Business

Political uncertainty and financial constraints have seen a halt to growth in London’s construction sector as sentiment turns negative in the capital, according to the RICS UK Construction and Infrastructure Market Survey, Q1 2019. Growth in workloads has slowed or declined across almost all sectors of construction this quarter in London. At the headline level, 2% of respondents in London reported a fall (rather than rise) in workloads, the lowest net balance since November 2010. Workloads in public housing and...

The public purse will take a £50m hit after the DoT (Department of Transport) ended its no-deal Brexit ferry contracts. Chris Grayling’s department had agreed £108m contracts with three ferry organisations, to assist with moving goods in the event of a no-deal Brexit. He has decided to terminate the agreements after the UK's departure date was moved to the end of October. Even though the deals were cancelled it is likely to cost around £50m to honour part of the...

Nearly a third of graduates are too educated for their job, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has found as part of its quarterly Economic Review. The data shows to 34.2 per cent of those who graduated after 2007 are overeducated for the profession they are in compared to just 21.7 per cent of those who graduated before 1992. London is the UK region with the highest proportion of overeducated workers, which is partly due to the relatively high proportion...

Demand for offices and retail space in London continued to fall during the first quarter of the year, according to the Q1 2019 RICS UK Commercial Property Market Survey. Alongside this, anecdotal evidence suggests uncertainty over Brexit continues to deter investors and occupiers across the board. London’s retail sector continued to struggle during the first quarter of the year, with 65% more commercial surveyors in the region reporting a decline rather than rise in demand from occupiers for retail space....

Public toilets, zoos and mountain tops have been named among the most weird and wonderful places people work from as hot desking turns to ‘not desking’. Research of more than 5,000 sole traders, entrepreneurs and small businesses has revealed people are increasingly turning their backs on the office and running company operations from their mobile phone. Those running animal care businesses were found to be most likely ‘not desking’, with a quarter running their firms remotely. People working in arts...

New research has revealed screens have taken over our lives after it was revealed that the average Brit now spends five and a half hours a day staring at their devices. More than half the nation now sit through the working week looking at a monitor before winding down the day watching television, which means it’s almost impossible to avoid the harsh blue light of digital devices. Many of those who work a 9 to 5 start to struggle with...

A multi-millionaire businessman has spoken of his struggle after losing a fortune in the global financial crash, before painstakingly making his way back to the top. Yorkshireman Matt Haycox, 38, lived a life most can only dream of during his 20s – thinking nothing of spending tens of thousands of pounds on a weekend away with friends. Rubbing shoulders with celebrities like Britney Spears, with a garage stuffed with supercars like the Ferrari 360 Spider and Bentley Continental GT, the...

An FOI request has revealed James Dyson financed the construction of a water reservoir on his farm with EU funding. The billionaire arch Brexiteer took money from the Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE) to pay for the development, despite campaigning for Britain to leave the union. The farm, dubbed Beeswax Dyson in Lincolnshire, has received £4.2 million of European subsidies between 2016 and 2017. Susan Elan Jones MP, leading supporter of the People’s Vote campaign, said that Dyson was...

Brexit uncertainty continued to subdue the London housing market in March, according to the RICS UK Residential Market Survey, March 2019.  Looking ahead, the lack of momentum is likely to persist for a while longer, although respondents still envisage modest improvements in activity twelve months ahead. In March, enquiries from new buyers saw the seventh negative reading in a row, with 16% of respondents seeing a fall rather than a rise in buyer demand in London. Significantly, demand fell across...