UK retailers, hoteliers and airport chiefs have warned the chancellor that scrapping tax-free shopping for international tourists has put 70,000 jobs in jeopardy.

Earlier this month the Treasury said that the retail scheme, which enables non-EU visitors to reclaim VAT paid on their purchases, would finish at the end of December. The Treasury says it is making use of the end of the Brexit transition period to bring personal duty and tax systems in line with international norms.

The move has caused a huge storm in retail and tourism circles with Marks & Spencer, Selfridges and the owners of high end designer outlet mall Bicester Village among the businesses putting their names to a letter urging the chancellor to think again.

Other signatories include the bosses of major airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Birmingham.

The decision will leave Britain as the only country in Europe without a tax-free shopping scheme for...

Shoppers are being urged to shop considerately as supermarkets tighten safety measures ahead of expected new lockdown restrictions.

After a break of several months Morrisons has reinstated marshals on the doors of its 494 supermarkets to better monitor shopper numbers and remind those entering to wear face masks.

Jayne Wall, Morrisons operations director, said the company’s additional hygiene measures – which include vending machine-style cleaning stations outside stores and hiring thousands of new cleaners - were designed to make “customers feel as safe as possible”.

Back in March supermarkets were forced to take drastic action, including rationing products such as pasta, toilet roll and flour, after the arrival of coronavirus on British shores led to a wave of stockpiling.

With the industry eager to avoid a repeat this autumn, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) urged shoppers not to change their habits.

“Retailers have...

Almost a quarter of the best paid people in the UK are migrants, according to analysis of anonymised tax returns collected by HM Revenue & Customs.

Of the 525,000 people in the top 1% each earning more than £128,000, 24% moved to the UK as adults, according to the research by academics at the University of Warwick. Migrants make up just 15% of the UK population as a whole.

Arun Advani, the lead author of the paper, said the research suggests that people who are concerned that migration is a drain on the economy are not considering the impact of high earners moving to the UK.

“A lot of the worries about migrants is about the bottom end of the distribution,” said Advani, assistant professor at the Warwick’s economics department and director of Cage, its research centre focusing on inequality. “But, actually migrants are hugely prevalent at the top of the income distribution – and therefore paying more tax.”

The prevalence of...

It is the end of another day for Hassan, a migrant worker from Morocco who has spent the past 12 hours under a sweltering late summer sun harvesting vegetables in one of the vast greenhouses of Almería, southern Spain.

The vegetables he has dug from the red dirt are destined for dinner plates all over Europe. UK supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Lidl and Aldi all source fruit and vegetables from Almería. The tens of thousands of migrant workers working in the province are vital to the Spanish economy and pan-European food supply chains. Throughout the pandemic, they have held essential worker status, labouring in the fields while millions across the world sheltered inside.

Yet tonight, Hassan will return to the squalor and rubbish piles of El Barranquete, one of the poorest of 92 informal worker slums that have sprung up around the vast farms of Almería and which are now home to an estimated 7,000-10,000 people.

Here, in the...

US airlines are facing what one leading analyst calls a “Thelma and Louise” moment as the industry approaches a government-funding deadline that could decide its future.

On 30 September a government aid packages used to protect workers expires, the airlines have already announced huge layoffs but what comes next could be even worse.

“I don’t think people get the Thelma and Louise analogy here. The car is up to speed, it’s headed toward the cliff and we know what happens next because you’ve seen the movie,” said industry analyst Robert Mann.

Along with leisure and retail, the airline industry has been one of the most direly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Passenger numbers are down 70% and the loss of business and frequent flyer travelers has pushed revenue down by as as much as 85%.

In March, airlines were offered two sources of money as part of the US government’s coronavirus stimulus package, the Cares Act. The act gave the...

In normal times, the Labour party would be assembling this weekend to attempt catharsis after the most savage electoral defeat since the 1930s. It looked into the abyss of a split, but has held together. Just.

