Business

The chancellor has agreed to address the CBI’s first public event since the business lobbying group was plunged into crisis earlier this year. Sky News has learnt that Jeremy Hunt will be among the keynote speakers at the CBI’s annual conference in London next week, just seven months after declaring that there was “no point”

Roughly 500 jobs are to go at pharma giant Pfizer’s Kent site. The roles are to be cut as Pfizer is discontinuing its pharmaceutical sciences small molecule (PSSM) operations at Sandwich in Kent, the company confirmed to Sky News. It’s part of a company-wide cost-cutting program, Pfizer said. Affected staff were notified on Tuesday morning

House prices have grown in 70 local authorities across Britain despite an overall UK-wide fall, according to the latest analysis from a subsidiary of the UK’s largest mortgage lender. The area with the largest increase was Powys in Wales, which is Wales’s largest and least densely populated county, containing most of Bannau Brycheiniog, formerly known

Royal Mail has been fined £5.6m by the industry regulator for missing targets covering both first and second-class deliveries. Ofcom said that for the 2022-23 financial year – a time when it was hit by 18 days of strikes by frontline workers – Royal Mail’s reported performance results showed that it had only delivered 73.7%

An infrastructure investor owned by Schroders, the fund management behemoth, is in pole position to buy a solar farms operator that received hundreds of millions of pounds from a scandal-hit local authority. Sky News understands that Schroders Greencoat has become the leading contender to acquire Toucan Energy, which collapsed into administration exactly a year ago.

Nigel Farage will next week begin a formal legal fight with NatWest Group and its former boss as he seeks millions of pounds in damages over the debanking scandal which escalated into a crisis for the state-backed lender. Sky News has learnt that Mr Farage, the former UKIP leader, has instructed London-based Grosvenor Law to

Ian King speaks to the chief economic strategist at Netwealth about the latest GDP figures. Plus, we hear from our city editor Mark Kleinman, about the former head of NatWest who’s losing out on 10-million pounds of a potential payout. Listen and subscribe to The Ian King Business Podcast here Advertisement

£7.6m is a lot of money to leave on the table by anyone’s standards. NatWest Group, the taxpayer-backed bank, hopes that headline-grabbing number will persuade stakeholders that it has taken a tough line on the severance package handed to Dame Alison Rose, its former chief executive. Indeed, Dame Alison herself might claim that she herself

Families “should feel optimistic” that the worst of the cost-of-living crisis is over, the chancellor has told Sky News. Acknowledging households have “suffered enormously” from energy, food and fuel inflation in the last 18 months, Jeremy Hunt said they should now feel some relief despite the UK economy slowing to a halt in the third

Former NatWest boss Dame Alison Rose is to lose £7.6m of her payout as the bank group seeks to draw a line under the debanking row sparked by the closure of Nigel Farage’s Coutts accounts. However, she will still receive around £1.7m. Dame Alison stepped down in late July after admitting she discussed the former

The number of mortgage holders who have fallen significantly behind on their repayments has risen by 18% over the past year, according to industry data that suggests landlords may be struggling most. UK Finance said 87,930 homeowner mortgages were in arrears during the third quarter of the year – up 7% on the previous three

A regulator has outlined concerns about the “intensity of competition” between fuel retailers. In its first monitoring update since finding that drivers were overcharged by supermarkets last year, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was yet to receive crucial data on fuel margins covering September and October. It said that while margins –

US actors union Sag-Aftra has agreed a “tentative deal” with Hollywood studio bosses to end a historic 118-day strike. In an announcement on Wednesday, the union said the longest walkout in its history will end at 12.01am US Pacific time on Thursday following a “unanimous vote”. The union, which represents around 160,000 members of the

The poorest half of UK families will have to wait until the end of 2026 for their real incomes to return to pre-COVID levels, according to independent analysis. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said low to middle income households face seven years of falling living standards due to the fallout from

After six months of falls house prices across the country are on the rise again, according to analysis from part of the UK’s biggest mortgage lender. Last month, for the first time since March, the cost of buying a house increased as the number of properties on the market shrunk, according to the Halifax house

The government will introduce a new law to parliament on Tuesday, which they say will ensure 40% of trains will still run on strike days. The new minimum service level regulations will also make sure “certain priority routes can remain open” – though it is not yet clear which journeys will be covered. Other rules

British Steel has revealed a decarbonisation plan that could result in the loss of 2,000 jobs in Scunthorpe, according to unions. The Chinese-owned company confirmed it was to shut down its blast furnace and replace it with two cheaper, greener electric arc furnaces (EAFs) – one of which was to be located up the coast

White people are 36% more likely to receive a positive response when applying to rent a home than black people, Sky News has learned. Exclusive figures provided by Generation Rent show apparent racism currently in the rental market. The campaign organisation used artificial intelligence to set up two fake profiles, a black and a white

More than 16 million people have missed payments on key household bills this year – two million of them for the first time. The government-backed Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) says 30% of British adults have fallen behind on at least one payment in 2023. Credit card repayments were the most common bill that went

Seafood allegedly produced using the forced labour of Uyghur people in China may have been sold at Iceland – and could be on sale now at other British supermarkets, according to an investigation. Iceland told Sky News it no longer had a relationship with the Chinese supplier in question. Since 2018, the Chinese government is