Nestlé is planning to cut almost 600 jobs in the UK, close a factory and switch production of some products to Europe.

The Swiss-owned confectioner said it was considering closing its site in Fawdon, Newcastle upon Tyne, in late 2023, with the loss of about 475 jobs, with a further 98 to go in York.

It is proposing changes to adapt its confectionery manufacturing for the future, with a £29.4m investment at its factories in York and Halifax.

The company said: “Nestlé Confectionery has an ambitious business strategy in the UK and these proposals are intended to support our long-term success in an increasingly competitive category. The proposed changes would create a more efficient manufacturing footprint and, in turn, allow greater strategic investment in Nestlé’s biggest confectionery brands.

“We have chosen to announce these proposals as early as possible to provide the maximum time for consultation with our colleagues and trade unions.”

The...

Asda is to begin selling secondhand clothing in its supermarkets as the vintage trend enters the retail mainstream.

The retailer is partnering with the specialist trader Preloved Vintage Wholesale to sell used clothing in 50 stores, including in Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Brighton, after a successful trial in its special sustainability outlet in Leeds.

Mel Wilson, the head of sustainable sourcing at Asda’s George clothing and homewares brand, said: “We know that sustainable fashion is something that’s really important to our customers and colleagues. They’re passionate about us encouraging everyone in the UK to think about the issues of waste and how we can make fashion and textiles more circular, so that we really can reduce the number of garments that go into landfill.”

Asda’s foray into the vintage market, thought to be a first for a UK supermarket, is spurred by a rise in interest, particularly among young people, in online trading sites...

Workers trying to block the sale of a Renault car parts factory held seven managers against their will for 12 hours in the latest “bossnapping” to hit French industry.

Managers at the Fonderie de Bretagne, a foundry near the town of Lorient, in Brittany, north-west France, that has been put up sale, were held by union activists on Tuesday morning and prevented from going home until 10.30pm.

A union rep, Mael Le Goff, from the hard-left CGT, said the union had decided to release the managers because “they still didn’t want to have a dialogue so it was pointless trying to talk to people who don’t want to engage”.

The carmaker, which “strongly condemned” the detention, said it was trying to find a buyer for the factory, which employs 350 people, in order to “maintain activity at the site and safeguard jobs.”

The Duke of Westminster’s property company, Grosvenor Group, swung to a pre-tax loss in 2020, its worst performance since 2008, but still paid a £47bn dividend to the duke’s family and its trusts.

The privately-owned group which includes some of the most famous addresses in London’s Mayfair and Belgravia, reported a £311m pre-tax loss last year, compared with a pre-tax profit of almost £157m in 2019, as it recorded a slide in the value of its global property portfolio and gave rent reductions to some of its tenants during the pandemic.

It blamed the impact of Covid-19 for the fall in property valuations, as its property assets tumbled in value by £400m to £6.7bn in 2020.

Retail properties in the UK, Europe and the Americas were responsible for most of the decline in value, as shops and other businesses remained closed for several months of 2020 during successive lockdowns.

Grosvenor’s results were “poor by historical standards”, according to its...

More than 7,500 Covid-19 infections and 133 deaths could have been prevented if Walmart offered employees two weeks of paid sick leave, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The public health not-for-profit Human Impact Partners calculated the impact that better paid sick leave could have had for employees of Walmart, the largest employer in the US, using findings from the University of Wisconsin that universal sick leave could lead to a nearly 6% reduction in coronavirus infections and deaths for workers in Wisconsin.

Researchers used the US national Covid-19 case rate to determine that at least 125,000 Walmart employees, of which the company says there are nearly 1.6m in the US, contracted Covid-19 between February 2020 and February 2021. The company has not publicly released data detailing how many employees have had the virus.

Cynthia Murray, an employee of a Walmart in Laurel, Maryland, and a leader with United for Respect, a worker advocacy...

Pent up demand, the government’s measures to support the housing market and a “chronic undersupply” of homes have driven a 23% leap in sales for UK housebuilder Persimmon this year.

The country’s second biggest builder said that it had completed £3bn worth of sales since the start of the year, almost a quarter ahead of the same period in 2020 and 11% up on the start of 2019.

