Reeves plans to give England’s regional leaders a share of national tax revenues
Rachel Reeves has announced that the Treasury will draw up proposals to hand England’s mayors a share of national tax revenues as part of a radical plan to rebalance the economy.The chancellor promised “a genuine break with the past” that would shift spending power away from Westminster, as she promised to create investment-led growth across the UK.Reeves was delivering the Mais lecture – the second time she has given the high-profile annual address at Bayes Business School in London.It is no coincidence that the UK is “the most politically centralised of advanced democracies, and one of the most geographically unequal”, Reeves said.Treasury officials will bring forward a plan at the autumn budget to allow regional leaders to receive a share of national taxes, starting with income tax, she added.
Reeves also announced new city investment funds worth £2,3bn for England’s regional “metro” mayors to spend on long-term investment projects, adding that they would be able to retain future business rates revenue,Reeves’s chief economic adviser, Neil Amin-Smith, wrote a research paper while at the Institute for Fiscal Studies that examined the case for the devolution of taxes and suggested income tax was the right place to start,The chancellor called her approach “a permanent transfer of power and resources, not another exercise in local ambition frustrated by central government control”,Local authorities across the UK have faced a severe funding squeeze in recent years, and several big councils have been forced into bankruptcy.
Aditi Sriram, an economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, said: “Giving regions a share of tax revenues, including income tax, is the missing piece of the UK’s devolution settlement.Extending devolution to include funding, alongside powers, is essential to unlock the long-term investment needed to drive regional growth.”Reeves acknowledged that she was giving the hour-long lecture at an “anxious moment”, as the impact of the Iran conflict threatened to harm the global economy, but she vowed to press ahead with Labour’s growth plans.She said recent events, including the Middle East conflict, had confirmed that, as she had stated in her first Mais lecture two years ago: “Globalisation as we once knew it is dead.”She conceded that the Iran war was “likely to put upward pressure on inflation” in the coming months but said the UK was in a stronger position than in the run-up to the Ukraine war in 2022, with inflation lower and the public finances improving.
Without mentioning Donald Trump by name, Reeves stressed that “the single best way to protect families and businesses from rising energy prices is a swift end to the conflict in the Middle East”.She underlined three strategic choices the government was making in its efforts to boost growth: a closer trading relationship with the EU; more support for the “growth corridors” between Oxford and Cambridge and Liverpool and York; and a bet on the benefits of AI.She said the government would pursue a closer relationship with Brussels, pointing to recent research suggesting that Brexit may have depressed GDP growth by as much as 8%.“No trade deal with any individual nation can outweigh the importance of our relationship to a bloc with which we share a large border, and with which all supply chains are closely intertwined, and which accounts for almost half of our trade,” she said.Reeves will press that message home with a visit to Madrid on Wednesday, during which she will announce a series of new investments.
She will meet 120 of the country’s top businesses and investors, and hold talks with her Spanish counterpart, Carlos Cuerpo,The pair will announce a simplified process to allow UK professionals to travel to Spain to work for fewer than 90 days,In her speech on Tuesday, Reeves struck an optimistic note about the economic outlook for the UK despite the looming energy crisis, highlighting the country’s record as the world’s second-largest exporter of services with strong creative, energy and pharmaceuticals sectors,After two controversial tax-raising budgets since Labour came to power, the chancellor acknowledged the frictions, including within her own party, saying the argument for fiscal responsibility “must be fought and won, over and over again, to persuade people”,In what appeared to be a sideswipe at potential rivals to Keir Starmer tempted to advocate a looser approach, she said: “For anybody who thinks this is the moment to change course, I just say to them: ‘Be very careful about what you are doing and what you are advocating.
’”Reeves also batted aside calls for the Treasury to offer immediate relief to graduates struggling with the burden of student loans.“Yes, the student loan system is broken.But if you try to fix everything straight away, everything will fall over,” she said, citing “precarious public finances”.“What is more broken is the fact that we have got one in six kids not in education, employment or training.So yes, we want to fix it, yes, we want to make improvements.
But is it front of the queue? No, it’s not.”
