Parkside: IELTS General Training Reading practice test

The principle behind everything in this policy is that you claim what you actually spent and nothing else. We do not pay round-sum allowances, and we do not expect anybody to be out of pocket for doing their job. A useful test before submitting a claim is whether you would be comfortable if it appeared on a list circulated to the whole department, since claims are audited and a sample is reviewed every quarter.

All travel must be booked through the company's booking tool rather than directly with an airline, a hotel or a railway company. This is not about securing a discount. It is so that in an emergency we can establish within minutes who is travelling and where they are, which we cannot do if bookings are scattered across personal accounts. Rail should be booked more than seven days ahead wherever the journey is already known.

Standard class is the default for rail, and first class may be booked only where it is genuinely cheaper on the day, with the comparison attached to the claim. Flights of under six hours are booked in economy. Premium economy is permitted on longer flights where the traveller is expected to work on the day of arrival. Business class requires the approval of a director, obtained in advance; it cannot be approved after the journey has been taken.

Accommodation is capped at £140 a night in London and £100 elsewhere in the United Kingdom, in both cases including breakfast. Where no room can be found within the limit, or where a conference venue is more expensive than the cap allows, add a short explanation to the claim. These explanations are routinely accepted and there is no need to seek permission beforehand.

Subsistence is capped at £30 a day on trips involving an overnight stay, and receipts are required. Alcohol is not reimbursed in any circumstances, including as part of a meal. A meal at which a customer or supplier is present is entertaining rather than subsistence: it is charged to a different code, is not subject to the daily cap, and must list the names of everybody who was there.

If you use your own car, the rate is 45p a mile for the first ten thousand miles in a tax year and 25p a mile after that. Mileage may only be claimed where the journey is shorter by road than by rail, or where two or more colleagues travel together and the total is lower. Parking charges and tolls may be claimed with the mileage. Parking fines and speeding penalties may not, whatever the circumstances.

Claims are submitted through the portal within sixty days of the expense being incurred, with photographs of the receipts attached. Any single item over £25 claimed without a receipt needs a written explanation, which your manager may accept or decline. A claim approved by the twelfth of the month is paid with that month's salary; anything later goes into the following month.

The decline of the traditional shopping street is real and it can be counted. Vacancy rates across British town centres roughly doubled between 2008 and the early 2020s; banks, department stores and chain retailers closed branches in the thousands; and in the worst affected towns a visitor can walk a main street and find a third of the frontages shuttered. What is much less clear, and what most of the public argument gets wrong, is why. The story is usually told as a single cause with a single villain, and the evidence supports neither.

Four things happened at once. Online retail took a large share of what the trade calls comparison goods, the things people used to walk from shop to shop to compare. Retail parks on the edge of towns took most of the bulky goods, because a household buying a sofa arrives by car. Business rates, the property tax paid by shops, are assessed on rental value, which means a town-centre unit pays several times what a warehouse pays for the same turnover. And a good many town centres were already weak before any of this, having lost the employers that put people on the street at lunchtime.

Something else has been happening that receives less attention because it looks like decline from a distance. The proportion of high street floor space occupied by services rather than by goods has risen steadily for thirty years: hairdressers, barbers, nail bars, dentists, opticians, veterinary practices, gyms, cafés, tattooists, repair shops, nurseries and driving schools. None of these can be done online, and the people using them are on the street for an hour at a time rather than ten minutes. A street full of such businesses is not a failed retail street. It is a different kind of street that is being measured with the wrong instrument.

The evidence on the standard interventions is mixed in a way that should make everybody more cautious. Pedestrianisation raises footfall and spending where a street already has enough people to fill it, and reduces both where it does not, because a quiet street with no traffic simply feels empty. Free parking is the most popular measure with traders and has a smaller effect on spending than almost anyone expects. The intervention with the most consistent record is the least fashionable: a regular market day reliably raises footfall for the surrounding shops, including on the days after it.

The strongest finding in the literature concerns residents rather than shoppers. Town centres with people living in them support an evening economy, justify a bus service, keep a chemist and a convenience shop viable, and are noticeably safer because somebody is looking out of a window. Converting empty upper floors above shops into flats is therefore the most frequently recommended measure of all, and it is also the hardest to finance, because the units are small, access is awkward, fire regulations are demanding and ownership is often fragmented between a shopkeeper downstairs and an absent landlord above.

Two approaches have a poor record and continue to be tried. The first is the pursuit of a flagship retailer, in which a council offers substantial inducements to attract a single large store in the belief that others will follow; the store arrives, trades for a few years and leaves when the inducement expires, and the centre is left with a unit nobody else can use. The second is regeneration conceived as decoration, in which paving is relaid, signs are replaced and planters appear, without anything changing about what the street contains or who can afford to occupy it.

The honest conclusion is that the high street as most people picture it was a product of a distribution system that no longer exists. For about a century, getting goods to people required a shop within walking distance of where they lived, and the street was the consequence. That requirement has gone, and no amount of paving will bring it back. The question worth asking is what a town centre is for now, and the answer that the evidence supports is a place with fewer shops, more services, more people living in it, and a purpose that does not depend on being the only way to buy a kettle.