Lloyds puts aside a further £700m for compensation over car finance scandal

Lloyds Banking Group has been forced to put aside a further £700m for potential compensation over the ballooning car loan commission scandal, in a move that knocked its annual profits by 20%.The latest provision brings the sum it will hold back for payouts to almost £1.2bn. RBC Capital has estimated that the bank could ultimately be on the hook for up to £4.6bn

‘Wilful acts of bastardry’: former Treasury secretary says young Australian workers ‘robbed’ by tax system

Recent governments have carried out “wilful acts of bastardry” and created intergenerational inequality and environmental destruction that will leave younger voters worse off, the former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has said, urging tweaks to Australia’s tax system to bridge the growing divide.Henry, who worked under both the Howard and Rudd governments, used a speech at the Per Capita tax summit in Melbourne on Thursday morning to argue the country’s tax settings since the Howard government have fuelled inequality and left further generations and young workers “to pick up the tab”.“Young workers are being robbed by a tax system that relies increasingly upon fiscal drag,” he said.“Fiscal drag forces them to pay higher and higher average tax rates, even if their real incomes are falling.”He said young workers were being denied the “reasonable prospect of home ownership” are “burdened by the punishing costs of securing a tertiary education”, will have to handle catastrophic environment destruction and “deal with the increasing costs of carbon abatement and climate change adaptation”

Unions call for £200m from government to keep two Scunthorpe steel furnaces open

British Steel should get an extra £200m from the government to support it in keeping the UK’s two remaining blast furnaces open until electric replacements are built, according to a proposal put forward by unions.Chinese-owned British Steel has said it will replace its polluting blast furnaces at Scunthorpe with electric arc furnaces, which can be used to make much cleaner, recycled steel.However, unions are concerned that a rapid closure of the blast furnaces will result in the loss of nearly 2,000 jobs within months.The loss of as many as 1,900 of Scunthorpe’s 4,000 jobs could cause “severe socioeconomic consequences” for Lincolnshire, according to a report, seen by the Guardian, from Syndex, a consultancy commissioned by the Community, GMB and Unite unions.The British steel industry must switch away from coal-driven blast furnaces in order to meet net zero carbon targets

Investment in UK’s crumbling public services is pro-growth, says pensions minister

Britain’s crumbling public services are bad for business, and spending more taxpayers’ money to fix them is a pro-growth policy, the pensions minister, Torsten Bell, has argued.Rachel Reeves has been accused by business lobby groups of clobbering the economy with the £25bn increase in employer national insurance contributions imposed in her October budget.But in his first interview since being appointed in January, Bell argues that the other side of the ledger – the chancellor’s plans for higher public spending, including an extra £25bn for the NHS over this year and next – has been underplayed.“The reason why the budget is pro-growth is because you cannot have a failing state and a growing economy,” he told the Guardian.“I’ll give you a concrete example: I walk into a Sainsbury’s in Uplands, in Swansea, and there are security guards on the door

Tesco fixes website glitch that affected hundreds of shoppers

Tesco has fixed a problem which forced the supermarket chain to apologise after hundreds of shoppers reported issues with placing online grocery orders.Consumers took to social media on Wednesday to complain that a wide range of groceries were showing as unavailable when they tried to check out and complete their shop.Some said everyday items such as bread and milk were marked as out of stock when they tried to pay for their online order.According to the website downdetector.com, which tracks site traffic, Tesco’s website started to experience problems shortly after 9

Glencore considers ditching UK stock market listing; air fares, food and private school fees push UK inflation to 3% – as it happened

Commodities trader Glencore is considering ditching its primary listing in the UK in favour of New York or another location where it can “get the right valuation”.This would deal another big blow to the London Stock Exchange, which has been hit by a string of high profile departures. Chief executive Gary Nagle said the company was assessing whether other exchanges were “better suited to trade our securities”. He told journalists:Ultimately, what we want to ensure is that our securities are traded on the right exchange where we can get the right and optimal valuation for our stock. There have been questions raised previously around whether London is the right exchange