Mortgage lending falls at Nationwide as house prices cool November 25, 2014 Mortgage lending at Britain's biggest building society fell £900m to £13.1bn in the six months to the end of September, suggesting "cooling measures" introduced by the Bank of England are taking their toll on the market. Nationwide added that mortgage lending had "reflected a recent flattening of the housing market", caused by a combination of [...]
Asda’s ToYou teams up with online retailers for launch of parcel collection service in UK stores November 12, 2015 Shoppers will be able to pick-up goods in Asda supermarkets that they have ordered from other online retailers as part of a new service launched today by the Walmart-owned chain to boost footfall in its stores. The retailer said the new service, called ToYou, allows customers to collect and return orders placed with third parties at any one of [...]
London mayoral election 2016: Why Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith may struggle to emulate Boris Johnson by defying polls to win City Hall January 20, 2016 A Tory candidate for London mayor that isn’t beloved by the wider Conservative party is down in the polls to a strong Labour candidate, but has Australian election strategist Lynton Crosby on board. It’s just over 100 days until the election and all signs point to a Labour win. Starting to sound familiar? The year [...]
Black Friday 2015 UK: Currys PC World reveals deals on Nespresso, Dyson, LG, Samsung, Sony and Bosch goods November 24, 2015 Currys PC World has launched its Black Friday 2015 bargains today, promising 40 per cent more stock will be available and 30 per cent more deals on offer than last year. In total, Currys PC World is promising more than 3,000 deals on top brands including Nespresso, Dyson, LG, Samsung, Sony and Bosch across a 10-day event starting [...]
George Osborne facing pressure from UK building societies over ‘perverse’ bank surcharge August 19, 2015 The Treasury is under fire from Britain’s building societies, who say that a new tax will cost them at least £630m over the next five years – and choke off £20bn worth of lending. Mortgage lenders want the government to think again. “As you would expect the sector is positively engaging with HM Treasury,” Building [...]
Bank of England stress tests: RBS and Standard Chartered flagged for “capital inadequacies” as Bank warns new capital requirements could be introduced next year December 1, 2015 British banks could be required to bolster their capital reserves by billions of pounds as soon as next year, the Bank of England said this morning, as it revealed that two of the country’s largest lenders had narrowly avoided failing its latest round of stress tests. The Bank is actively considering raising the so-called countercyclical buffer, [...]
For the UK economy to thrive, we need our young people to be more in touch with business November 12, 2015 As news broke yesterday that Britain's unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since early 2008, we were slow to celebrate. Youth unemployment persists at three times the average national rate even though there are 700,000 unfilled vacancies. In a separate piece of research, the British Chambers of Commerce revealed that 69 per cent [...]
Tube, train, bus and taxi strikes: London is worse than Paris for industrial action in 2015 September 29, 2015 If it seems like there's been a summer of strikes across London's transport this year, you're not half wrong – there's been more disruption to Londoners' travel from action this year than even the commonly strike-plagued Paris. The capital has (so far) experienced an entire week's worth of chaos, while over in Paris, just five [...]
City boss wants MPs as interns so they can deal with the paperwork September 15, 2015 Property group Panther Securities issued its interim results yesterday and, rather than praising the firm’s nearly £4m profit for the first half of the year, chairman Andrew Perloff took the opportunity to bemoan the unnecessary amounts of paperwork needed for his teenage daughter to sign her summer job contract (but he needed to write on [...]
For Santander, changing banking is as easy as 123 October 7, 2015 Santander’s recovery in the past couple of years has been one of the most successful brand building exercises of recent times. The latest available official figures for bank account switching show that it is expanding is customer base more rapidly than any other current account provider. YouGov is to publish a white paper [...]