The number of homes being bought and sold has fallen to its lowest since October July 21, 2017 Here’s another sign the UK’s housing market is beginning to suffer: the numbers of homes bought and sold have fallen to their lowest since October last year. On a seasonally adjusted basis, just under 97,000 homes were sold in June this year, down from 100,270 in May, figures from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) showed [...]
An intergenerational storm is brewing – politicians beware July 21, 2017 Two announcements were issued from Westminster this week that should strike fear into the hearts of anyone under 30. On the one hand, the Conservative government has brought forward the rise in the state pension age by seven years, increasing it to 68 by 2038. On the other, the Labour party dropped its commitment to [...]
Ukraine’s central bank pulls plug on PwC bank audit rights over PrivatBank’s balance sheet hole July 20, 2017 The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) announced today that it had pulled the plug on PwC’s domestic bank auditing rights, after it had failed to identify a $5bn (£3.9bn) balance-sheet hole at the country’s largest lender in previous audits. It comes after last December’s state takeover of PrivatBank by the NBU, in a move aimed [...]
Graphcore lands $30m from top AI experts Demis Hassabis from Deepmind, Uber’s Zoubin Ghahramani and more along with Atomico and others | City A.M. July 20, 2017 Some of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence are among fresh investors to plough $30m into a Bristol-based chip startup. Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis and Zoubin Ghahramani, Uber’s chief scientist and Cambridge university professor, are among new investors in Graphcore, which makes chips that can process machine learning faster and more efficiently. It [...]
London mayor Sadiq Khan says it’s a myth that the capital gets too much public spending on transport July 20, 2017 London’s mayor has hit back at claims that the capital receives a disproportionate amount of investment on transport schemes compared to the rest of the country. Today, Sadiq Khan released a new report by GLA Economics, arguing that previous regional comparisons haven’t considered the demand for transport and size of the economy in London, and [...]
Rapid vehicle-charging business Engenie aims to fire up its engines with £1m investment opportunity through SyndicateRoom July 20, 2017 The electric car market appears to be slowly revving up, as vehicle-charging business Engenie has announced it is raising £1m to expand across the UK. The four-year-old business is aiming to capitalise on recent moves from the likes of Volvo, which said all new models would be electric by 2019, and Emmanuel Macron’s government in [...]
Confidence in the City is high as job volumes rise by nearly a fifth after June’s General Election, according to headhunter Robert Walters July 20, 2017 Confidence in the City has bounced back after the snap General Election, with the number of jobs rising 17 per cent in June compared to the same time last year, according to the new Robert Walters City Job Index. The figures out today found that there were more roles available in the City than this [...]
Do the BBC’s pay figures reveal a sexism problem within the corporation? July 20, 2017 Do the figures released today about the highest paid presenters reveal a sexism problem within the BBC? YES – Sophie Walker, leader of the Women’s Equality Party. The staggering inequalities between men and women, and between white and BAME staff, revealed in BBC salaries demonstrates why pay transparency is so vital. The highest paid male [...]
W1A: BBC spends £33m on redundancies… staff headcount increases, wagebill rises above £1bn July 19, 2017 The BBC’s staff wagebill rose above £1bn last year as the corporation’s headcount swelled – despite £33m being spent on redundancy payments. The £1bn does not include the pay of all of the celebrities whose salaries were revealed for the first time yesterday, because many are not employed directly by the corporation. According to the [...]
Bank of England gives fintech startups direct access to the UK’s RTGS payments system in latest innovation move July 19, 2017 The Bank of England has opened up the UK’s payments systems – the “plumbing” which facilitates same day money transfers between banks – to organisations that are not banks, giving fintech startups another step up in their challenge to traditional banks. Tech companies will no longer have to go through selected banks and other providers [...]