Ex-Stobart boss back at the controls October 27, 2014 A NEW investment vehicle led by ex-Stobart boss Avril Palmer-Baunack and backed by blue chip investors braved choppy markets yesterday to announce a float of the business. Haversham, a specialist vehicle set up by executive chairman Palmer-Baunack and investment firm Marwyn, said investors from Invesco, Artemis, Aviva and Schroders will support the share placing, which [...]
Slum finance: We can build a new asset class by housing the desperately poor November 13, 2014 THE LATEST forecasts for global population growth continue to surprise. The number of people on our planet is thought likely to reach 11bn, or even 12bn, by the end of the century. Africa’s population is set to quadruple to 4bn. There are huge reasons for optimism, not least because world hunger has continued to fall [...]
Stepping outside: Exterion Media CEO Shaun Gregory on the future of out-of-home advertising December 21, 2014 You've almost certainly seen an Exterion-owned ad site today – dozens, actually. They’re smattered all over the inside of London’s Tube stations: up and down the escalators, on platforms, inside the carriages, as well as on the sides of the capital’s buses. Social media and content marketing have predictably drawn the bulk of column inches [...]
Quotas on immigration would be a disaster for London’s tech startups November 12, 2014 Political debates over the benefits and drawbacks of immigration will no doubt rage on for years to come. But while the opposing sides pick apart the evidence over the impact of migrants on the public purse, one thing is clear: London’s tech ecosystem faces a very significant skills shortage. Government should be doing all it [...]
TheTrainline.com boss Clare Gilmartin “delighted” as US private equity giant KKR snaps up rail ticket seller January 22, 2015 US private equity player KKR yesterday announced its acquisition of TheTrainline.com, the UK’s leading online platform for selling rail tickets, from buyout rival Exponent for an undisclosed sum. TheTrainline.com is the most downloaded travel app in the UK and ranks fifth by gross transaction value in the UK’s e-commerce sector. The company is licensed to [...]
Which London street is the most expensive to live on? Belgravia beats Kensington and Chelsea December 12, 2014 Grosvenor Crescent, near Buckingham Palace, has been named London's most expensive street to live on, according to new research by Lloyds Bank. Home buyers who want to live in one of the prestigious crescent's white Georgian townhouses will, on average, have to shell out a whopping £16.9m. It's located in high-end Belgravia, one of the wealthiest [...]
As National Grid warns of a winter electricity capacity squeeze, is UK energy policy to blame? October 28, 2014 Matthew Sinclair, an economist and author of Let Them Eat Carbon, says Yes. The UK’s energy sector used to do quite a good job of delivering affordable and reliable energy. Politicians then made a number of interventions which increased costs and reduced reliability. First came obstacles to the construction of new coal capacity, then the [...]
Entrepreneurs’ relief: Unnecessary fiddling with this vital policy will damage growth February 1, 2015 Given that they drive our economy’s growth, it’s vital that entrepreneurs are rewarded for their efforts – especially since they take on so many risks to succeed. Thankfully, since 2008, there has been a tax relief that does precisely this. Entrepreneurs’ relief enables business owners to pay a lower rate of capital gains tax when [...]
Berkeley reports another stonking set of profits December 5, 2014 The figures Housebuilding giant Berkeley Group reported this morning that profits before tax leaped 79.9 per cent to £305m in the six months to the end of October. Revenue also rose, to a touch over £1bn, a jump of 24.5 per cent, while earnings before share increased 78.6 per cent to 178.6p. Why it's interesting [...]
Unleash the potential of small developers to help resolve the housing crisis September 30, 2014 JUST as with small business lending, the house-building market in Britain is deeply dysfunctional. Development is being suffocated, helping to inflate house prices and stoke the red-hot rental market. In some parts of the country, the situation is particularly grim. In the East Midlands, housing starts are barely at a third of their peak levels [...]