Great Britain’s energy networks to get £24bn upgrade but bills to rise

Energy companies have been given the green light to spend nearly £24bn on Great Britain’s electricity grid, in a move that will further increase household bills.In its draft verdict on price controls for energy network companies, the energy watchdog, Ofgem, approved more than £15bn to be spent on gas transmission and distribution networks in the five years to 2031.A further £8.9bn will be invested in the nation’s high-voltage electricity network – the biggest expansion of the grid since the 1960s – with a further £1.3bn earmarked on top of that

M&S’s online business should be ‘fully’ operational by end of month, CEO says

Marks & Spencer’s online business should be running “fully” within the next four weeks, its boss has said, as the retailer recovers from a damaging cyber-attack.The hack forced the retailer to pause customer orders through its website for almost seven weeks, before resuming them last month. However, its click-and-collect services remain suspended, and the full range of clothing and homeware is not available to buy online.Stuart Machin, the M&S chief executive, told its annual general meeting in London: “I have previously highlighted that it would take all of June and all of July, maybe into August [to resume all of its operations].”Machin added: “Within the next four weeks we are hoping for the whole of online to be fully on

Finance firms’ claim to be ‘saving the world’ was a mistake, says City veteran

Pension funds and institutional investors made a “huge mistake” and exaggerated their role in environmental, social and government (ESG) issues to promote their products, the outgoing chair of Aberdeen Group, Douglas Flint, has said.Flint, who has chaired the recently rebranded fund manager since 2019, said “ridiculously extravagant claims” had been made by some companies, which were driven by a mindset that their job was “not really about investing money: we’re just jolly good people and we’re saving the world”.Flint, who also chaired HSBC between 2010 and 2017, told a City of London net zero conference on Monday that those claims may have been over-egged, in a way that put them at legal risk, particularly in the US.“Our industry then made a kind of huge mistake. It became a marketing thing: let’s tell everyone we’re saving the world, we’re saving the planet,” he said, in comments first reported by the Financial Times

Southern Water owners to invest up to £1.2bn in troubled utility

The struggling English utility Southern Water has secured investment worth up to £1.2bn in a deal led by its majority owner, Macquarie Group, which will help it avoid a breach of its regulatory licence.A consortium led by Macquarie has committed to invest £655m, with a promise of another £245m by the end of the year from existing shareholders and unnamed new investors. Southern could receive another £300m depending on the outcome of a legal appeal to increase the amount it can charge customers.Southern supplies Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight with water and sewage services

Sainsbury’s boss warns over retail taxes after ‘high impact’ NI rise

The UK government should be wary of loading retailers with more tax after the “high impact”, particularly on jobs, of raising national insurance costs this year, the boss of Sainsbury’s has warned.The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is under pressure to raise fresh funds in her autumn budget as she attempts to fix public services and grow the economy while meeting her fiscal rules and dealing with the fallout from the government’s U-turn on welfare cuts.“[The government] have got to be cautious about the amount of cost coming into the industry,” Simon Roberts, the chief executive of the supermarket group, which also owns the catalogue chain Argos and the furniture brand Habitat, said.Retailers had warned since Reeves’s autumn budget that the chancellor’s £25bn increase in employer national insurance contributions and 6.7% national living wage rise, introduced from April, would force them to raise their prices

British overseas territories miss final deadline to crack down on ‘dirty money’

The UK is edging towards a constitutional showdown with some of its overseas territories after offshore financial havens missed a final deadline to introduce corporate transparency measures aimed at cracking down on “dirty money”.Five overseas territories (OTs) including the British Virgin Islands and Bermuda had pledged to introduce registers of company ownership, accessible to those with a “legitimate interest”, by June this year.The measure is aimed at tackling the reputation of some of the UK’s semi-autonomous island OTs for permitting “criminals and kleptocrats” to hide their business dealings behind a web of corporate secrecy.Four of the territories failed to hit Monday’s deadline, the latest in a series of delays to frustrate ministers trying to push through transparency upgrades.The government’s patience with the BVIs is understood to be wearing thin, although officials are happier with the progress of Bermuda, Anguilla and Turks & Caicos