Marketing Newscast

(Edited 29 November 2024)

Louise Haigh has resigned as Secretary of State for Transport after admitting to Sky News that she made a false report to police officers that her work mobile phone had been stolen in 2013, an offence to which she pleaded guilty in 2014, six months before becoming an MP. Haigh, who was previously a special constable in the Metropolitan Police and shadow policing minister under former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, told Sky she was mugged while on a night out in 2013, and originally included the phone in the list of items she believed were stolen. However, when the device was later switched on, an act which "triggered police attention," Sky said, she was called in for further questioning. "Some time later, I discovered that the handset in question was still in my house. I should have immediately informed my employer and not doing so straight away was a mistake," she told the newscaster. However, three separate sources told Sky they believed she made the false report to benefit personally. Two sources claimed she wanted a more modern work handset that was being rolled out to her colleague. Haigh had been working as a public policy manager at Aviva at the time but lost her job at the insurance firm because of the incident. Haigh said the shadow cabinet had been informed of the conviction - now classified as ‘spent’ - when she became a frontbencher. She said in her resignation letter to the Prime Minister that her appointment as the UK’s “youngest ever” female Cabinet member “remains one of the proudest achievements of my life”. “I am sorry to leave under these circumstances, but I take pride in what we have done,” she added. In a separate statement, Haigh said last night she had made a "genuine mistake from which I did not make any gain".

The economy is now Brits’ major concern after Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s record tax-raising Budget, according to a new poll from Ipsos, which surveyed 1,008 people between 6-12^th November. 51% of Labour supporters said it was their primary concern, the highest among all party affiliations. Overall, 39% listed the country’s finances as their primary concern, meaning it overtook immigration, which was listed as a worry by 33% of respondents.

Retail footfall fell again in November, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has found. Footfall was also down 4.5% on the same month last year. BRC CEO Helen Dickinson said: “Footfall took a disappointing tumble in November, as a later-than-usual Black Friday and low consumer confidence meant customers were hesitant to hit the shops”. “New costs bearing down on retailers in 2025, including from rises in employer National Insurance contributions, National Living Wage, and packaging taxes, means investment in jobs, stores, and high streets will likely be curtailed,” she added, warning that: “If the Government wishes to bolster footfall and the growth and investment that would come with it, it must help retailers mitigate the impact of the £7bn additional costs they face from next year.”

Independent high street shops could face the worst of Rachel Reeves’ tax raid because of the hike in employers’ National Insurance Contributions (NICs), analysis by small business platform Enterprise Nation has concluded. Enterprise Nation modelled the impact of the 1.2% hike in employers’ NICs across four different “typical” business scenarios and found a busy high street cafe with up to 26 staff members at a “lower paid rate” would face a 100% surge in its NICs cost. A small e-commerce business with fewer employees, albeit at a higher-paid rate, would face an increase of far less, around 17%.

Entrepreneur Luke Johnson, the chairman of Gail’s bakery chain and the former Pizza Express owner, has warned MPs that some of his companies “might not survive” next year. He told the Employment Rights Bill committee yesterday that insolvency specialists were “rubbing their hands” at the prospect of a bumper year of company collapses. “Even if we don’t suffer a technical recession next year, it’s odds on there will be a serious slow down,” he said. An overhaul of workers’ rights launched by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is set to cost employers £4.5bn, according to the Government’s own impact assessment, and Johnson warned the MPs on the committee that the measures could overwhelm small businesses. “The idea that companies that can barely afford any form of HR could stomach a big new bill of 150 pages in 28 measures – they won’t even have time to read it,” he said, adding that: “You never know, until you get a big tribunal, what the real cost is.” He also cautioned the Bill could impact job creation, and that its timing, given the significant tax increases on businesses pushed through in last month’s Budget, was “beyond belief”. “Jobs don’t just fall from the sky – they appear because companies are created by risk takers. Jobs only exist because they are helping that business to progress. If you crush the private sector, you crush jobs. Without jobs, you don’t have civilization,” he said. Asked by the Telegraph which of his businesses he thought might not survive a Labour Government, Johnson did not specify. He invests in various enterprises and sits on the board of several companies, including Brompton bicycles and Revolution Bars. “I hope they will all prosper, but the Budget and tough general conditions and legacy issues post-lockdowns mean next year will be difficult all round,” he told the newspaper.

