Economy

The share price is in freefall. Sales are sliding at an accelerating rate as customers lose interest. The Chinese are moving in, and the brand is tarnished. When Elon Musk unveils the quarterly results for Tesla later today, he will need to convince his shareholders he has a plan to turn the company around. The only trouble is, right now there is not much sign Musk has a clue what to do. Musk is a brilliant entrepreneur. There is no question of that. But he has also spread himself too thinly Tesla’s results this week are expected to be its worst in years. Sales have already fallen by 8 per

Alongside the Prime Minister’s speech on welfare today, the Department for Work and Pensions quietly released updated forecasts. The numbers are stark: DWP expects there to be 3.96 million working-age claimants by 2028-29, a rise from 2.8 million in 2023-24. Meanwhile the number of working-age people receiving disability benefits is forecast to rise to 1.16 million – that’s 160,000 more claimants than was expected just six months ago. These are the numbers Rishi Sunak must grapple with as he sets out his welfare reform agenda.  Back in 2020, then chancellor Rishi Sunak had days to design the furlough scheme. Once lockdown became mandatory in spring 2020, it was a race

Labour, according to Rachel Reeves, is now the party of low taxes. She has said she won’t raise income tax, National Insurance, capital gains tax and corporation tax, as well as ruling out a wealth tax. But that still leaves a few options for jacking up taxes, as one of Reeves’ advisers, Sir Edward Troup has hinted. Last week, Troup, a former head of HMRC, was appointed by Reeves to look at efforts to reduce tax avoidance. This is a slightly ill-timed initiative given that Labour is simultaneously trying to play down the case of a particular taxpayer who stands accused of failing to pay capital gains tax on a

Interest rate cuts are beginning to look like a mirage: the closer we seem to get to them the more they seem to recede into the distance. Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey may have hinted this week that UK rates could soon be cut regardless of what happens in the United States, where strong jobs data is putting off the Federal Reserve from cutting rates, but this morning’s inflation data will not encourage an early cut. While the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) did fall in March, from 3.4 per cent to 3.2 per cent, this was less than the fall which was expected. The rise in road fuel prices

The economy grew by 0.1 per cent in February: not much to celebrate on its own but the small uptick in GDP all but confirms that the UK is leaving its recession in 2023. February wasn’t a booming month: services output only grew by 0.1 per cent, with transportation and storage services contributing the most to the sector’s growth (the former seeing its biggest boost since June 2020). The construction sector decreased by 1.9 per cent in volume terms, as the ‘fourth wettest February on record in England’ delayed projects. But a bounceback in production – the ‘largest contributor to the growth in GDP’ that month – provided some balance:

Can flexible working get the best out of what a ministerial press release calls ‘hardworking Brits’ – or is it a couch potato’s charter? As of 6 April, employees have had the right to ask for flexibility – including remote working and hours to suit – from their first day in a job; employers can reject unworkable requests, but are obliged to consider and consult. If you’re an optimist, you’ll think workers whose family lives are accommodated by enlightened employers will be happier, more loyal and more productive: ‘5 a.m. will be the new 9 a.m.,’ declares the HR Director, for parents who choose to ‘tackle work before attending to

What was that about Sadiq Khan’s expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) supposedly helping to reduce our dependence on cars and clean up the air? As well as the stick of charges of non-compliant vehicles, Khan has rolled out a very large carrot: £121 million of funds to help motorists ‘transition to greener alternatives’. That includes £49 million worth of scrappage grants for cars, at £2,000 a time, and £72 million worth of scrappage payments for vans and minibuses. According to City Hall in a press release last October, the whole package has resulted in 80,000 fewer motorists driving around London. So London’s streets are presumably now much less

By abolishing non-dom status, Jeremy Hunt was supposed to have clipped the wings of the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. Given that she had already earmarked the extra revenue – or what she hoped would be extra revenue – for free school breakfasts and a few other things, Hunt had suddenly punched a hole in her spending plans. But Reeves now claims to have filled that hole. She claims that she will raise an extra £2.6 billion – on top of what the Chancellor is expecting to raise – by closing a few loopholes. Non-doms will no longer be allowed to escape inheritance tax by placing wealth held overseas into trusts.

‘It would have been ideal not to have so  much poo in the water,’ said Oxford captain Leonard Jenkins after losing the university boat race to Cambridge last Saturday. Thames Water blamed high groundwater levels after weeks of rain for sewage discharges that are a less unpleasant alternative than ‘letting it back up into people’s homes’. But no one’s listening to the excuses – for the failing utility, that is, not the dark-blue crew. Thames Water is the pariah of post-privatisation capitalism, facing a charge sheet of poor service and financial opportunism of which rising tides of river filth are merely pungent symbols. The argument that water should never have

It has finally happened. In trading on Tuesday afternoon, the UK’s FTSE 100 index finally closed in on an all-time high. It hit 8,015 points, itching above the previous record closing level of 8,014 set in February 2023 – even if it was still a whisker below the intra-day trading record of 8,043, also from February last year. With stock markets rising around the world, at some point this week or perhaps next, the FTSE 100 will be setting fresh records daily. We may even be treated to one of those self-congratulatory tweets the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, specialises in. The trouble is, there is nothing to celebrate. In reality,

The thing about having three prominent house prices indices, all of which publish monthly figures, is that they are forever telling conflicting stories. Indeed, today’s Nationwide index, itself, nods in two different directions: prices were down 0.2 per cent in March, but the annual gain in prices was up from 1.2 per cent in February to 1.6 per cent in March. So is the housing market up or down? The first thing to note is that the Nationwide index is seasonally-adjusted – a process which is always at risk of giving a perverse outcome because it assumes that the same pattern of housing market activity will be repeated every year.

Given that a fair proportion of the UK public seem to want Martin Lewis to be prime minister, the government might well hesitate to dismiss the Money Saving Expert’s latest grumble: that Ofgem’s cap on standing charges is to be jacked up from today – from 53 pence to 60 pence per day in the case of electricity and from 29 pence to 31 pence in the case of gas. This rise comes in spite of the sharp fall in Ofgem’s energy price cap, which should see average annual dual fuel bills fall from £1928 to £1690. Lewis is not the least bit pleased, tweeting that standing charges are ‘an

Members of Labour’s frontbench have recently fallen over themselves to acclaim Margaret Thatcher. Hot on the heels of Rachel Reeves feting the Iron Lady’s determination to reverse Britain’s decline, David Lammy lauded the woman who defeated his party three times as a ‘visionary leader’. But like Mark Antony’s attitude to Julius Caesar, Reeves and Lammy come to bury Thatcher rather than to praise her. This appropriation of a Conservative icon like Thatcher is highly mischievous Labour’s shadow ministers invoke the ‘Iron Lady’ because they know a certain kind of voter, one Labour needs to help it win power, still goes all of a quiver at the mere mention of her

On Monday, the UK welfare state will expand to cover 15 hours of free childcare for working parents with two-year-olds. In September, this will be extended to infants of nine months or more. Next year, cover doubles to 30 hours. The total cost: £5.3 billion a year. It’s the ‘largest ever expansion of childcare in England’s history,’ says Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary. This Easter weekend we see the bizarre spectacle of Tories attacking Labour from the left What is conservative about this? Nothing, of course. It pushes up costs and taxes. But the idea, at the time, was to to do this before Labour proposed it. To shoot Labour’s fox.