Labour willing to drop HS2 before 2015 September 23, 2013 Labour is considering dropping support for the High Speed 2 railway before the 2015 general election, City A.M. understands. Ed Balls used his speech to the Labour conference in Brighton to question whether HS2 – which would link London to the midlands and the north – was the best way of spending £50bn on transport [...]
UK spending on research drops behind China October 13, 2013 CHINA is spending six times more on the iterative development phase of innovation than the UK – $500m (£313m) a day – according to a report out today by innovation charity Nesta. The development phase of innovation refers to China’s ability to take existing knowledge to improve materials, products and services. “China now produces 13 [...]
Frack in the north, says Tory peer July 30, 2013 Conservative peer Lord Howell, the former energy secretary, has argued that “uninhabited and desolate” areas in the north east of England should be the venue for Britain’s controversial fracking efforts. “Certainly in part of the north east where there’s plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody’s residence, where we could conduct without any kind [...]
Shares for rights could lure talent to smaller firms September 1, 2013 AS NEW rules came into force yesterday allowing employees to waive certain workers’ rights in exchange for shares in their employer, lawyers have said the legislation could drive top talent towards the UK’s smaller companies. Under the new scheme, first proposed by chancellor George Osborne last year, employees can exchange certain rights – including statutory [...]
What the other papers say this morning – 25 July 2013 July 24, 2013 FINANCIAL TIMES Osborne accused of bowing to City The UK chancellor was yesterday accused of bowing to City pressure and watering down key provisions to make Britain’s banks safer, as the Banking Reform bill began its passage through the House of Lords. Lord Lawson, the Tory former chancellor, said the Treasury was guilty of an [...]
MPs deliver new blow to HS2 plan September 8, 2013 HIGH Speed 2 (HS2) lacks a “convincing strategic case”, according to a damning report released today by MPs that questions the entire justification for the £50bn railway. Margaret Hodge MP, chairman of the public accounts committee, said the department for transport had relied on “fragile numbers, out-of-date data and assumptions which do not reflect real [...]
Inside Track: All bets on Ross McEwan as field of candidates for RBS narrows July 24, 2013 AND then there was one. The search for Stephen Hester’s successor as chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) was never going to be straightforward – George Osborne put paid to that prospect by engineering the current boss’s removal last month. So it was hardly surprising that Mark McCombe, the former HSBC executive who [...]
Treasury veteran Sir Jon Cunliffe named Bank of England deputy governor July 26, 2013 Sir Jon Cunliffe has been appointed deputy governor of the Bank of England for Financial Stability. Cunliffe, 60, will replace Paul Tucker who is leaving in the Autumn to become a Harvard academic. Cunliffe has been the UK’s permanent representative to the EU since January 2012, covering policy issues like negotiations on the banking union [...]
Dovish Carney stuns markets July 7, 2013 EQUITY markets jumped yesterday after the Bank of England shocked investors by indicating that rates would stay at historic lows in the near future, despite recent signs that the British economy is starting to strengthen. At new Bank governor Mark Carney’s first meeting, the monetary policy committee (MPC) took the unusual step of releasing a [...]
Shale find fuels hope of UK boom June 30, 2013 THE UK’s shale gas industry was given a huge boost yesterday after one exploration firm massively lifted its estimate of the amount of untapped gas resources in the north of England. Initial studies by IGas – one of the few companies with permission to explore UK shale reserves – have shown that reserves in its [...]