Whitbread offloads £89m worth of Premier Inns to Londonmetric January 13, 2026 Hospitality giant Whitbread has offloaded a number of its Premier Inn hotels to property group Londonmetric for £89m as it looks to boost profits. The group sold nine South Eastern hotels to the group, ranging from Southampton Airport to Warwick, as part of its plan to reuse £250m-£300m of property proceeds for growth opportunities, including [...]
FTSE 100 Live: UBS to get new boss; Premier Inn leaseback deal January 13, 2026 Good morning from the City PM liveblog team. What’s an easy way to tell apart a developed country from a less developed one? One straightforward yardstick is the behaviour of state institutions and their relationship to government. If they are well run, they are operated by professionals independently from the executive. Or – the executive [...]
VAT-free shopping debacle has sent tourists packing January 13, 2026 Five years on from the demise of VAT-free shopping, retail and hospitality chiefs say the impact is still causing pain as the industry seeks change, writes Joanna Hodgson Five years ago this month a change came in that might, on the surface , have prompted the average British shopper to get their smallest violins out: [...]
Why the FTSE is enjoying a winter uptick January 13, 2026 Amid AI bubble worries, London's FTSE is luring in American investors seeking greater diversification, writes Susannah Streeter.
Labour talked big, but London housing starts are worst since WW2 January 13, 2026 Labour may have talked big on housing and planning reform, but the figures don't lie, writes Emma Revell.
HENRYs set for further Budget blow as more dragged into £100K tax trap January 13, 2026 Thousands more UK workers are set to be pulled into the £100,000 tax trap as high earners brace for a further financial squeeze. The number of Brits earning six-figure salaries is set to surpass two million for the first time according to estimates from HMRC obtained by Rathbones, leaving more high earners to face the [...]
London families to shoulder nearly a quarter of all inheritance tax bills January 13, 2026 Families in London and the South East coughed up nearly half of all UK inheritance tax receipts, amid a continued climb in property prices. Londoners paid the greatest share of the unpopular levy, at 23 per cent, narrowly ahead of the South East at 22 per cent. This was followed by the South West, but [...]
Immigration law firm put up for sale on insolvency market amid visa crackdown January 13, 2026 A London law firm specialising in immigration services has been put up for sale on an insolvency marketplace in an early sign the government’s crackdown on visas has sparked a slump in applications. Woolwich-based A Vincent Solicitors, which employs more than two dozen staff and has a second office in Manchester, offered multi-lingual support services [...]
Stride vows to protect OBR in new dividing line with Farage January 12, 2026 Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride has vowed to protect the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in any future Conservative government, drawing a dividing line with Reform’s Nigel Farage on approaches to controlling public finances. Stride is expected to re-establish the Conservative Party’s firm commitment to maintaining the fiscal watchdog as an independent body scoring the effects [...]
Hargreaves Lansdown swipes new chief executive from Vanguard January 12, 2026 Britain’s biggest investment platform has poached a senior member of tracker funds giant Vanguard to be its new chief executive. Hargreaves Lansdown has appointed Matt Benchener as chief executive officer from July 2026, subject to regulatory approval. Benchener runs Vanguard’s personal investment business in the US, which has several million clients, and will join the [...]
