Natwest has beaten profit expectations during the first three months of this year. NatWest Group, which includes Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank, recorded a pretax profit of £1.8bn in the three months ending 31 March. The total comes in ahead of analysts’ expectations of £1.6bn for the quarter and ahead of the £1.2bn during […]
A lack of flexible job opportunities is keeping over 50s out of the workforce and preventing retirees from returning to employment according to a survey. Insurance giant Zurich UK found nearly one in five UK adults over 50 were deterred from applying for new jobs because of a lack of flexible working opportunities.
Britain is poised to dodge a recession this year, but inflation will not return to the Bank of England’s two per cent target until the end of next year, new forecasts out last night revealed. The fresh projections from consultancy PwC add to the growing body of organisations who have canned their prediction that the […]
Wikipedia will not comply with any age checks required under the Online Safety Bill, its foundation says. Rebecca MacKinnon, of the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the website, says it would “violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors”. A senior figure in Wikimedia UK fears the site could be blocked as a […]
The UK government’s pledges on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from farming and land use fall short of promises made in its net zero strategy, analysis has found. Using figures from the government’s carbon budget delivery plan, analysts from WWF found that the total projected emissions reductions from now until 2037 for agriculture and land use […]
The number of cars built in the first three months of the year rose by 6 per cent, but the overall volume of vehicles produced remains lower than before the pandemic. Production totalled 219,887, according to figures published by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. The trade group said that the global shortage of […]
Business confidence reached its highest level since May last year as bosses become more optimistic about the wider economy, a new survey has found. Confidence reached 33 per cent on the monthly index this month, up from 32 per cent in March, the latest monthly sentiment index by Lloyds Bank showed. The survey of businesses […]
Ministers are to dramatically scale back the number of EU laws to be scrapped by the end of the year as part of Rishi Sunak’s bonfire of Brussels rules and regulations. In a concession to opponents of the Retained EU Law Bill, Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, is to publish a list of 800 laws […]
The bank holiday for the King’s Coronation promises to be a bumper weekend for the UK hospitality industry. New research from SevenRooms reports that the Coronation will create an additional £2.6 billion for the hospitality industry through consumer spending in restaurants, pubs and bars across the UK, with an average spend of £88.51 per head. […]
Netflix has spent $6bn (£4.8bn) making TV shows and films in the UK since 2020, $2bn more than originally planned, as the streaming giant doubled down on must-watch content amid a global slowdown in new subscribers. In a rare public announcement on content-spend levels, Netflix has said that it had spent on average almost $1.5bn […]