Bentley to cut hundreds of UK jobs amid ‘challenging global market environment’
Bentley is to cut 275 jobs in the UK as the carmaker faces a “challenging global market environment”.The luxury brand, owned by Germany’s Volkswagen, is preparing to launch its first all-electric model but acknowledged it had some work to do to persuade consumers to switch away from internal combustion engine vehicles.The company said on Tuesday it was slashing about 6% of its 4,600-strong workforce by cutting about 150 office-based permanent staff and by not filling vacant positions or replacing employees.The announcement came as the company reported a 42% fall in annual operating profit to €216m (£187m) in 2025, compared with a year earlier.While this marked a seventh consecutive year of profitability at Bentley, which produces cars at its factory in Crewe in Cheshire, the company said its profits had taken a hit from the impact of US tariffs introduced by Donald Trump and foreign exchange changes and weaker sales in China, as well as decisions made by its parent company, VW
Australian households fear double whammy of rate hikes and higher petrol prices will lead to recession
Surging interest rates and petrol prices have stripped more than $1bn a month from Australian household budgets as economists warn of recession risks.Consumers are preparing for rates to surpass their recent highs after the Reserve Bank delivered back-to-back hikes ahead of an inflation spike driven by the US war on Iran.Dougal Warby was among the thousands of Australians who bought their first homes when the RBA was expected to cut its target interest rate from 4.1% to 3.1% or lower by today
London bars shun Margot Robbie’s gin over shellfish allergen concerns
Margot Robbie said she “couldn’t wait” to see the artisan gin brand she had created stocked in her London local. But the willingness of the capital’s venues to fulfil her dream has been seriously compromised by three words on the side of the bottle – “warning: contains molluscs”.The Wuthering Heights star has had to change the recipe of her spirit after top London bars and restaurants rejected it due to allergen concerns, the Guardian can reveal.The drink, Papa Salt, uses oyster shells as a botanical, which she hoped would evoke the sandy dunes of Australia where she grew up. It means people with a shellfish allergy are advised not to drink it, because though the distilling process of gin removes most shellfish proteins, some can still remain when it is made with oysters
Close Brothers banking group to cut 600 jobs and roll out AI ‘at pace’
The UK banking group Close Brothers is to cut about 600 jobs and roll out the use of AI “at pace” after posting further losses amid a mounting compensation bill for the UK motor finance scandal.The specialist lender said the cuts – almost a quarter of its 2,600-strong workforce – would be made over the next 18 months across its teams in the UK and Ireland.It aims to reduce costs by £25m in the year to the end of September, up from a previous target of £20m, and by another £60m in the next financial year, a year earlier than planned.It said it would make the cuts through outsourcing and offshoring work and reducing office space. “In parallel, we are progressing the deployment of automation and artificial intelligence at pace, providing further opportunity both to reduce costs and enhance customer experience,” the lender added
Starbucks shareholders push to oust board members over stalled union talks
Starbucks shareholders are pushing to remove two board members at the company who they argue have contributed to stalling the coffee chain’s long-fought-over union drive.The SOC Investment Group, Trillium Asset Management, Merseyside Pension Fund, the non-profit Shareholder Association for Research and Education (Share), and the New York state and New York City comptrollers wrote a letter to Starbucks shareholders to vote “no” on the re-election of board members Jørgen Vig Knudstorp and Beth Ford at Starbucks’s annual shareholders meeting on 25 March.More than 680 Starbucks stores have voted to form unions since the barista-led organizing campaign started in 2021. The union has reached 34 tentative agreements with Starbucks, but the company has not reached a single final agreement.Starbucks workers began an unfair labor practice strike at the coffee chain in November 2025, escalating up to the holidays in December 2025 with several thousand workers on strike
‘Very damaging’: how the Iran war is hitting energy-intensive industries
In its 160-year history, Somers Forge’s furnaces in the Black Country have cast steel columns for the Bank of England, part of the anchor for the Titanic and – more recently – propeller shafts for Britain’s nuclear submarines.The economic fallout from the Iran conflict is the latest of many geopolitical headaches the family-owned forge has endured, but it is already “very damaging”, said Tammy Inglis, the Somers finance director.Energy was about a fifth of manufacturing costs at the forge, which employs 140 people in Halesowen, before the conflict began, but that proportion is now rising. “Everybody just battens down the hatches and spends what they absolutely need to spend,” said Inglis. “You’re in survival mode
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