The retailer Dixons Carphone has decided to permanently close all of its outlets in airports, blaming the government’s decision to scrap tax-free shopping.

The company said it does not expect a sufficient recovery in passenger numbers to make up for the loss of the retail scheme from 1 January, which enables non-EU visitors to reclaim VAT paid on their purchases.

Almost all of the 24 Dixons Travel shops are currently shut because Covid-19 restrictions on international travel have greatly reduced the number of people allowed to fly to and from the UK.

Dixons Carphone said it had made the “difficult decision” not to reopen the stores, situated in airports from Aberdeen to Southend, even though the business has historically contributed £20m in annual profit to the group. All staff from the stores will be offered roles elsewhere.

The move by the Treasury to end tax-free shopping in December 2020 caused a commotion in the retail sector, and the bosses...

Sainsbury’s has dived to a £261m annual loss despite booming sales of groceries during the pandemic as it spent millions of pounds on protecting staff and customers from the coronavirus.

The UK’s second biggest supermarket said it had spent £485m on special bonus payments for staff who worked through the pandemic, extra staff to cover those who were isolating, additional safety measures in stores and pay for vulnerable staff who had to stay at home.

Online sales more than doubled in the year to 6 March, with grocery takings rising 7.3%, and general merchandise sales, which include the Argos chain, up by just over 9%.

But Sainsbury’s said total sales remained almost flat at £29bn as drivers put less petrol into their cars during the lockdowns and clothing sales slid almost 9%.

The company’s hefty annual loss came after a £255m pre-tax profit a year before. Sainsbury’s said it was on track to exceed 2020 profits in the year ahead.

The company...

Earnings at Lloyds Banking Group have surged back, with a forecast-beating £1.9bn in pre-tax profits for the first quarter, as the lender released hundreds of millions of pounds worth of loan loss provisions originally earmarked for potential defaults linked to the coronavirus pandemic.

Lloyds released £459m from a cash pile meant to cover bad debts in the first three months of the year, in stark contrast to the £1.4bn charge it took at the start of the outbreak in 2020. The banking group put aside a total of £4.2bn last year, amid fears that business and personal customers would fail to keep up with their loan payments.

The latest move signalled cautious confidence about the economic outlook after the success of the UK’s vaccine programme, which has helped the government ease restrictions after months of lockdown.

Pre-tax profits for the three months to March were up 2,464% from the £74m it reported for the same period last year, when loan loss charges...

Calls are growing for an end to the practice of paying executives health and safety bonuses if none of their employees dies on the job, as an analysis revealed the average value of a human life in some boardrooms under such schemes is as little as £33,000.

The research, by the shareholder advisory firm Pensions & Investment Research Consultants (PIRC), looked at annual reports from 38 FTSE 350 companies in which at least one person died at work between 2015 and 2019.

It found that at least two had not reported docking their top executive’s bonus at all after employees died, while those that did imposed an average cut of £33,628 – the equivalent of less than 1% of the executive’s total annual pay.

Conor Constable, the PIRC researcher behind the report, called for the link between bonuses and health and safety to be broken, saying that keeping employees alive should be a basic requirement rather than something that merited an extra pat on the back.

In Germany, there are signs that the jobs market is slowly improving. The employment barometer from Munich’s Ifo institute rose to 98.3 points in April from 97.6 points in March. The labour market is slowly making up for some of the job losses from the coronavirus crisis.

Germany’s manufacturing boom is increasingly reflected in companies’ hiring behaviour. Manufacturers of machinery and equipment in particular are looking to take more people on. In the service sector, however, the willingness to hire has not budged from its low level.

While jobs continue to be lost in the hospitality and tourism industries, IT service providers and architectural and engineering firms are adding staff. In trade and in construction, plans for hiring and layoffs currently balance each other out.

Revenue for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, jumped by 34% on the previous year in the first quarter of 2021, the company announced on Tuesday, fueled in part by a sustained surge in ad sales during a pandemic that has seen people spending more time online.

The robust announcement provides the latest sign that advertisers are expecting the economy to roar back to life as more people get vaccinated, emerge from global lockdowns, and resume travel and spending. Google’s vast digital ad empire is now benefiting from that recovery.

