‘The bubble had to burst’: the inside story of the Lindsey oil refinery collapse

It was mid-April and the government had just finished nationalising British Steel, to prevent thousands of job losses at the Scunthorpe steelworks, when word reached Whitehall that another national infrastructure asset was wobbling.Prax Group, owner of the Lindsey oil refinery on the Humber estuary in northern England, was rumoured to be in financial trouble, stoking fears about jobs and disruption to critical fuel supplies.In a hastily arranged meeting at the department for energy security and net zero (DESNZ) on 13 May, well-placed sources said, a concerned Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, took solace from Prax’s owner and sole director, Winston Soosaipillai.Prax had suffered some setbacks, the seldom-seen oil boss is understood to have said, but it was not in any imminent danger and was even planning investment for the future. Within weeks, these assurances had crumbled to dust

Rachel Reeves needs wider headroom against fiscal rules, ex-Bank of England deputy says

The former Bank of England deputy governor Charlie Bean has urged Rachel Reeves to create much wider headroom against her fiscal rules – a decision likely to require significant tax rises or spending cuts.Bean suggested that the current slim margin of less than £10bn, had led the chancellor to “fine-tune” the government’s tax and spending plans to meet the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) forecasts five years ahead.“Government spending is about one and a quarter trillion, so £10bn is a small number … and it is a small number in the context of typical forecasting errors,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.He added: “She should aim to operate with a larger margin of headroom, so previous chancellors have typically operated with headroom of the order of £30bn.“Because she has chosen about a third of that … it is very easy for numbers to go in the wrong direction and she finds she has to neurotically fine-tune taxes to control the OBR forecast that is several years ahead

‘An unjust transition’? Teesside locals divided over net zero after deindustrialisation

“We’re basically going through a deindustrialisation of the country at the moment and I think we’re losing a lot of jobs,” says John Mac, over a pot of tea in a bustling Caffè Nero in the centre of Stockton-on-Tees.The local candidate for Reform UK worked for years at the Billingham plant of Imperial Chemical Industries’s (ICI), before taking voluntary redundancy in the 1990s.Having witnessed decades of industrial decline on Teesside first-hand, including the dismantling of the once-mighty industrial behemoth, Nigel Farage’s pivot to court the working class is speaking Mac’s language.The Reform leader is targeting voters in post-industrial communities across Britain, outlined in a Guardian series showing how Farage views the “next Brexit” as reversing net zero to create a manufacturing renaissance.This, the third in the series, looks at the future of another of Britain’s industrial heartlands

UK electric car sales up by a third in first half of 2025, preliminary data suggests

British electric car sales rose by a third in the first half of 2025 after the strongest June for overall car sales since before the Covid pandemic.The number of battery electric car sales rose 34.6% to 224,838 units in the first six months of the year, according to preliminary data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), a lobby group.New car sales rose 6.8% year-on-year in June to 191,200 units, the best sales figures for the month since 2019

UK government ‘closely watching’ £120m legal claim against Vodafone

Ministers are closely watching a court case in which Vodafone is alleged to have “unjustly enriched” itself at the expense of franchise operators, and have raised the prospect of a regulatory crackdown on the sector.The small business minister, Gareth Thomas, has said he will “track very carefully” a £120m legal claim brought against Vodafone last year by a group of 62 of about 150 franchise operators.They allege that drastic cuts to commission rates on selling Vodafone products in the group’s high street stores caused many of them to run up huge personal debts. They say they fear for their livelihoods or homes, and some have reported suicidal thoughts.Their court filing claims the company “indiscriminately … operated to enrich Vodafone at the expense of its franchisees”

First-time buyers turn from rural areas to Britain’s regional cities

With the rise of home working and surging house prices in many urban areas, one might have assumed that British cities had lost some of their appeal to homebuyers over the past decade, but it turns out the opposite is the case.An analysis of the first five months of this year shows the number of would-be first-time buyers in Great Britain looking to move to cities is up by 16% on average compared with the same period in 2015.The location to record the most significant jump in first-time buyer inquiries over that period is Dundee, Scotland’s fourth-largest city and, it is said, its sunniest.Some will be surprised to learn that homebuyers’ love affair with cities has intensified, bearing in mind that the pandemic apparently prompted many to think about a new life on the coast or in the countryside.The data was crunched by the property website Rightmove, which looked at Great Britain’s 50 largest cities, excluding London, and 50 of the most popular coastal areas