Coronavirus: First Group receives £300m from Bank of England April 24, 2020 Transport operator First Group today announced it had received £300m from the Bank of England to help deal with the financial damage of the coronavirus pandemic. First is currently running its bus services at 40 per cent of normal capacity, although passenger numbers have dropped 90 per cent, the firm said. The company’s rail franchises [...]
UK retail sales ‘obliterated’ in record fall over coronavirus April 24, 2020 UK retail sales plunged by their biggest fall on record in March, official data showed today as retailers counted the cost of the coronavirus lockdown. While food sales surged, overall UK retail sales plummeted 5.1 per cent last month compared to February, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). That was much bigger than [...]
Has the black swan left us with white elephants? April 23, 2020 The coronavirus crept up on us, in some ways. It began with a single illness in China in mid-November 2019, a 55-year-old in Hubei province, some records suggest, and it wasn’t until January this year that it became clear that there was an epidemic of this new respiratory disease in the city of Wuhan. In [...]
Coronavirus: UK government borrowing could top £300bn, says think tank April 21, 2020 UK government borrowing could hit £300bn this year as tax receipts collapse and the Treasury pumps money into the economy to tackle the fallout from coronavirus, according to a new report. The £300bn figure, produced today by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank, would be by far the biggest budget deficit since World [...]
Coronavirus: Here comes the startup chancellor April 20, 2020 Startups are the economy’s ‘department for the future.’ Their job is to future-proof all the other sectors – from retail and banking through ecommerce to public services. They are vital to the UK’s post-Brexit, post-Covid-19 future. They are also among its most vulnerable. Look up ‘start-up’ in the Cambridge Dictionary and the first example of [...]
Coronavirus hits hospitality: Loan scheme leaves restaurants high and dry April 19, 2020 Ranald MacDonald is Managing Director of Boisdale’s Restaurants In newspapers, so I’m told, a cracking story is known as a “marmalade dropper,” so named because it stops you – and indeed your toast – in your tracks. And that’s exactly what Rishi Sunak’s announcement of a £330bn rescue package for British business to get through [...]
Coronavirus: The economy is in trouble, and there seems no plan to fix it April 17, 2020 As a rule, it is always helpful to question the usefulness of government plans—often as they are late, over-budget, over-promised and under-delivered. But when the alternative is an empty void and the government promising no light at all to what will be possible, never mind when, just an inkling of a suggestion that someone is [...]
Coronavirus: Could crisis be a tipping point for compliance and ‘RegTech’? April 17, 2020 We are living in unprecedented times. Due to the human disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, a financial downturn is upon us. Against this difficult backdrop, it is my belief that ‘Regtech’, regulatory technology, is very well positioned to weather the storm. Regtech does what it says on the tin: it uses new technology, often [...]
Demand for IT workers soars during coronavirus lockdown April 17, 2020 The number of advertised jobs in the IT and logistics sectors soared last month as businesses adapt to the coronavirus lockdown, new data has revealed. The logistics sector saw the biggest increase in available roles in March while demand for staff in IT and tech remained strong, according to figures from Totaljobs and the British [...]
HS2 construction work set to begin despite coronavirus lockdown April 15, 2020 Construction work on controversial rail project HS2 has been given the green light to begin despite the current coronavirus lockdown restrictions. The high speed rail link was approved by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in February after uncertainty about whether it would go ahead at all. Work on the four work packages, which involve many of [...]