Featured

    The Government will keep spending money on contingency plans for a no deal Brexit until shortly before the planned withdrawal date of March 29 2019, in case a proposed transition deal falls through, David Davis has said. Even if political agreement on the transition is reached at this month’s European Council summit, Mr Davis said that preparations for a no-deal outcome must continue until the plan is formally ratified probably in the final weeks of this year. His comment appears to put him at odds with Chancellor Philip Hammond, who told the Commons European Scrutiny Committee on Monday he expected to be able to stand down preparations for a no deal Brexit once the transition deal is agreed. Crashing out without a deal in March 2019 would probably require signific...

    Theresa May is heading toward an inevitable capitulation with the EU and a soft Brexit that would keep Britain inside the European customs union, according to Pantheon Macroeconomics analyst Samuel Tombs. The prime minister has no choice, Tombs believes, because she cannot get any other type of deal through parliament, and because the EU has a stronger negotiating position than Britain. Staying inside the customs union is also the only way to solve the problem of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, Tombs wrote in a note to clients last week. On Friday, May repeated that she believes the UK must leave the EU's borderless custom union. She is being pushed by the right-wing of her party to extract Britain from the EU's single market, its customs rules, an...

    St Mungo’s is one of the largest providers of homelessness outreach services in the UK, with 17 outreach teams across the south and south-west. On its website it says it is “here for every step of the journey away from homelessness” and says its outreach teams work to gradually build up trusting relationships with people who are sleeping rough. But St Mungo’s has admitted to the Guardian that it has cooperated with Home Office immigration, compliance and enforcement (Ice) teams when they go looking for rough sleepers who are in the UK illegally. A September 2016 Home Office training document obtained by the Guardian, which features the St Mungo’s logo, states: This teamwork which sees both the charity referring eligible people to immigration enforcement [IE] for he...

    Energy firms will be banned from back billing customers for inaccurate meter readings which are over a year old under new Ofgem rules. Under the change, which is being introduced in May, retrospective billing for gas and electricity customers will be limited only to those taken during the past 12 months. At present there is no limit meaning the he average back-bill was £1,160 last year, with extreme cases seeing customers receive bills in excess of £10,000, according to Citizens Advice. Many suppliers are already part of a voluntary agreement not to back-bill customers past 12 months, but this does not include all companies and those that have signed up do not always stick to it, Ofgem said. The new rule will come into effect at the beginning of May for domestic c...

    Try as they might, politicians have found little public support for raising taxes over the years. Think of the poll tax riots, the furore over Ed Miliband’s mansion tax or George Osborne’s omnishambles budget and the pickle he was in over the humble pasty. Usually the most resistance is reserved for wealth taxes, not least for their doom laden names given by the media: no voter wants to pay for death or dementia. Denis Healey, the Labour chancellor misquoted for wanting to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak, came closest, with a 1974 election wealth tax pledge but was forced to backtrack. The pips would have squeaked a little too loud for comfort. Fast forward and the time has come to make the case for greater wealth taxes, given our emerging economic realities,...