Typhoo Tea has gone into administration. The brand, one of Britain's oldest and most iconic, founded in 1903, has appointed advisory firm Kroll to oversee the administration process and hopefully find a buyer to save the firm from collapse. Among those said to be interested is AIM-traded Supreme, a distributor of batteries and vape products which is looking to diversify into new markets. Typhoo’s fortunes have waned for a number of reasons: tea drinking is in decline in the UK; traditional brands are losing market share to supermarket own brands; and the firm suffered £24.1m hit in one-off costs after its Moreton factory in the Wirral was broken into, occupied, and vandalised so extensively for several days during August 2023 that the site was inaccessible. Stock was rendered unusable and a planned sale of the site was delayed. The firm’s debts soared to £73m by the end of September 2023, with majority owner Zetland Capital facing mounting pressure since acquiring the firm in 2021.

A total of 45 firms listed on the London Stock Exchange this year have been approached, agreed to or completed acquisitions worth £52bn in value, according to data provided to City AM by investment bank Peel Hunt. Charles Hall, head of research at Peel Hunt, said the level of takeover activity among FTSE 350 businesses in particular was “unprecedented”, with 21 bids this year. The largest of these is the planned £5.7bn merger of British packaging firm DS Smith and US rival International Paper, followed by investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown’s £5.4bn sale to a group of private equity buyers. Other multibillion-pound deals include US private equity firm Thoma Bravo’s £4.3bn takeover of cybersecurity company Darktrace, Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s planned £3.6bn swoop for Royal Mail owner IDS, and Nationwide’s £2.8bn purchase of Virgin Money. “The scale of activity and level of premium show how many good quality companies there are in the UK as well as how undervalued they are,” Hall said. “This further reinforces the need for fundamental reform to stimulate investor demand in the UK market. If this doesn’t happen in the near future, there will undoubtedly be many more companies leaving the London market in 2025.”

The Telegraph says it understands that the Gambling Commission is preparing to settle a £200m claim for damages brought by media baron Richard Desmond over the running of the National Lottery. The UK’s gambling regulator has requested a so-called mediation meeting with Desmond’s business, Northern and Shell, to propose settling the legal claim out of court in the coming weeks, the newspaper claims. Desmond’s firm had sought to run the Lottery when its last contract with Camelot, which had run the National Lottery since its inception in 1994, came to an end. When the Gambling Commission gave the new licence to Czech operator Allwyn, Desmond launched a High Court legal challenge alleging the regulator failed to run a proper auction process and gave “unfair” and “favourable” treatment to Allwyn. Since then, Allwyn has botched an attempt to change technology providers, missing deadlines to enable to tech switchover intended to allow for the introduction of new games and double the lottery’s contributions to good causes from £17bn to £34bn by the end of Allwyn’s 10-year licence. Officials at the Gambling Commission are said to be concerned further delays could be seized upon by Desmond to support his claim that it was a mistake to award Allwyn the contract to run the National Lottery, hence the potential search for an out of court settlement, it is claimed.

The Coventry Building Society will acquire The Co-operative Bank in January, having been the green light to do so by regulators the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority. Both lenders will retain their own banking licences. The £780m deal was agreed in May, and will create a business with roughly £89bn in assets, around the same size as Britain’s sixth-biggest high street bank, Virgin Money.

B&Q-owner Kingfisher and Marks & Spencer have both expressed interest in buying up to 25 stores operated by Homebase following its collapse into administration this month, Sky News says.

The sale of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph has been deferred again. The sole remaining bidder, Dovid Efune, who publishes The New York Sun, has been given a fresh extension to secure the £550m in funding the deal to buy the newspapers from current owners RedBird IMI is believed to require. Having fought off other bidders, six weeks’ ago, Efune was offered a period of exclusivity to raise the funds which was supposed to end today. However, a number of investment businesses have pulled out of talks with Efune. Redbird has refused to give an end date for the new extension, the Telegraph says, raising fears that the process has effectively become open-ended. It is now almost 18 months since the newspaper group, then owned by the Barclay family, was seized by Lloyds Banking Group because of £1.2bn in unpaid debts owed by the Barclays. The sale to Redbird IMI, which is majority owned by Sheikh Mansour, UAE vice president, was then blocked by the former Conservative Government which ushered in new legislation to prevent foreign nationals owning British newspapers, hence the current sale process.

The Qataris state's first major investment in elite motorsport - the purchase of a roughly-30% stake in the Formula One team that will be rebranded under the Audi name from 2026 - will be announced ahead of this weekend's Qatar Grand Prix, Sky News reports.

Lord Bilimoria has stepped down as Chairman of the board of Cobra Beer, the company he launched in the UK when he was just a 19-year old student, having emigrated here from India.