The boss of John Lewis has said that the 1 million mostly over-50s who left their jobs during the Covid pandemic should be encouraged back to work to tackle the labour shortage that is pushing up inflation and wages.

Dame Sharon White, a former second permanent secretary at the Treasury and chief executive of media and postal regulator Ofcom, said she had never seen such a difficult economic situation facing businesses.

When Linda Bullamore’s husband, Steve, passed away, she was left struggling to change many of the bills in his name. “It was a real inconvenience at that time in particular,” she recalls. “With me needing to make lots of calls and lots of people trying to contact me.”

She is just one of many bereaved relatives across the UK who have found the trauma of losing a loved one compounded by difficulties communicating with phone, TV, broadband and utility firms, facing difficulties closing accounts, unsympathetic staff and unexpected and unfair bills.

The Bank of England will probably have to raise interest rates further from their current 14 year-high to tackle inflationary pressures that are gaining a foothold in Britain’s economy, its deputy governor, Dave Ramsden, has said.

The spread of inflation was showing up in rising British pay and companies’ pricing plans, having originally been triggered by the reopening of the world economy from Covid-19 lockdowns and then by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ramsden said.

Good morning. At 7pm this evening Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak will speak at the fifth official Conservative party hustings. Tom Newton Dunn from TalkTV is in the chair, and the event may give some insight into how both candidates appeal in “red wall” territory. The Tories won Darlington in 2019, but until then it had been a Labour seat since 1992. It is a key target seat for the opposition.

Truss and Sunak will also come under pressure to clarify exactly what they would do to help people cope with crippling energy bills later this year. A column in the Sun yesterday said Britain was “on the brink of a full-blown calamity of wartime proportions”. In a statement released overnight Sunak went further than he has gone before in saying that essentially he would replicate the support package he announced earlier this year as chancellor. He said:

I rented a flat for five years and paid monthly bills to the energy supplier EDF, and had regular meter readings taken.

I moved out in January and was shocked to recently receive a bill for £1,851 to cover May 2016 to January 2022 – a period when I had been making monthly payments via bank transfer to the account.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has almost doubled its profits in 2021/22 to a record $US760m ($A1.1bn).

The US-listed company owns News Corp Australia, as well as numerous mastheads in the US and UK, alongside book publisher HarperCollins and a majority stake in real estate advertising company REA Group.

The super-rich are paying 13.5% more to rent luxurious central London properties than last summer, research has found, in the latest sign that overseas millionaires and billionaires are flocking back to the capital.

The estate agent Savills calculated that over the year to June 2022 the average price of “prime central London” rentals rose by that figure, the highest annual increase in more than 20 years.

ScottishPower is planning to build a £150m green hydrogen plant at the Port of Felixstowe to power trains, trucks and ships, the Guardian can reveal.

The energy company has drawn up proposals for a plant at the Suffolk port to produce the fuel using renewable electricity from 2026, in quantities equivalent to 100megawatts a year – enough to power 100,000 homes.

Cash has made a comeback as a result of the cost of living crisis, with record amounts being withdrawn as consumers increasingly rely on notes and coins to help them manage their budgets, figures show.

While the pandemic accelerated the UK’s embrace of card and digital payments, the economic crisis – with inflation going up and many bills expected to rise further – has led a growing numbers of people to turn once again to cash to help them plan their spending.

In June, workers at a Chipotle restaurant in Augusta, Maine, became the first in the company’s history to file for a union election. Less than a month later, the company closed the store. In shutting down a location that was set to unionize, Chipotle was keeping company with Starbucks, which has suddenly undertaken a campaign to shut down several unionizing locations from coast to coast due to “safety” issues, and the health food company Amy’s Kitchen, which last month closed an entire factory in California where workers were organizing. It is, of course, impossible to “prove” that these companies closed these locations to try to crush the union drives, in the same sense that it is impossible to prove that a schoolyard bully meant to punch you in the face: he claims that he was merely punching the air while you happened to walk in front of his fist. Who’s to say what’s true in such a murky situation?

The debt collectors arrived when Laura Kennedy* was out. They left a letter to say they would be back to claim payments owed to Scottish Power.

Kennedy has never been a customer of Scottish Power and the bills were not in her name, but that hadn’t stopped the demands and threats pouring through her letterbox for 18 months. She is so terrified that bailiffs will enter her home and seize her goods that she is now moving out.

Next is in talks to take a £15m stake in the struggling high street retailer Joules.

Joules, whose share price has slumped by almost 90% over the last year, said it was in talks with Next about raising the sum in a deal that would result in the clothing and homeware retailer taking a strategic minority investment in the company.

