Money

Are chief executives overpaid? The High Pay Centre thinks so. Every January, it releases data showing the huge inequality between top UK CEOs and average workers. The results are startling: ‘Bosses of Britain’s biggest companies will have made more money in 2024 by lunchtime on Thursday than the typical worker will all year,’ according to the BBC, which wrote up the story showing that top bosses’ average reward amounts to £3.81 million a year. But is this disparity with the £34,963 annual median wage for full-time workers really a surprise? The truth is that this pay gap is an obvious feature of a free market where top pay in business

Labour appeared stumped when, earlier this year, the government announced it would be drastically increasing its ‘free’ childcare provision. Given it was a policy that shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson was rumoured to be considering, her party would now need to find a way to outdo itself. Now, we have a clearer idea what its ‘signature offer’ to voters might entail. At present, all parents of pre-school children over the age of three are entitled to 15 ‘free’ hours with registered providers. From April 2024, this will expand to all over-twos, and from September, to all children over nine months (the point at which Statutory Maternity Pay ends). If the rollout continues

The news that Tim Martin, the founder of JD Wetherspoon, has been given a knighthood in the New Year Honours list caused predictable outrage among the perpetually outraged. The gong was awarded for Sir Tim’s ‘services to hospitality and culture’, but the usual crybabies on social media asked whether it was really because he supported Brexit. The real question is why did it take so long? The first Wetherspoons opened in 1979 (named after a teacher who told him that he would never amount to anything). There are now more than 800 of them. His services to hospitality and culture are indisputable, but Wetherspoons is more than a successful business.

Finally it seems to be dawning on many Conservative MPs that abolishing – or seriously cutting – inheritance tax at the same time as jacking up income tax for millions of low earners is not a great way to tackle a strong Labour lead in the polls. Several backbenchers have written to the Prime Minister in response to reports that he is considering taking the axe to inheritance tax in the Budget on 6 March. They have suggested that the government should be cutting income tax instead, or at least raising the thresholds which have been frozen until 2028. At a time of elevated inflation, that is dragging millions more into

A few weeks ago, I chaired a debate in Westminster about the falling birth rate and its implications. It was organised by the Centre for Social Justice, which I’ve long been proudly involved with. Miriam Cates, a Tory MP, was on the panel as was Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP. But when I arrived, Duffield had pulled out: she had taken so much abuse and threats from those furious that she would attend this debate that she felt she could not continue. The debate, quite plainly, is one many people would rather never took place and I look at it in my Daily Telegraph column today. While populists have embraced this argument,

Anyone for more tax cuts in the spring budget? You might as well hand out free beer. For many Conservatives, tax cuts provide the last tiny chink of light before the door closes on their electoral prospects for good. This month’s government borrowing figures might just provide some encouragement, too. Net borrowing in November was £0.9 billion lower than it was in November 2022. The great bulge in the deficit which came with Covid seems finally to be subsiding. With inflation falling sharply, too, the outlook for the public finances begins to look a little brighter. The UK government has an unusually large slice of its debt in index-linked debt,

Covid provided a revelation of the vulnerabilities of the global supply chain, but now war in Yemen has provided another. Attacks on shipping by Iranian-backed Houthis has reminded the world of how much trade is reliant on free passage through the Bab-al-Mandeb Strait, an 18-mile wide waterway at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. If shipping cannot get through that then it struggles to get through the Suez Canal. In the past month, 15 ships have been attacked in the strait with missiles and drones, and now shipping lines have had enough. They are instead routing their container vessels an extra 3,000 miles around the Cape of Good Hope. That

The Bank of England has held interest rates at 5.25 per cent for the third consecutive time. This was the expected outcome of the Monetary Policy Committee’s latest vote, but it wasn’t unanimous. There were six MPC votes to hold rates but three to raise it to 5.5 per cent. No one voted to cut. This speaks to the biggest challenge the Bank faces right now: how to balance getting the inflation rate back to target without tipping the economy into recession. But markets expect the next movement to be downwards – so much so that mortgage rates are already falling in anticipation. The MPC today urges markets not to get ahead of themselves

So, a deal has been reached. The world has agreed on what Cop 28 president Sultan al-Jaber has called a ‘robust action to keep 1.5 Celsius in reach’. The world is to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. And meanwhile, back in the real world? If the world really had just made a meaningful commitment to end the use of fossil fuels, you might have expected shares in oil companies to have crashed this morning. But have they heck. Shell, BP, all are unmoved. It is expansionary business as usual. The UAE has invested $150 billion (£120 billion) to increase oil production by half to five million barrels a day by 2027. In the

The jobs market appears to be slowing down, but can we trust the figures? Vacancies have fallen for the longest continuous period on record, according to data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). But there are still just under 950,000 jobs on offer which is well above the pre-lockdown norm. Meanwhile, despite British workers receiving real-terms pay rises in the three months to October, wage growth seems to have peaked. This will please Bank of England rate setters who feared that spiralling wage demands could worsen inflation. Average weekly earnings (including bonuses) fell slightly to 7.2 per cent on the year, down from 8 per cent. Because of