AA driving schools ordered to refund 80,000 learner drivers over hidden fees
The AA has been fined £4,2m and ordered to make payments to more than 80,000 learner drivers for not showing the full price of lessons at the time of booking, an illegal practice known as “drip pricing”,The UK competition watchdog, which launched an investigation into the practices employed by the AA Driving School and BSM Driving School last year, said the AA-owned businesses must repay more than £760,000 as a result,The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that learner drivers were not shown the total price upfront when booking lessons online, which is required under UK consumer law,Instead, the driving schools were introducing a mandatory fee later in the process.
“If a fee is mandatory, the law is clear: it must be included in the price from the very start – not added at checkout – so consumers always know what they need to pay,” said Sarah Cardell, the chief executive of the CMA.“At a time when people are watching every pound, dripped fees can tip the balance.And when it comes to something as important – and costly – as learning to drive, people deserve clarity.”The CMA said the amount repaid to individual customers would vary depending on how many lessons they bought but the average payout was expected to be about £9.The regulator said cooperation from the AA, which admitted to breaking the law, meant it had reduced the potential financial penalty by 40%.
It is the first financial penalty the CMA has imposed for a breach of consumer law since it was granted new powers to enable it to decide whether to take action rather than having to go through the courts.“With our new powers, it will never pay to break the law or treat consumers unfairly,” Cardell said.“Where the rules are ignored, we’ll step in to put things right.”A spokesperson for the AA said: “Although the £3 booking fee was made clear to customers prior to their purchase, we acknowledge it should have also been displayed at the start of the online booking journey.“Having listened to the regulator, we made immediate changes to our website to make the £3 booking fee more prominent.
We are now refunding all relevant customers,“While we are disappointed with the outcome of the investigation, we have fully cooperated with the CMA throughout and would emphasise that protecting consumer rights has been central to our business for more than 120 years,”In November, the CMA launched investigations into eight companies, including the AA, over concerns about online pricing practices and sales tactics,The regulator is continuing its investigations into the ticket sellers StubHub and Viagogo, the US gym chain Gold’s Gym and the retailers Wayfair, Appliances Direct and Marks Electrical,The secondary ticketing sites are under review over mandatory additional charges applied when consumers buy tickets, and whether or not these fees are included upfront.
Gold’s Gym is under investigation over not including its one-off joining fee for its annual membership in advertised membership costs.The homeware retailers Wayfair, Appliances Direct and Marks Electrical are being investigated to determine whether their time-limited sales ended when they said they would, or whether customers were being automatically opted in to purchase additional services.The investigations follow a cross-economy review by the CMA of more than 400 businesses in 19 sectors to assess their compliance with price transparency rules.In 2023, the Department for Business and Trade found that almost half of online businesses (46%) used hidden or dripped fees, with consumers estimated to spend up to £3.5bn extra online each year as a result.
The IMF refuses to name the cause of this global chaos. It starts with ‘Donald’ and ends in ‘Trump’ | Greg Jericho
The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook has forced it to admit that things have changed since its previous update in January when it blissfully hoped things would be OK. Now there is mostly darkness and despair.The IMF’s January report was titled “Steady amid Divergent Forces”; whereas the latest outlook is headlined “Global Economy in the Shadow of War” and begins “the global outlook has abruptly darkened following the outbreak of war in the Middle East on February 28, 2026.”Far be it for me to gloat, but my suggestion in January that “steady” was not a word to describe the global economy unless you were desperately trying to make the madness of Donald Trump seem normal has aged quite well.If the graph does not display click hereAs ever, the IMF remains unwilling to name Donald Trump
This chart on oil prices shows why Qantas and Virgin are cutting flights and raising fares
Thanks to the US-Israel war on Iran, filling up your car with petrol costs about 40% more than it did in February, and for diesel vehicles it’s closer to 80%.But even those painful increases pale in comparison to the extraordinary rise in the price of jet fuel, which has climbed by a 125% since the start of the Middle East conflict.This increase dwarfs the last global energy shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Jet fuel peaked at about $US155 a barrel in June of that year; now it’s trading at $US210.Johnathan McMenamin, a senior economist at Barrenjoey, said the explosion in refining margins – the difference between the price of jet fuel and crude – was due to the big Asian refiners struggling to operate with falling oil supplies
Trump threatens to fire Fed chair Jerome Powell amid pressure campaign
Donald Trump threatened to fire Jerome Powell if he stays on as US Federal Reserve chair past the end of his tenure and doubled down on a criminal investigation into renovations of the central bank’s headquarters.As the White House pushes Trump’s new nominee to take charge of the Fed, Kevin Warsh, Powell has a month left in the role. The possibility of Powell staying on as chair past 15 May, the official end of his term, has grown amid mounting scrutiny of Trump’s approach to the Fed in the Senate, which is required to approve Warsh’s nomination.“I’ll have to fire him, OK, if he’s not leaving on time,” Trump said of Powell during an interview on Fox Business. “I’ve held back firing him
Economic shock from Iran war risks driving up global debt levels, says IMF
The Iran war risks triggering a rise in global debt levels, forcing governments to choose between cushioning a cost of living shock and maintaining sound public finances, the International Monetary Fund has warned.Against a volatile backdrop of the Middle East conflict, the Washington-based fund said the war could add to the already strained position of government finances throughout the world.In its half-yearly fiscal monitor, the IMF said global debt levels were on track to increase because the war was pushing up the price of energy and food, fuelling higher government borrowing costs, and hitting economic growth.After a rise in gross government debt levels to almost 94% of GDP last year, it warned this figure was on track to reach 100% by 2029, a level previously reached only in the aftermath of the second world war.“The outbreak of war in the Middle East has added a new source of fiscal pressure to an already strained global landscape,” it said in the report
Norwegian group in talks to buy former Liberty Steel works in South Yorkshire
UK officials have entered exclusive talks with a Norwegian startup to buy the former Liberty Steel works in South Yorkshire, in a significant step towards its rescue.Norwegian-owned Blastr is understood to be the bidder preferred by the government’s official receiver to take on ownership of the UK’s largest existing electric arc furnace in Rotherham and other works in Stocksbridge, both in South Yorkshire.The business, formally named Speciality Steel UK (SSUK), has been under the official receiver’s control since August, after the previous owner Sanjeev Gupta lost the ownership in London’s high court.Finding a new buyer would remove a headache for the government, which also a year ago took control of the Chinese-owned British Steel blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. Ministers are understood to be looking at fully nationalising that plant
$30m an hour: big oil reaping huge war windfall from consumers, analysis finds
The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies banked more than $30m every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran, according to exclusive analysis for the Guardian. Saudi Aramco, Gazprom and ExxonMobil are among the biggest beneficiaries of the bonanza, meaning key opponents of climate action continue to prosper.The conflict pushed the price of oil to an average of $100 (£74) a barrel in March, leading to estimated windfall war profits for the month of $23bn for the companies. Oil and gas supplies will take months to return to pre-war levels and the companies will make $234bn by the end of the year if the oil price continues to average $100. The analysis uses data from a leading intelligence provider, Rystad Energy, analysed by Global Witness
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