Fighting forward: The Black Farmer’s Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones talks sausages, political incorrectness and willpower May 31, 2015 Being an entrepreneur is all about timing. You can have the best-laid plans in the world, a huge amount of skill, but it’s really about catching the zeitgeist.” This is Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones’s opening line to me. After a brief pause, he adds, “life is also all about timing”. This is something the founder of [...]
Number of first time buyers up by 45 per cent September 5, 2013 THE NUMBER of first time buyers has swelled as the housing market begins to rebound, with LSL Property Services suggesting a 45 per cent increase in the 12 months to July. There were 26,100 people buying homes for the first time in July, up by over 8,000 through the year, with LSL’s figures suggesting that [...]
Maximum excitement on the six nations with sporting index February 5, 2015 THE SIX Nations is a really competitive affair and makes for a great betting heat. Scotland and Italy’s wait for a first title in the new format looks certain to go on, so we are down to four teams who could take glory. Sporting Index traders can’t split England and Ireland on their Outright 60 [...]
UK property prices: House price growth still falling – but mortgage approvals are up April 9, 2015 Growth in house prices fell again in the three months to March, to 8.1 per cent, down from 8.5 per cent in January, research by Halifax suggested today. That puts growth at a "similar" rate to September 2014 – although it's now "significantly" below July's peak of 10.2 per cent, it added. Month on month, [...]
Green & Black’s founder Craig Sams on his plans to get us drinking real kola beans with Gusto Cola July 26, 2015 Back in the 1980s few people even knew that cocoa came from a pod grown on a tree. Absurd though that sounds, even supermarket buyers were unaware of cocoa’s provenance. As an experiment, Craig Sams, a legend in the macrobiotic diet community and founder of organic food company Whole Earth, decided to have some [...]
Miliband to tax mansions to fund new NHS splurge September 22, 2014 ED MILIBAND will today deliver a key pre-election speech at his party’s annual conference in Manchester, in which he is widely expected to announce a funding boost for the NHS. Miliband is thought to have found a way to pay for a budget increase for the health service as he seeks to position Labour as [...]
Car review: Don’t judge the Audi RS3 Sportback by its flashy logo June 29, 2015 Do you chuckle when you press your car’s accelerator to the floor? Do you have an exhaust that barks so loudly it startles passersby? Does your car cover ground so quickly that it’s just a blur to pedestrians? If you wish you could answer yes to these questions, then Audi’s new £40,000 RS3 could [...]
Stamp duty up over £900m in last 12 months June 19, 2014 THE ANNUAL total stamp duty bill has soared to £5.6bn in the year to March 2014, up by over £900m from £4.7bn for the previous year, as home buyers are increasingly being hit by the levy as house prices rise while stamp duty thresholds remain flat, according to research by Lloyds Bank. The increase means [...]
UK rental prices: Is it time to stop buying? August 3, 2014 House prices have been on a surge in the last 12 months and despite a recent slowing of the market many first time buyers are finding themselves priced out of the market. The ONS released figures on rental prices this week that make for interesting reading and imply that an answer to high house prices could be [...]
General election jitters? UK house prices fall off the boil in February March 5, 2015 The path to house price equilibrium is an undulating one. After a 1.9 per cent spike in January the average cost of a house fell by 0.3 per cent month-on-month in February, according to the latest data from Halifax. This put the price of the average home slightly lower at £192,372, with some analysts suspecting [...]