Published: 13 November 2023
By Suzanne Evans, Director, Political Insight
An anticipated Cabinet reshuffle by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak began at 08:38 this morning, when he sacked Home Secretary Suella Braverman. So where are we at the time of writing? Sunak’s first new appointment was to make the former Foreign Secretary, James Cleverley, Home Secretary, with the surprise appointment of the non-MP and former Prime Minister David Cameron his successor. It has also been confirmed that Jeremy Hunt stays on as Chancellor. Meanwhile, Schools Minister Nick Gibb and Health Ministers Will Quince and Neil O’Brien have resigned. Jesse Norman has also quit as Transport Minister.
Bosses at Sainsbury's, Boots, M&S and Aldi are among more than 50 business to have signed a letter calling for assaults on staff to be better recorded, the BBC reports, along with John Lewis, the Post Office, BT, Octopus and Ovo Energy. Esther McVey, former work and pensions secretary, is also among the signatories to the letter, which requests the policing minister to ensure assaults on service workers are recorded separately in police statistics. Meanwhile, new figures from the Co-op reveal that retail crime is worsening ahead of Christmas. The police are failing to show up in three out of four cases where shop workers have detained criminals who were looting from stores, the supermarket said, adding it has experienced almost 300,000 incidents of shoplifting, abuse, violence and anti-social behaviour this year across its 2,400 stores – up 43% year-on-year. This in turn is a marked a step-up from July, when cases show a 35% year-on-year rise, with 175,000 incidents recorded. The convenience store has also seen a rise in hate-related crime, including homophobic, racist and misogynistic abuse of workers. Paul Gerrard, Co-op’s director of public affairs, suggested that offenders are becoming emboldened because they know the police will not show up. “That’s actually worse than us not detaining them in the first place, because it means those people are going to leave stores saying we knew the police weren’t going to turn up, and they didn’t,” he said. Towards the end of last month, the police promised to attend more retail crime scenes and a group of 13 retailers, including John Lewis, Tesco and the Co-op, agreed to pay almost £800,000 over two years to fund a new partnership to tackle the problem. [1] A spokesman for the Home Office told the Daily Telegraph: “Shoplifting is a blight on our communities. It damages businesses, hurts our high streets and the Policing Minister has made clear that police should be taking a zero-tolerance approach.”
The number of whistleblower reports to HMRC rose from 106,920 in 2021/22 to 157,270 in 2022/23, a 47% rise, new research from international law firm RPC concludes. Adam Craggs, partner and head of RPC's tax disputes, financial crime and regulatory team, said the vast scale of fraud against the Government's Covid-19 assistance schemes is the likely driver of the jump. The National Audit Office estimates that at least £7.3bn was lost to fraudsters taking advantage of the business loan and furlough schemes and the Eat Out to Help Out initiative.
Landlords are selling up in significant numbers, continuing a trend that began in 2021, The Guardian reports, particularly in Scotland. As the property website Rightmove reports this morning that new seller asking prices dropped by 1.7% or £6,088 last month to an average of £362,143, data from Hamptons estate agent reveals that landlords have bought the fewest number of homes since 2010 – once the period of the first Covid lockdown is discounted from the data. The share of homes sold by landlords in Great Britain fell from 15.7% in 2022 to 14% so far this year. Investors have bought about 11.2% of all the homes put up for sale this year, compared with the 15.7% bought in 2015. Hamptons said individual landlords would have sold 294,300 more homes than they had bought since 2016, more than the total number of homes in either Manchester or Cornwall. Changes to way buy-to-let incomes are taxed, massively higher mortgage costs that have followed 14 consecutive interest rate rises, and changes to home emissions regulations have all played their part in weakening the attraction of buy to let as an investment, the newspaper says.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says 42% of university-educated workers outside the capital are stuck in jobs not requiring a degree, up from 31% since 1993. The IFS says a rise in better paid jobs has been concentrated in London, meaning that “graduates from other places need to move to reap the returns to their education”. For example, the IFS says, although employment in high-paid occupations has risen by 95% since 1993 on a national scale, this growth was 240% in inner London compared with only 41% in an area like Cheshire.
