Owning houses and cars can sometimes seem like throwing money into a black hole. And there’s little respite – new research has found that car insurance premiums rose by an average of 12 per cent over the past year.
MoneySuperMarket, the price comparison site, looked at year-on-year quarterly car insurance premiums to identify overall and regional price fluctuations. The average premium paid in the first quarter of 2016 was £478, up from £428 in the same period in 2015 – a stinging £50 hike.
Drivers in Tonbridge saw premiums rise by almost a quarter (23 per cent – or £75). Drivers in Dartford, Worcester and Wolverhampton also experienced hefty year-on-year increases, with prices ballooning by a fifth. Kevin Pratt, consumer affairs expert at MoneySuperMarket, said: ‘Until 2014, British motorists benefited from a very competitive car insurance market, with prices broadly dropping year on year. However, since then it’s been a bleaker picture.’
More bad news on the mortgage front as the latest analysis by Moneyfacts.co.uk reveals that borrowing fees are rising. Although mortgage rates have become increasingly competitive in recent years, the last six months have seen a particularly sharp rise in the average mortgage fee, which is now £967, up from £927. And the average fixed mortgage fee has also gone up over six months to reach a two-year high of £975.
The Telegraph reports that the head of the UK’s Pensions Regulator has admitted in front of MPs that the authority was concerned about BHS four years ago but decided the retailer did not meet the risk thresholds to launch an investigation. The revelation was made yesterday during a joint cross-party inquiry into the collapse of the 88-year-old retailer with a £571 million pension deficit. Lesley Titcomb, chief executive of the Pensions Regulator, said that the authority raised concerns over BHS’s recovery plan in 2012 when the retailer adopted a 23-year recovery plan. Also in the paper is a story that gazumping could be banned by the Government, as it has emerged that officials have held private meetings with industry to discuss bringing forward the point at which house sales become legal, in line with Scotland. The radical move would prevent millions of British housing sales falling through as 18 per cent, or around 200,000 transactions collapse each year. A major reason is a plague of buyers outbidding others who have already put down an offer, a practice commonly known as ‘gazumping. According to Thisismoney.co.uk, challenger banks are offering a raft of best buy savings deals when they first launch only to fade away once they have attracted enough cash from savers. Research shows that new small banks that have had a banking licence for under a year have 60 best buy savings rates currently on offer in Britain. But data from KPMG and Savings Champion shows how this steadily falls the longer a challenger bank has been operating. A flurry of figures from the housing market to the high street has added to evidence of a ‘go-slow’ when it comes to the British economy. A report from the British Retail Consortium reveals shop sales stalled for the second month in a row. Most notably, online retail sales have seen the slowest growth in three years. Helen Dickinson from the British Retail Consortium told the Today programme that more and more of us are shopping through physical stores and online. She said: ‘The line between what is offline and online has become more blurred than it was before. It almost becomes less relevant in terms of how you actually measure the difference between the two – they all become part of our interaction, our shopping experience.’Meanwhile, the Panama Papers affair has widened, with a huge database of documents relating to more than 200,000 offshore accounts posted online. The database became accessible yesterday at offshoreleaks.icij.org. The Panama Papers have shown how some wealthy people use offshore firms to evade tax and avoid sanctions. The papers belonged to Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca and were leaked by a source simply known as ‘John Doe’. The company denies any wrongdoing.
Finally….British workers on an average salary would need to toil away for 348,063 years to earn the fortune of their wealthiest compatriot, a new study suggests. While the gulf between the world’s wealthiest 1 per cent and the rest of us is widening, the time it would take for average earners to earn a billionaire’s fortune varies significantly depending on the country, business products and services marketplace Expert Market said.
In Brazil, where the average worker’s wage is £1.95 an hour, it would take a worker there more than five million years to reach the £19 billion fortune of Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann. Based on a 40-hour week on an average hourly wage of just over £15, the average Briton would need to work for nearly 350,000 years to rake in the wealth of the billionaire Indian-born British siblings Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja, who are worth around £10 billion.
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