Exceeding Wall Street’s expectations, Alphabet brought in $55.3bn in revenue in its first quarter of the year, which represented a 34% rise from the same time a year ago.

Two ministers face calls to recuse themselves from a decision on whether a company jointly controlled by a major Conservative party donor should be allowed to build a £1.2bn cross-Channel power cable after “bankrolling the Tories”.

The Labour party is warning of “a clear conflict of interest” at the heart of the business department, and tonight called on two of its ministers to “come clean” about their links to the sponsors of the controversial power cable plans.

Aquind Energy, which is jointly owned by Alexander Temerko, who was an arms executive in Russia and worked for the Yukos oil company before seeking political asylum in the UK, has applied for permission from the business department to build a 148-mile cable between Portsmouth and Normandy in France, which could supply up to 5% of the UK’s electricity, and contain one of Europe’s largest fibre optic data links.

But the shadow business secretary, Ed Miliband, has claimed it would be “a total...

The owners of Heathrow, who have done very nicely for themselves over the years, have an extraordinary ability to believe the world owes them a living in all circumstances. Take their reaction on Tuesday to the Civil Aviation Authority’s ruling that the airport can’t have a gold-plated pandemic bailout from passengers, but can have some assistance.

That was the gist of the CAA’s award of £300m as a “limited, early adjustment” to Heathrow’s regulated asset base, which will mean roughly 30p added to landing and take-off charges (currently £21) from next year.

Heathrow had been seeking £2.6bn, including £800m immediately. Those numbers always looked absurdly cheeky, or “disproportionate and not in the interests of consumers”, in the CAA’s coy language. To believe Heathrow, though, you would think the sky had fallen in. The CAA’s stance, it said, “undermines investor confidence in UK regulated businesses, and puts at risk the government’s infrastructure...

Office space provider IWG said occupancy levels in its buildings are improving, and it is receiving more inquiries from potential tenants, as it see the beginnings of recovery from the pandemic.

The world’s biggest workspace provider, formerly known as Regus, said it is experiencing strong demand from businesses which are planning future hybrid working, where employees split the week between their home and an office desk, which is not necessarily inside their corporate headquarters.

The optimism from IWG came as it reported what it called the “trough” of its financial performance in the first three months of the year.

The group’s revenues fell by almost 24% to £528m between January and March, compared with the same period a year earlier, while its occupancy rate dropped from 66% from just under 75%.

IWG said its results suffered from comparison with the first three months of 2020, which came just before the March lockdown and was the best quarter...

The steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta could be summoned in front of MPs after the parliamentary business committee launched a formal inquiry into Liberty Steel following the collapse of its largest lender, Greensill Capital.

The business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) committee is the fourth parliamentary committee to launch an inquiry linked to Greensill’s failure. It will consider the impact of the lender’s collapse on Liberty Steel, its customers and its roughly 3,000-strong UK workforce, who could be under threat if the company fails to find alternative financing.

Gupta’s sprawling holding company GFG Alliance, which owns Liberty Steel, was one of Greensill’s largest borrowers, owing the firm an estimated £3.6bn, according to reports. The lender’s collapse prompted the Liberty Steel owner to temporarily pause production at UK factories to preserve cash last month, and request a £170m government bailout that was ultimately rebuffed.

While MPs on...

Should we be worried for the English language when companies drop their vowels to appear more modern? No, say leading linguists, but a company rebranding is wrong because it is ill-judged, confusing and is definitely not the zeitgeist. It stnks.

Standard Life Aberdeen announced on Monday a name change to Abrdn, joining brands such as Flickr, Scribd, Grindr and Tumblr in dropping vowels from their names. The move was met with bafflement and scorn from linguists, who wondered if the name was now pronounced Aburden, Abradon or Aberdeen.

“To me it just smacks of old people trying to use youth language, or wanting to speak like teenagers, which is always a mistake,” said Rob Drummond, a reader in linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University and an expert in the language of young people. “It looks like older people desperately trying to sound cool.”

You can picture the board meeting, said Drummond. “‘How can we make ourselves edgy? Look at Tumblr,...

Bank losses linked to the collapse of Archegos Capital Management have topped $10bn, after Nomura and UBS became the latest global banks to reveal the true impact of the hedge fund’s failure on their finances.

