Daily Mail Articles

Treasury figures show £46.3bn has now been lent to 1.1m firms, including £31.7bn lent to 1m of the UK’s smallest companies through the Bounce Back scheme.

The airline was at risk of plunging into administration putting almost 10,000 jobs in danger after the global travel shutdown forced it to abandon commercial flights.

In its latest update, the OBR laid out the potential damage which coronavirus will cause to the public finances. In its central forecast, public sector borrowing will rise to £372.2bn this year.

Ocado The group reported a 27 per cent jump in retail revenues to £1bn due to ‘unprecedented’ demand during the six months to May 31. This helped retail profits jump 87 per cent to £45.7m.

The sofa chain is overhauling the two brands. It said revenues slumped to around £725m in the year to June 28 after it was forced to freeze deliveries for most of its final quarter.

The discounter plans to open over 25 stores in the next six months, and 100 stores in 2021 and 2022, creating a further 4,000 new jobs. By comparison Sainsbury’s has 1,400 supermarkets.

Britain faces three great uncertainties in the shape of Covid-19, Brexit and relations with China. The decision to ditch Huawei means trading relations with China are potentially in jeopardy.

As FTSE 100 firm Bunzl became the latest company to turn down the bonuses, the OBR said the scheme ‘is likely to be claimed for employees who would have been retained anyway’.

Bucking a trend that has seen dozens of firms cancel or push back handouts as they struggle to balance their books in the Covid era, Halma has raised its total dividend by 5 per cent to 16.5p.

Staffline, the UK’s biggest recruiter, underpaid agency workers at several food production plants because the time spent putting on work clothes had been excluded from their hours.