Ofcom has levied a fine of £5.6m against Royal Mail after the postal service failed to meet crucial delivery targets in its 2022/23 financial year. Only 73.7% of First Class mail and 90.7% of Second Calss mail was delivered on time.
Ikea’s parent company, Ingka Group has bought its second UK shopping mall, an empty Debenhams site in Brighton’s Churchill Square, for an estimated £145m. The new Ikea store is expected to open within two years. Three years ago, Ingka bought the Kings Mall in Hammersmith, west London. Ikea is also converting the former Topshop flagship store on London’s Oxford Circus into an outlet, all part of its aim to bring its offering to the High Street, as opposed to the more usual out-of-town shopping centres.
Sir Richard Branson is preparing a bid to break Eurostar’s monopoly on Channel Tunnel rail services, a Telegraph exclusive reveals, four years after his Virgin Trains business ended operations in the UK. Virgin Train’s former boss Phil Whittingham has been tasked with spearheading Branson’s challenge to Eurostar, sources said, now that the high-speed rail network in Europe is has opened access to companies not currently operating routes. Whittingham is said to have been in discussion with infrastructure officials along the prospective route, which currently runs from London to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. Virgin declined to comment.
The Sunday Times claimed yesterday that hundreds of jobs are at risk at Alstrom, the UK’s largest train building plant, following the Government’s decision to axe parts of the HS2 project. The French-owned firm is preparing a statutory consultation to cut approximately 600 jobs at its Derby factory, and is in talks with trade unions, the newspaper said. Alstrom employs 2,000 people on the site, and the factory was set to play a key role in building 54 high speed trains for HS2, under a partnership between Alstom and Japan’s Hitachi.
Asda owners Mohsin and Zuber Issa have signed a multimillion-pound deal with Tesla to launch ultra-fast charging outlets for electric vehicles (EVs) across EG Group, their petrol station empire, in the UK and Europe. They will carry the name “Evpoint,” and are said to be able to charge 80% of batteries from most EVs within around 20 minutes.
HSBC is to axe a dedicated customer phone line for Welsh speakers from 15th January, in favour of a system in which customers can request a call back in Welsh, which may take up to three days. Hywel Williams, the Plaid Cymru MP for Arfon, said staff at his local HSBC branch were able to address customers in Welsh or English, and he criticised the company, saying in a tweet: “It’s a disgrace that HSBC management don’t follow their workers’ exemplary good practice”. Liz Saville Roberts, the leader of the Plaid Cymru in the House of Commons, also said she had written to HSBC for an explanation. Several Welsh Assembly members have also denounced the move.
Majestic Wine is set to open around 50 store in the next 4-5 years, CEO John Colley says, telling the Telegraph that brick-and-mortar outlets will remain “sacrosanct” at the company while he is at the helm. Majestic has opened 15 new stores in the past four years since it was bought by US private equity firm Fortress.
Defence company Babcock International has signed a four-year £750m contract with the Ministry of Defence's (MOD) Submarine Delivery Agency (SDA). The contract will deliver the infrastructure required to support and sustain the UK's submarines "for decades to come", Babcock said.
The former NatWest Group CEO Alison Rose will not be getting £4.7m in share awards or £2.9m in bonuses, the bank confirmed on Friday, because of her role in the Nigel Farage debanking scandal. NatWest insisted in a statement that Rose had not been involved in any “misconduct,” but that “good leaver status was not applicable”. Consequently, she will receive only the contractual elements of her pay package, comprising her salary, fixed share allowances and a pension allowance of 10% of salary, totalling £1,748,142. A payment will also be paid towards her legal fees. Rose is on a 12-month notice period, having stepped down from her role in July, after providing misleading information to a BBC journalist about an internal decision to shut Farage's account at Coutts, NatWest's private bank. Last week, Farage threatened to sue the bank, saying on X, formerly Twitter, that he aimed to turn the case “into a class action as so many others have been wronged”.
Ofcom chair Michael Grade has told the Financial Times he thinks the Government should look again at how the BBC is funded. The licence fee is a “regressive tax”, he said, as he pays no more than a “single mum with three kids in a rented room.”
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