Yet Covid-19 makes impossible an authentic arena where the party could start the multiple encounters and exchange of ideas that will be the foundations for better times. The conference will be online. This is better than nothing but, of necessity, it is bloodless. Politics is a touch business if it is anything.

However, the deadly experience of Covid has opened up politics despite the Conservative landslide. It is a growing commonplace that it has exposed Boris Johnson, and his cabal, as unfit for government. On top, Brexit will so deepen the mire that it will engulf the prime minister. Labour finds itself with political prospects it had no reason to expect 10 months ago.

Yet the challenges are profound – and a normal conference would have had an...

During lockdown millions started WFH – and most of us don’t want to go back. In just a few months the landscape of work, family and city life has altered dramatically - but are all the changes positive?

The manufacturing taskforce that recommended underwriting a huge gas expansion to help drive Australia’s Covid-19 recovery was receiving “pro bono” advice from a lobbyist firm with links to the Saudi government and gas companies.

Civil society groups have repeatedly raised questions about conflicts of interest, a lack of transparency and weak governance structures surrounding the body handpicked by Scott Morrison to lead Australia’s post-coronavirus economic recovery, the national Covid-19 commission.

The commission’s manufacturing taskforce, led by Andrew Liveris, a former Dow Chemical executive and current Saudi Aramco board member, came under fire earlier this year when leaked documents showed it wanted the government to underwrite a massive expansion of gas.

New freedom of information documents released to Greenpeace show that the taskforce, a publicly funded body, was being helped in its work by a firm named Dragoman, which lists...

‘This is serious stuff,” said BP’s Bernard Looney. The chief executive, speaking last week at the oil giant’s three-day investor event, was talking tough on the need to tackle the climate crisis. He could just as easily have been referring to the existential tightrope that BP, and others in the fossil fuel industry, will need to walk between investor confidence and the rising public pressure to slash their greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the course of three days and 10 hours of executive presentations, Looney’s new leadership team sought to convince investors that their plan to become a carbon neutral company will allow them to toe this line successfully. BP’s nascent renewable energy interests will grow while the oil production business that has powered the company for over 110 years will begin to shrink within the next decade. A whiplash of clean energy innovation, carbon capture technologies and emissions offsetting schemes will then power the company to net zero carbon...

When I was 20, the newspaper magnate Conrad Black offered me a job. We were at an event for young journalists, though I was the opposite of his usual social milieu, being shy, scruffy and riddled with self-doubt – the opposite of his wife, columnist Barbara Amiel. He grabbed my hand in his giant paw, barked, “I’ll get you a job at the Telegraph. Good salary, too” and named a figure I just about – at 42 – earn now. He smiled, less like a boss offering employment, more like a king bestowing a blessing. A few years later, he was convicted of fraud.

The 90s was a golden era for alpha power players, and back then they seemed golden, as if they themselves were plated, though that may have been the glint from the riches surrounding them. The Blacks, the Trumps, Robert Maxwell: the men were called “charismatic” by people who confuse charisma with bullshit; the women (Amiel, Ivana, Marla Maples) were styled by the papers as monstrous, and at times they were.

I still have a...

“Not only are we getting the pandemic under control, with deaths down and hospital admissions way, way down, but we will continue to tackle it, with local lockdowns and with our superlative test-and-trace system.”

Company directors will have their identities verified before their names are listed on the UK’s official register of company information, as the government attempts to make life harder for financial criminals.

The reforms to procedures at Companies House will look to provide businesses with greater assurance about who they are dealing with, while also improving the ability of law enforcement agencies to trace their activity for suspected fraud or money laundering, the department for business, energy and industrial strategy said.

Lord Callanan, the minister for corporate responsibility, said: “Mandatory identity verification will mean criminals have no place to hide – allowing us to clamp down on fraud and money laundering and ensure people cannot manipulate the UK market for their own financial gain, whilst ensuring for the majority that the processes for setting up and running a company remain quick and easy.”

