol of the country’s ills: the UK’s rollercoasters are underwhelming for much the same reason that the UK economy in general is underwhelming.
I speak with some authority, as the proud parent of a teenage rollercoaster addict. Harford Junior has sampled much of what the UK’s rollercoaster scene has to offer, and now has his eyes firmly fixed on a theme park in Stockholm, another in Belgium, a third near Paris and a fourth near Krakow. (He’ll be lucky.)
This wanderlust speaks eloquently of the power of rollercoaster influencers on YouTube, but also of the fact that the UK just doesn’t have much to offer the connoisseur.
Thorpe Park has the extravagantly tall Hyperia and Alton Towers has The Smiler, in all its labyrinthine dystopian glory. Both are memorable coasters, but both have equally memorable queues.
Speaking as a man who has been dragged to more rollercoaster parks than you might imagine, my experience has been that the European parks are simply more pleasant experiences — shorter queues, better landscapes and themes, nicer food, longer opening hours.
Compare Alton Towers with Europa Park in south-west Germany. Alton Towers is cheaper, which means it is overcrowded and the queues are absurd. A fast-track pass to skip them is available — for three times the price of admission, at busy times. Europa Park doesn’t sell a queue-jumping pass, and it has enough capacity that in my experience you don’t really need one.
These are subjective impressions, admittedly. But according to the Themed Entertainment Association, none of the world’s 25 most popular theme parks is in the UK. (There are four in Europe.) Only one UK theme park is in Europe’s top 10 — Alton Towers, in 10th place.
Why doesn’t Alton Towers just expand its capacity? A good question. It may be something to do with the limited competition: the UK’s three most popular theme parks are all run by the same operator. There are plans to build a Universal Studios theme park near Bedford, but major theme park openings in the UK are not a frequent occurrence.
It may be a response to planning restrictions — Alton Towers rides are obliged to stay below the tree line, lest they annoy the locals. Alton’s population is not much more than a thousand people, while the annual attendance at Alton Towers is well over two million. As so often in the UK, we let the planning-permission tail wag the economic dog.
The UK economy has suffered decades of under-investment from private and public sector alike, and you can see that reflected in our rollercoaster game. At least the fast-track passes serve as a shining example of how to profit in a low-growth economy: when life hands you long lines, make lemonade by charging people for the privilege of standing at the front of them.
So there we are. The rollercoasters don’t really matter, but what they symbolise does: a supply-constrained economy, hemmed in by rules and habits that don’t just make it hard to build something new and better, but make it hard even to imagine what “new and better” might look like. A brief, poorly targeted and poorly timed tax cut is no more likely to help than handing out fast-track passes is likely to reduce the average queue times at Alton Towers.
What might work? Treating the tax system strategically as a source of revenue and an encouragement to productivity would help — rather than using it as a fun-house source of distraction. Taxes are too complex and don’t raise enough revenue to meet any recent government’s spending plans, so cutting some randomly chosen tax rates for a few weeks is hardly addressing that problem.
But the real challenge lies in the nation’s supply side. Encouraging a few more theme parks would do wonders to improve the experience for coaster fans everywhere. And on the off-chance that we actually get serious? More power lines, houses, vehicle charging stations, roads, railway lines and power generation would be nice. I’ll cope without the discount on my chocolate biscuits.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 3 June 2026.
