Author: Blake Anderson

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Browsing one-star reviews on Trustpilot is a great way to experience vicarious outrage on behalf of overcharged or underserved customers. Going by its own pricey valuation, though, shareholders are awarding the online reviewer the full five stars. Value depends on perspective — or geography, in this case — but a more moderate rating would give an untested model some leeway. Shares in Trustpilot, which produced its first net profit last year, surged as much as 13 per cent on Tuesday after a…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The UK’s tax authority does not know how much tax billionaires pay, an influential group of cross-party MPs has found, as the government considers a levy on the country’s richest individuals to close the country’s growing fiscal hole.“HM Revenue & Customs has no overview of an individual’s total wealth and faces challenges in getting all the data it needs to risk assess and target wealthy people,” according to a report by the House of Commons public accounts committee.Lloyd Hatton, a Labour MP…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Rachel Reeves says British banks and insurers are choking under unnecessary regulations. This is not quite true. Even if it were, some of the first rules she has picked to unwind barely cause a hiccup.The UK chancellor laid out a series of reforms in her set-piece Mansion House speech on Tuesday. One is a plan to “radically streamline” the Senior Managers and Certification Regime, which was designed to strengthen culture and personal accountability in the financial sector after the financial crisis and…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Staff at the UK financial watchdog are threatening industrial action if they are told to be in the office more than the current rule of at least 40 per cent of their working days each month. Union officials and staff representatives at the Financial Conduct Authority have gone on the offensive after the regulator recently started consultations with employees on reducing how much they work from home.Unite, the union with the most members at the FCA, has written an open letter to the…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Bank of England has been handed responsibility for overhauling the UK’s retail payments infrastructure to replace the “faster payments system” that was groundbreaking when it was launched in 2008 but is now seen as out of date. BoE governor Andrew Bailey said in his speech at the Mansion House dinner on Tuesday night there was “an urgent need for innovation in the area of payments” and that designing and delivering new UK infrastructure in this area “must be a priority”.The not-for-profit payment…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Rarely has a UK cabinet minister made such an extraordinary admission to parliament as that by defence secretary John Healey on Tuesday: a catastrophic data breach under the previous Conservative government endangering the safety of thousands of Afghans who assisted British forces in the Afghanistan conflict; a top-secret, multibillion-pound scheme to relocate them to the UK; a “super-injunction” intended to protect them, but which banned any disclosure of what was happening. It is now for parliamentary and other inquiries to evaluate what…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the UK energy myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Developers of UK wind and solar farms will be offered longer subsidy contracts as ministers try to boost investment into renewable projects in a bid to meet the country’s clean power targets. The government on Tuesday announced an extension to the “contracts for difference” scheme, raising the contract duration to 20 years from the 15-year term that has been in place since 2013. It argued the move would spread the costs of building the infrastructure over a longer period of time and…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Chancellor Rachel Reeves will tell a City of London audience on Tuesday that Britain’s safety-first regulatory culture is acting as “a boot on the neck of business”, as she promises to sweep away red tape across the economy.Reeves will use her annual Mansion House speech to announce what she claims is the biggest cut to financial services regulation in a decade, arguing that Britain has engaged in a corrosive attempt to eliminate risk from the economy.She will say that the drive against…

BBC director-general Tim Davie has admitted “that the BBC is not perfect and sometimes we make mistakes” but that the national broadcaster “deserves backing” after a bruising few weeks of scandals at the corporation that led to questions over his future.On Tuesday, Davie gave his first public response to a slew of scandals at the national broadcaster at the publication of its annual report, saying: “We’ve certainly been through a tough period, and there are some tough days.”His comments come after another difficult summer for bosses at the BBC, which has faced angry criticism over a series of programmes, including…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A historic UK government data security breach put tens of thousands of Afghans at heightened risk of murder and torture by the Taliban.The episode set in train an extraordinary set of events, including the creation of a secret immigration scheme at one point projected to cost as much as £7bn, and the imposition of an unprecedented super-injunction.What was the original breach? An unnamed British soldier in February 2022 accidentally sent two emails with highly sensitive, personal details of about 19,000 Afghans who co-operated…