OnePlus is back with another mid-cycle upgrade to its top Android phone – this time with the lightning-fast-charging 10T handset, which can fully power up in under 20 minutes without destroying its battery life.

After a two-year hiatus, the “T” series of phones is back to debut new technology halfway through the year, this time with 150W charging – more than five times the power of Apple’s top iPhone.

In today’s newsletter: From GDP and government spending to inflation, it can be hard to get around the big figures you see in the headlines and what they really mean. So here’s a guide

It’s never been more obvious that those in the business of exploiting our need for shelter have no shame.

Everyone’s wellbeing is affected by their living environment, but as an autistic person with a few psychosocial disabilities thrown in, I’m more sensitive than most. My current home has given me more stability than I’ve ever had – more than two years without an extended period of total breakdown.

Children’s piggy banks are paying a high price for the cost of living crisis after almost a third of parents cut back on pocket money during the last year.

The average amount that is going into the pockets of under-16s each week has dropped by 23% to £4.99 this year from £6.48 in 2021, according to research from the lender Halifax – the lowest amount since 2001.

Fifteen years ago this week the French bank BNP Paribas announced it was closing three of its hedge funds heavily exposed to the US sub-prime mortgage market.

On the day little heed was paid to the news, but it quickly became apparent that not just BNP Paribas but just about every big financial institution was up to its neck in securities linked to underperforming American home loans. In early August 2007, BNP was simply the pebble that marked the coming avalanche.

As someone who writes about small business and runs a small business and serves hundreds of small business clients I often get asked: “How are small businesses doing?” Recently the Big Question I’m being asked is whether or not we’re “in a recession”. The answer – like everything these days – is complicated.

Britain is rapidly entering its worst economic crisis since the 1970s, but it is a crisis hardly discussed by the two rightwing Conservative politicians vying for the premiership.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and the Bank of England have both pronounced that we are entering a recession that could last for much of next year. This will serve to aggravate already serious economic, industrial and social problems, with goodness knows how much public unrest.

Hundreds of flights delayed or cancelled, an engine fire on a Tui plane at Manchester airport, and an abject apology from the managing director … it has not been an easy summer for the world’s biggest tour operator.

On Wednesday, a Tui report on bookings and revenues from April to June will shine a light on the whole holiday sector during its peak period.

Rules on genetically modified farming, medical devices and vehicle standards will be top of a bonfire of laws inherited from the EU as the government seeks to change legislation automatically transferred to the UK after Brexit.

Thousands of laws and regulations are to be reviewed, modified or repealed under a new programme aimed at cementing the UK’s independence and “Brexit opportunities”, David Frost has announced.

The Brexit minister told peers the government had a “mammoth task” ahead to improve or remove laws inherited through 50 years of the “legislative sausage machine” in Brussels.

Labour has condemned the new international trade secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, for rejecting the science of the climate emergency after a series of tweets emerged showing her dismissing those who believed in human-caused global heating as “fanatics”.

Trevelyan, whose previous junior business minister position took in the brief of promoting clean growth, was promoted to replace Liz Truss, the new foreign secretary, as part of Boris Johnson’s reshuffle on Wednesday.

Labour has unearthed a series of tweets sent by Trevelyan between 2010 and 2012 that explicitly reject the science of global heating. “Clear evidence that the ice caps aren’t melting after all, to counter those doom-mongers and global warming fanatics,” read one.

Another, sent in support of a campaign against windfarms, said: “We aren’t getting hotter, global warming isn’t actually happening.” A third approvingly shared an article by an explicitly climate emergency-rejecting Twitter...

Ryanair has said itplans to fly an extra 25 million passengers a year by 2026, as the no-frills airline tries to take advantage of the industry’s slow recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Irish airline said it hopes to carry 225 million passengers annually by March 2026, 25 million higher than its previous target of 200 million, as it prepared for its annual meeting in Dublin on Thursday.

Airlines have been among the hardest hit sectors during the coronavirus pandemic amid extended restrictions on international travel, even as domestic economies including the UK have opened up. However, airlines are also jostling for position for the recovery.

John Lewis Partnership reduced its losses to £29m in the first half of its financial year, as it benefited from business rates relief, but paid out millions of pounds in redundancy payments and property closure costs.

The group behind John Lewis and Waitrose said it had benefited from £58m of business rates relief and would decide if it would return that to the government by March next year as it faced “significant uncertainty” about trading over the important Christmas period.

Sales for the group rose 6% to almost £5.9bn in the first half to 31 July, despite high street lockdowns and the permanent closure of 16 department stores and several supermarkets. About 300 people left the business in the half year, but the group has previously announced that it is consulting staff on more than 2,500 job cuts.

The group has benefited from its significant investment in online shopping.

Sales at Waitrose rose 2% year on year and were 10% higher than...