Ker-ching! Children’s pocket money has reached its highest level for nine years, according to an annual survey that has been running since the 1980s.
Children now receive £6.55 per week from a parent or guardian on average, an increase of six per cent compared to last year, according to Halifax. But there’s a gender gap, even at this age. Parents gave boys 13 per cent more pocket money every week than girls in the past year with the gender gap growing from 2 per cent the year before.
Halifax’s survey, which involved more than 1,200 children and 575 parents, found boys between eight and 15 received an average of £6.93 a week, with girls getting £6.16. It means both sons and daughters have seen their pocket money reach the pre-credit crisis levels of 2007.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the survey also found the traditional dissatisfaction with the handout with about 40 per cent of children saying they should be given more. Tax Freedom DayAs latest figures reveal that UK consumer card spending outstripped cash for the first time in 2015, a quarter of UK consumers claim they’ve started avoiding shops that don’t take cards, while a third say they only use cash if absolutely necessary.
That’s according to research by Worldpay, which claims as many as 60,000 small and independent retailers across the UK are putting their futures on the line by making life difficult for customers who want to pay by card.
While nearly two-thirds of 24-34 year olds say they would prefer not to have to carry cash, Worldpay found one in ten small and independent retailers are still refusing to accept card payments, while a further 10 per cent impose a lower limit on non-cash payments.
Repossessions
The gap between home repossessions in the North and South has almost halved in the last year, according to research released by chartered surveyor, e.surv. In 2015, repossessions in the North fell to a rate of 2.1 per 1,000 households, compared with 1.4 per 1,000 in the South, according to e.surv’s analysis of court-ordered repossessions in England and Wales, broken down by postcode. This leaves a gap of 0.7 between the two regions for 2015.
A year earlier, the difference stood at 1.3 homes per 1,000, as the North saw a repossession rate of 4.1 per 1,000 households in 2014, while the South saw a rate of 2.8 during the same period.
BHS collapse
A business leader has accused the former owners of BHS of ‘lamentable failures’. Simon Walker, head of the Institute of Directors, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning that Sir Philip Green has a moral responsibility to the retailer’s staff.
It was announced yesterday that the department store will be wound down with the loss of up to 11,000 jobs after efforts to find a buyer failed. BHS, sold by Sir Philip last year for £1 to former racing driver Dominic Chappell, went into administration in April. Also on the Today programme was an interview with Lord Myners. He said that taxpayers will have to pick up the tab for BHS redundancy payments.‘You do have a responsibility as a steward to make sure that the company is in safe hands…Redundancy payments will have to come from the taxpayer, other pension funds are going to have to pick up the tab for the pension scheme, and innocent small suppliers to BHS could see their business collapse because they’re not being paid for the goods they’ve supplied, so I don’t think you can wash your hands of what happens to the company after you’ve sold it.’
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