Have a Walk on the Taxpayer's Dime

The latest idiocy out of England.

Children will be given shopping vouchers for walking to school

Children will be given shopping vouchers for walking to school under a radical Government plan to combat obesity.

Under the scheme, which will be part of a public health white paper to be announced on Tuesday, children will receive Topshop vouchers and cinema tickets for travelling to school on foot.

Every school in the country will be offered access to technology which would allow children to use swipe cards to track their journeys, so that points can be swapped for consumer rewards.

Under a pilot scheme under way in Wimbledon, south London, teenage girls receive a £5 Topshop voucher if they walk to school eight times, and an Odeon cinema ticket for five journeys, in a certain period.

Aside from the general nanny state attitude that taking money from taxpayers to pay other people to walk is a good and proper thing for a state to do, I expect that within 3 years we will be hearing about the massive fraud involved in this program which will result, not in the program being scrapped, but in hiring an entire new bureaucracy to monitor and eliminate abuse.