Banks have prevented more than £1bn worth of fraudulent business loans being paid out from one of the government’s emergency Covid schemes. In a letter to the public accounts committee, the British Business Bank, which administers the government-backed loan programme, said 20 lenders had blocked a total 26,933 fraudulent applications to the bounce-back loan scheme…
Engineers from Openreach managed to cut our telephone line while they were working on our road. The phone stopped working, and our broadband was down for about three hours but then came back at very slow speeds. BT promised two engineer appointments but no one turned up. When someone did arrive, they told us the…
I sent a present to a friend in Cairo to celebrate the birth of her baby boy. I used FedEx, selecting them from the various quotes on the ParcelHero price comparison website. I paid £68 for the delivery, which was a parcel of kids’ clothes and snacks worth about £200 which was supposed to be…
Cash withdrawals across the UK have surged since Saturday, as consumers scramble for haircuts and stock up on banknotes before England’s second lockdown. Link, the network that connects virtually all of Britain’s cash machines, said more than £174m was taken out on Sunday 1 November, the day after Boris Johnson confirmed England would be facing…
Record demand for country houses in the UK has driven prices to a four-year high, with wealthy buyers flocking to Worcester in the West Midlands and Cobham in Surrey in a “race for space”. Prices for country houses, including cottages, farm houses and manor houses, rose 2% in the three months to September from the…
The number of people in the UK earning below the minimum wage has risen more than fivefold to 2 million since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to official figures, as the lowest-paid workers in Britain suffer the most financial damage. The Office for National Statistics said there were 2,043,000 jobs where employees aged…