However, the move is seen...

Train operators may have to gear up for a 1950s-style future, where the biggest passenger demand is for summer day trips to the seaside rather than the morning commute to the office, the boss of Network Rail has suggested, as leisure travel is growing faster than the return to work.

Rail firms have reported far busier weekend services and crowding on coastal routes, while London commuter trains remain largely empty.

The chairman of Network Rail, Sir Peter Hendy, said: “Leisure travel has returned quicker than work travel … A scenario we might have in our heads is going back to the 1950s, when maximum traffic was on summer Saturdays rather than weekday peak hours.”

Hendy said footfall at Britain’s busiest commuter station, London Waterloo, had reached 36% of pre-Covid levels on Thursday, “which was busier than it’s been for weeks and weeks but nothing like the railways we used to know”.

Speaking at a Transport Times online summit, a...

Its success has been hailed as “extraordinary” – not least because no one saw it coming. The YA romance After We Collided has next to no marketing budget and zero reviews – and has taken more than £1m after just two weeks in the UK. A few weeks ago, it wasn’t even in line for theatrical release. As the box office struggles in the pandemic, the industry has sat up to take note of this grassroots success. It is “completely unprecedented”, says Delphine Lievens, a senior box office analyst at Gower Street. “To do that based on no marketing – it’s a really impressive result.”

After We Collided is the follow-up to last year’s After; both are adapted from the “new adult” novel series by the US author Anna Todd. They follow the up-and-down relationship of college students Tessa (played by Josephine Langford) and Hardin (Hero Fiennes Tiffin – Joseph and Ralph’s nephew). Tessa is a headstrong and bookish young woman with parallels – the film insists – to Elizabeth Bennet. Hardin,...

MPs are to debate the controversial $40bn (£31bn) sale of the UK’s biggest tech company, Arm Holdings, after assurances from its US buyer failed to quell lingering concern that the deal will harm British interests.

Jensen Huang, the founder and chief executive of California-based tech firm Nvidia, moved to allay fears about the transaction on Friday, publicly declaring himself willing to offer legally binding guarantees on jobs and investment.

Huang is also understood to have made personal representations to UK government officials at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

The department is headed by the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, who has the power to “call in” the takeover for a review of whether it would harm the national interest.

Dowden has yet to act, despite concerns expressed by trade unions, Labour and Arm’s co-founder Hermann Hauser.

With pressure mounting on the government to intervene, Labour...

Medicinal cannabis companies have been cleared by the UK’s financial regulator to float on the London Stock Exchange but firms that sell marijuana to recreational users will still be banned.

The Financial Conduct Authority said businesses that grow and sell recreational cannabis, even in countries such as Canada where it is legal, cannot list in London because of the Proceeds of Crime Act. Income from the sale of cannabis and cannabis oil outside the UK could constitute “criminal property” under the act, because it covers conduct abroad that would constitute a crime if it happened in the UK.

But the regulator said UK medical cannabis firms could float in London, as could overseas firms, although they would have to satisfy the regulator that they should be allowed to do so because of the more nuanced legal position.

The rules for overseas firms are complicated by the UK’s restrictive regulatory environment for medicinal cannabis,...

Pearson has suffered a significant shareholder revolt against controversial changes to its remuneration policy, which will grant its new chief executive a multimillion-dollar pay package.

Almost a third of investors in the FTSE 100 educational publishing group voted against the plans, which will award a $9.3m (£7.2m) one-off payment to the incoming boss, Andy Bird.

The British executive, who is the former chairman of Walt Disney’s international operations, is based in Los Angeles and will remain there when he takes up the top job at Pearson on 19 October.

Pearson thanked the majority of its shareholders for supporting the proposal, but noted that a “significant minority” of investors had rejected its plans.