Some of the world’s largest investment banks have been left nursing billions of pounds worth of losses as a result of their exposure to Archegos, the personal hedge fund of the New York-based billionaire Bill Hwang.

The combined financial hit has now pushed past the $10bn mark, after Japanese lender Nomura revealed a $2.3bn hit from Archegos in its first quarter results, resulting in its largest quarterly loss since the 2008 financial crisis.

Nomura warned that it was likely to see further losses in the months ahead that would bring its total losses to at least $2.9bn. That is more than the $2bn hit forecasted by the lender last month and confirms Nomura as the second-hardest-hit lender following the hedge fund’s failure, behind Credit...

Britain’s biggest retailers recorded the sharpest growth in sales since 2018 as consumer confidence was boosted by the easing of lockdown in England and Wales and progress with the Covid-19 vaccination programme.

For the first time in 2021, sales volumes were viewed as good for the time of year, according to the latest monthly snapshot from the CBI lobby group, and sales were expected to remain above normal levels in May after the reopening of non-essential shops in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The survey of 124 retail businesses and wholesale distributors showed that hardware, DIY shops and furniture and carpet retailers enjoyed particularly strong sales as consumers continued to focus on home improvements. The results, compiled between 26 March and 15 April, covering some of the period after the easing of restrictions on 12 April, showed overall retail sales increased at the fastest pace since September 2018.

Ben Jones, principal economist at the...

Huge concerts and nonstop touring mean the music business is in dire need of reform. Performers have begun to lead – but can their industry reshape itself as the world reopens?

California water officials have moved to stop Nestlé from siphoning millions of gallons of water out of California’s San Bernardino forest, which it bottles and sells as Arrowhead brand water, as drought conditions worsen across the state.

HSBC reported $5.8bn in first-quarter profit, a near-80% jump, as improving economic forecasts allowed the bank to release hundreds of millions of pounds of bad debt provisions made to cover potential defaults linked to the Covid crisis.

Executives said they were still cautious but feeling more optimistic than in February, partly owing to the success of vaccine rollouts in big markets including the UK.

It meant the bank was able to release $435m (£313m) of the $8.8bn it put aside to cover bad debts during 2020, when lenders worried that a wave of business and personal customers would fail to keep up with their loan payments.

The cash boost helped raise pretax profits by 79% to $5.8bn over the three months to March, compared with $3.2bn during the same period last year when the Covid crisis first started gathering pace in Asia and Europe.

While HSBC’s Asian operations accounted for approximately 60% of its earnings, all of its regions turned a...

Premier Inn owner Whitbread has reported a £1bn annual loss as sales fell by almost three-quarters due to Covid-19 lockdowns, but the hospitality group said it expects a summer boom in travel to coastal and mountain resorts.

As the pandemic forced the closure of venues across the group, which also includes the Beefeater and Brewers Fayre pub-restaurant chains, revenues plunged 71% to £589m in what was “one of the most challenging years” in its 279-year history according to the chief executive, Alison Brittain.

The lack of business led to apretax loss of more than £1bn for the year to 25 February, compared with a £280m profit the year before. It includes a £348m charge as Whitbread was forced to write down the value of German acquisitions, property, equipment and other assets, because of the Covid-19 situation and its impact on current and future growth rates.

The UK’s biggest hotel operator said 92% of its UK hotels are open to guests staying for...

BP has reported its biggest quarterly profit since the Covid pandemic began, and will hand investors a $500m (£360m) cash windfall, as the global oil markets recover from the crisis.

The oil company reported a profit of $3.3bn for the first quarter, up sharply from a loss of $628m in the same period last year when oil prices began to slide in line with China’s economic slowdown.

BP’s quarterly profit figure is more than four times higher than in the last quarter of 2020, and has allowed the company to start a $500m scheme to buy back shares from its investors a year earlier than expected.

Bernard Looney, the BP chief executive, said the first quarter’s results demonstrate “what we mean by performing while transforming”.

The oil company generated more than $6.1bn in cash, almost six times as much as its operating cashflows in the first quarter of 2020 and enough to reduce its debt so it can begin buying back the shares it has paid to investors in...