Author: Blake Anderson

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Electric vehicles myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.A leading UK electric-vehicle charging company that floated in London in 2021 at a £350mn valuation has agreed to a buyout by EDF for just over £10mn.Pod Point, which sells the hardware to charge EVs, blamed stiff competition and a slower than expected adoption of EVs for its problems. It suspended its shares in May after a tumultuous start to the year in which it issued a profit warning and discovered £4.4mn of bad debts on its books. A takeover would mark…

This article is an on-site version of our Inside Politics newsletter. Subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every weekday. If you’re not a subscriber, you can still receive the newsletter free for 30 daysGood morning. When Keir Starmer became leader of the Labour party, the thing he would say privately is that he had to be Neil Kinnock and John Smith who turned the Labour party around after its nadir in 1983, and Tony Blair, who led Labour to victory in 1997. Having done so, Starmer now has to be Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the UK energy myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Britain’s wind farms were paid to switch off for 13 per cent of the time they should have been generating last year, a record level of disconnections that highlights the strains on the UK’s electricity system. Planned cable outages in Scotland and high summer winds added to existing pressures on the network, the National Energy System Operator (Neso) said on Thursday. The grid operator had to pay £2.7bn during the 2024-25 financial year to make sure electricity supply and demand was constantly…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The UK economy contracted by 0.3 per cent in April, the steepest monthly drop since 2023, underscoring the challenge for chancellor Rachel Reeves to boost growth amid higher global uncertainty.Thursday’s monthly GDP figure from the Office for National Statistics was below the 0.1 per cent contraction forecast by economists polled by Reuters and follows growth of 0.2 per cent in March.Weakness in the dominant services sector held back the economy, with output falling 0.4 per cent. Manufacturing production fell by 0.9 per…

On a clear day in Crystal Palace, south London, it’s just possible to see beyond the Shard and the skyscrapers of the City to the forests surrounding another former village, Walthamstow, in the capital’s north-east. These two communities, 18 miles apart, are currently among London’s most on-the-up neighbourhoods, with house prices growing more than 45 per cent in the past decade and more than 100 per cent since 2008, according to research by Hamptons. Data from Savills suggests that Walthamstow has seen the biggest jumps in the UK, with prices now more than seven times higher than they were in…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Treasury received more than £500mn to pay off Britain’s national debt in the last tax year from a fund set up by a banker almost a century ago for that purpose, in a boost to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ aim to balance the books.In the 2024-25 tax year the UK Debt Management Office received the assets of a fund created in 1927 by Gaspard Ferrer, a former partner of Barings bank, to clear government debt, people familiar with the matter said. In…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Ministers failed to agree a plan to cut Britain’s high energy costs ahead of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ spending review, leaving a question mark over the final shape of a policy that is top of the priority list for business groups.Jonathan Reynolds, business secretary, is still planning to cut energy costs for the eight priority “growth” sectors identified in the government’s new industrial policy, which is to be set out later this month.But the structure of such a scheme has not been agreed,…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.VodafoneThree is aiming to more than double its broadband business by 2034, as the newly formed leader in the UK mobile market pledges to create thousands of jobs and upgrade its network. The company — formed last week by the £16.5bn merger of Vodafone’s UK operations and CK Hutchison’s Three UK — plans to grow its broadband customer base from 2mn to 4.3mn over the next eight years.Ahead of VodafoneThree’s launch event on Wednesday chief executive Max Taylor told the Financial Times…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Rachel Reeves is banking on big productivity gains from the adoption of AI across the UK government to help deliver efficiency savings totalling £14bn by the end of the parliament. The chancellor said she had been “relentless” in driving out inefficiencies in order to put money back into public services in the spending plans she set out on Wednesday. Most government departments have committed to deliver efficiency gains worth at least 3 per cent of their day-to-day spending by 2028-29, with some set to…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Rachel Reeves’ first year as UK chancellor has been one to forget. She has been haunted by rising bond yields, unshakeably poor economic growth and mounting political pressures, which have forced her to make unpopular spending cuts and U-turns. Businesses and investors have also been downbeat since she raised taxes in her inaugural budget last October. Wednesday’s spending review, where the British government outlines its plans for day-to-day and capital expenditure, was the moment Reeves laid the foundations to begin turning things…