Under the new directors’ remuneration policy, Andy Bird will receive a salary of at least $1.25m fixed until 2023, with the opportunity to double it if he meets certain performance targets.

Bird will also be allowed to...

A £200m contract to implement Brexit checks on goods in the Irish Sea has been won by a consortium of companies led by Japanese company Fujistu.

HMRC announced on Friday that a two-year contract for the new trader support service (TSS) has been awarded to a consortium led by the tech company and its partners, the Customs Clearance Consortium, an organisation run by customs expert Robert Hardy and the Institute of Export and International Trade.

The latter counts among its patrons the former Ulster Unionist party leader Reg Empey, who is listed as one of the organisation’s vice-presidents.

Lord Empey said he had no involvement in the bid and his role as patron was entirely honorary.

The winning consortium, which also involves McKinsey consultants, said it was “very pleased to be the successful supplier” of what will be “a free service available to all traders moving goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and importing...

Watson, who stepped down as MP after the general election, is joining the company to advise on tackling problem gambling, having spearheaded Labour’s campaign for tough reform of gambling legislation.

The former MP also questioned Paddy Power’s moral compass in a series of Twitter exchanges with people angry that it was giving odds on the outcome of the Pistorius trial, including “money back if he walks”.

Shares in airlines, hotel groups and pub companies have tumbled, after it emerged that the government is weighing up tough new “circuit break” restrictions to avert a second wave of Covid-19 infections.

International Airlines Group, which owns British Airways, was the biggest loser on the FTSE100, down nearly 11% by mid-morning, while the aircraft engine maker Rolls-Royce was not far behind, down 7%, and easyJet fell nearly 8%.

Pub companies such as JD Wetherspoons and Mitchells & Butlers, as well as hotels groups Intercontinental and Whitbread, also suffered heavy losses as traders spooked by the threat of curbs on hospitality sold shares.

The rout affecting hospitality and travel shares came after the health secretary, Matt Hancock, refused to rule out a two-week lockdown as the “last line of defence” against rising rates of Covid-19 infection.

The imposition of restrictions akin to those that were in place throughout the summer would severely...

Ryanair will cut a further one in five of its flights scheduled in October, blaming Irish and EU governments for what it called “excessive and defective” travel restrictions.

The move comes on top of an earlier 20% reduction in flights in September and October, which it announced in August, blaming a drop in bookings and the introduction of fresh quarantine requirements.

Ryanair now expects to fly 40% of flights in October compared with the same month in 2019, a fall from the 50% it had previously predicted. However it hopes its planes will fly almost three-quarters (70%) full.

The budget carrier said the reductions in capacity were necessary because of frequent, and often short-notice, changes to travel restrictions and policies being introduced by EU governments, which have impacted customers’ willingness to make future bookings.

Ryanair said it was “disappointed” to cancel more flights, but warned that it may announce more cuts if travel restrictions...

The Royal Mint will not produce any new £2 or 2p coins for at least a decade, as its stocks remain high because of the slump in use of cash, a trend that has accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.

The rapid decline in demand for coins has left the Mint, which has been producing coins in Britain for more than 1,000 years, with a mountain of excess stock.

It reported in March 2020 that it had stocks of £2 coins 26 times over its target, and was eight times over target for 2p coins.

The fall in the use of cash has been detailed by a report from the National Audit Office (NAO), which monitors the effectiveness of public bodies.

A decade ago, cash was used in six out of 10 transactions, but by 2019 that had fallen to less than three in 10, and some forecasts suggest it may slide to one in 10 transactions by 2028.

The volume of cash payments plummeted by 59% between 2008 and 2019, as consumers have increasingly turned to...

It’s looking like a fairly dreary start on stock market indices across Europe.

The FTSE 100’s declines have been led by industrials such as GKN owner Melrose, jet engine maker Rolls-Royce and weapons maker BAE Systems. Gold and silver miner Polymetal was the worst performer after its biggest shareholder sold its stake.