PARENTS are being offered cheap dream holidays at paradise resorts in the Caribbean, Mauritius and California in a Town Hall drive to stop children missing school for family breaks.
Camden’s Labour education boss Councillor Nick Smith is backing a scheme offering families cut-price deals provided they go during school holidays.
The cheap holidays offer comes as the Town Hall puts on hold a shock plan to dish out “Truancy Tickets” to parents whose children turn up late for school or miss lessons.
Instead of pressing ahead with the hard-line measure, Cllr Smith hopes that offering huge discounts on dream breaks will encourage parents to book vacations during school holidays rather than term time.
The Town Hall had been geared up to hit parents with parking ticket-style fines of £50 and £100 in a bid to curb unexplained school absences. Offences were to include unnecessary term-time holidays. But education chiefs had sudden cold feet over the blitz on bunking off and Cllr Smith has demanded more information on the project before giving his blessing.

CAMDEN Council claimed its milestone 150th banning order yesterday (Wednesday) when a judge told a maverick advertising boss to halt his company’s fly-posting campaigns.
In what is being seen as Britain’s first “white-collar Asbo”, Tim Horrox, managing director of Camden Town-based agency Diabolical Liberties, was hit with a two-year order banning him from authorising fly-poster displays in the borough.
District judge James Henderson told Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court he was satisfied the fly-posters caused residents distress by “defacing the area they care about”.
After hearing four days of evidence, including claims from council officials and Labour councillors Theo Blackwell and Barbara Hughes that messy posters heighten the perception of high crime levels on Camden’s streets, the judge drew up an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (Asbo) against Mr Horrox yesterday (Wednesday) morning.

AFTER the hearing, Tim Horrox said: “This has been a bizarre experience for me.
“I am the owner of a number of media and marketing companies, including an advertising agency called Diabolical Liberties. This company acts for many arts and cultural industry clients.
“In the past the agency has even co-ordinated fly-posting work on behalf of Camden’s Arts and Leisure Department, which has promoted music festivals in the borough. The agency has never disputed that one of the services it has provided has been to distribute advertisement posters to groups within the borough who then erect the posters by means of ‘fly-posting’.

ANGRY squatters confronted police who had evicted them from an office building in Camden Town yesterday (Wednesday).

A RESTAURANT waiter charged with the axe murder of a man in a Swiss Cottage street made his first Old Bailey appearance yesterday (Wednesday).
Joseph Sheehan, 37, of Belmont Street, Chalk Farm, was seen over a video link from Belmarsh Prison in south London, where he is being held in custody.
He is accused of the murder of gay pensioner Brian Messitt, 67, who died from head wounds on the pavement in Eton Avenue last Monday.