Author: Blake Anderson

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The number of prescriptions for hormone replacement therapy is rising, data shows, but medical specialists warn that supply is still failing to meet demand with women left at the mercy of a “postcode lottery” in treatment. HRT prescriptions rose faster in London than in any other region in the year to January 2025, according to a Financial Times analysis of official data for England.In London, the number of items of the medication, which is prescribed for menopausal symptoms, increased 11.4 per cent…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There is a decades-old adage that the tap water Londoners sip has already passed through seven other sets of human kidneys. The principle is at least partly true.About 80 per cent of the English capital’s drinking water is drawn from the rivers Thames and Lee, and just 20 per cent from aquifers — the large, natural underground stores that are deep in the ground and absorb rain run-off. Although the rivers are fed by rain­water, they also receive untreated effluent via some of…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A £2.2tn fall in the valuation of UK household wealth following a methodology change by the country’s statistics agency was based on a “fundamentally flawed” analysis of pension wealth, according to a leading think-tank.The Institute for Fiscal Studies on Friday accused the Office for National Statistics of “jumbled economic reasoning” after an adjustment by the agency last year knocked one-third off estimates of British household private pension wealth between 2018 and 2020 overnight. The think-tank’s report is the latest setback for the…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The first investment for the UK’s new state-owned energy company will be £110mn in grants to fund solar panels and other clean energy production at schools, hospitals and community projects, with no return for the company. The backing from Great British Energy, based in Aberdeen, will be matched by other UK government funding, amounting to total taxpayer investment of about £200mn for the projects, almost all of which are in England. Chair Juergen Maier said it was the “first step” in “work…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.London’s Heathrow airport has been forced to shut down until midnight after a fire caused a “significant power outage”.“Due to a fire at an electrical substation supplying the airport, Heathrow is experiencing a significant power outage,” Heathrow said in a post on X. “To maintain the safety of our passengers and colleagues, Heathrow will be closed until 23h59 on 21 March. “Passengers are advised not to travel to the airport and should contact their airline for further information. We apologise for the…

The strength of UK wages is a puzzle for economists — and a growing problem for Bank of England policymakers.Surging inflation, widespread labour shortages and a wave of public sector strikes drove growth in average nominal UK earnings to a record high of 8.3 per cent in the summer of 2023. Since then, the economy has stalled, vacancies fallen and employers have put the brakes on hiring. Productivity, the long-term determinant of wages, has been falling since 2023. Yet average earnings in the three months to January were still 5.9 per cent higher than a year earlier — and have been…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Films about novice cops tend to follow a similar pattern: a raw recruit moves from civvie innocence to uniformed empowerment, then to bleak disillusionment or, sometimes, total immersion in the abyss of personal and systemic corruption. The latest film to explore this path is Santosh, a brilliant fiction debut from British-Indian documentarist Sandhya Suri.Set in northern India, it stars Shahana Goswami as a young woman whose policeman husband is killed in a riot. Santosh appears to have no options ahead, but the government…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.UK ministers hope they will eventually be able to access live information showing departmental delivery and financial performance, under proposals launched by the Treasury to try to keep closer tabs on all government spending. Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury, set out plans to “transform and upgrade” the government’s central finance system using new technology inspired by the private sector — although he admitted that this could take years to implement. Currently all departments track their own spending and performance, only sharing…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldSir Keir Starmer has said that the “coalition of the willing” is working to establish a military plan so it can “react straightaway” to defend any peace deal that Ukraine secures with Russia. The UK prime minister said senior armed forces figures from around 30 nations involved in the coalition to support Kyiv had gathered on Thursday to pivot from “political concept to military plans”.The meeting followed a call of political leaders convened by London last weekend, and an initial…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The UK is on the road to having a truly competitive broadband market within six years as other providers dilute the influence of its largest player, the country’s telecoms regulator has indicated. Ofcom said that restrictions placed on BT’s Openreach — which hosts 71 per cent of customers according to New Street Research — could be reduced after 2031 because of the expansion of rival networks, including VM0-2 and CityFibre. The broadband market was on a “path to deregulation”, Ofcom networks director…