FTSE 100 giants Rolls-Royce and Shell lead City market rally July 31, 2025 A fleet of corporate news helped the FTSE 100 edge up in early trading on Thursday with a number of rallies from the index’s heavyweights. Positive updates from Rolls-Royce and Rentokil helped London’s flagship stock market rise 0.5 per cent to 9.182.34 as markets opened. Rentokil topped the risers with a 11 per cent surge [...]
London’s offices ‘regain footing’ as deals tick up and prime rents surge July 31, 2025 Activity in London’s office market has seen a boost, driven by a strong second quarter marked by a number of high-profile leasings. Office take-up in the first half of 2025 reached 4.8m sq ft, up four per cent on the long term average, according to data from Savills. Second-quarter leasings were up 18 per cent [...]
Bleak ‘hospitality zones’ will make London nightlife even worse July 31, 2025 Proposed ‘hospitality zones’ for alfresco dining are little more than top-down attempts at vibrancy which will move nightlife away from where it’s already thriving into sterile Boxpark clones, says Tom Jones It is a Saturday night. Your exhaustion from a week of open-plan purgatory – the train delays, the Slack pings, the passive-aggressive tone of [...]
Industry chief warns fresh tax grab will push ‘loved’ retailers to the wall July 31, 2025 More of Britain’s “well-loved” retailers will go to the wall if the government unleashes another round of tax hikes on businesses in the Autumn, the boss of the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has warned, as fresh data from the body found that nearly nine in 10 high street bosses are struggling with the tax burden. [...]
Bank of England officials set to clash on interest rates July 30, 2025 Bank of England policymakers are set to spar on whether to hold or cut interest rates as City analysts are expecting a three-way split in the final vote. The Bank saw a 6-3 vote in favour of holding interest rates at 4.25 per cent in June while the meeting before in May saw four dissenting [...]
SME Construction data casts doubt on UK ability to hit 1.5 million homes July 29, 2025 The number of struggling construction firms has risen further despite heavy pressure on the sector to deliver hundreds of thousands of new homes. The number of firms in critical distress – a measure of firms nearing bankruptcy – rose 15.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2025, according to Begbies Traynor, while the number [...]
JP Morgan: Rachel Reeves could slash headroom to avoid large tax rises July 29, 2025 Chancellor Rachel Reeves is poised to reduce her wafer-thin £9.9bn headroom even further at the Autumn Budget to avoid making sweeping tax rises, analysts at one of the world’s biggest banks have predicted. Leading think tanks and City analysts have warned that Rachel Reeves will look to raise as much as £30bn in taxes later [...]
Halfords: Departing CEO gets golden goodbye July 29, 2025 The departing chief executive of Halfords saw his pay more than double as the company clocked a statutory £30m loss in the year before he stepped down. Graham Stapleton took home a pay packet of £1.5m for the firm’s latest financial year, up from the £650,440 he received in the prior 12 months. Stapleton had [...]
UK cider set to benefit from sweetest apple crop ‘in recent memory’ July 29, 2025 Multiple heatwaves in the UK have boosted expected yields from the UK’s orchards, with this year’s cider crop to be bigger and better than in recent years. The UK’s driest and hottest spring for over a century has concentrated the sugar content of apples, making them smaller but sweeter. “Last year was a perfect storm [...]
AI disruption rocks professional services jobs market fuelling anxiety among Gen-Z July 29, 2025 The UK jobs market is facing significant turmoil, with rising unemployment figures and layoffs, a trend seen in the professional services sector