logo
‘In the UK there's a lot of growth to be had, a lot of opportunity'

‘In the UK there's a lot of growth to be had, a lot of opportunity'

Times12-05-2025

The government gathered leading fintech entrepreneurs to kick off UK fintech week in London this week and was met with a resounding thumbs up.
Jaidev Janardana, co-founder and chief executive of the neobank Zopa was among those providing an upbeat assessment of the industry's prospects. Last week, it said it doubled pre-tax profits to £34.2 million in 2024 and grew its customer base to 1.4 million people.
'In the UK there's a lot of growth to be had, a lot of opportunity from sectors, such as fintech, to grow. I'm really encouraged by what the government is doing here to make sure we continue to remove barriers to growth,' he told the audience from financial services firms and government agencies.
Richard Davies, chief executive of

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Dubai flights cancelled and diverted after US strikes on Iran
Dubai flights cancelled and diverted after US strikes on Iran

The Independent

time43 minutes ago

  • The Independent

Dubai flights cancelled and diverted after US strikes on Iran

A British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Dubai, BA 109, diverted to Zurich after flying nearly 5,000 miles, landing less than 500 miles from its starting point. The diversion was a result of escalating conflict between Iran and Israel, including fresh attacks in the Middle East and Donald Trump targeting Tehran's nuclear facilities. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner turned back approximately 90 minutes before its scheduled arrival in Dubai, as it was only fuelled for the journey and could not return directly to London. Following this incident, all three British Airways departures from Heathrow to Dubai on Sunday were grounded, along with a Sunday evening flight to Doha. Over 1,000 British Airways passengers are currently stranded in Dubai, with the airline adjusting schedules and offering rebooking options due to the developing situation.

Ed Miliband's £8bn pet project is sliding into irrelevance
Ed Miliband's £8bn pet project is sliding into irrelevance

Telegraph

time44 minutes ago

  • Telegraph

Ed Miliband's £8bn pet project is sliding into irrelevance

The chairman of Great British Energy appeared exasperated. Under tough questioning, Juergen Maier was desperately trying to explain the mission of the new taxpayer-owned company he had been hired to oversee. When would it actually start to bring people's bills down, the interviewer from Sky News asked. And how exactly would it do this? Maier, the former boss of Siemens UK, could only offer that 'more renewable energy is bringing people's energy bills down. It's a great thing for British people'. 'I know you're asking me for a date,' he added. '[But] Great British Energy has only just been brought into creation.' 'Can you see why people think this is a bit vague?' the journalist responded. Fast forward four months – almost a year after Labour's election victory – and the question of what Great British Energy (GBE) is for still troubles the energy industry. 'It's what we're all waiting to find out,' says one executive at a top wind farm developer. 'They've got £8bn. But what are they going to actually use it for?' The quango, which it set to be headquartered in Aberdeen, was promised a dowry of £8.3bn to 'drive forward investment in clean, home-grown energy production' in the Labour manifesto. Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has since described it as Britain's answer to the European state-owned energy companies such as Orsted (Denmark), EnBW (Germany), Equinor (Norway) and EDF (France) – the likes of which currently own nearly half of the country's offshore wind farms. 'We have a simple proposition: if it is right for the Danes, the French, the Norwegians and the Swedes to own British energy assets, it is right for the British people to do so as well,' he told MPs in September. Great British Energy. Owned by the British people. For the British people. — Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) May 15, 2025 It's an argument that more than two thirds of the public agrees with, according to polling by More in Common. 'The concept resonates with people,' says Luke Tryl, the group's executive director. Yet critics say that for all the soaring rhetoric, GBE is sorely lacking a clear purpose. Even the quango's own staff have appeared unsure about what it should be doing, some claim. One industry source recounts going to a GBE 'engagement' event last month at a French restaurant in central London, hosted by Paul Addison, the head of policy. 'I got the strong impression that they still haven't actually settled on what it should look like,' the source adds. Another person who attended a roundtable in Scotland described a similar experience. However, a person close to GBE disputed this characterisation. 'What we've been saying to people is, if you're unsure about what we're up to, reach out, because there is a team of us now,' the person adds. Ahead of the election, senior Labour figures stressed that the taxpayer-funded entity would not 'crowd out' the private sector and instead only focus on where its cash could help to unlock or 'de-risk' investment by others. This would rule out vast swathes of the conventional energy sector – including investment in solar and wind. Instead, it would focus on potentially more nascent and expensive technologies such as floating offshore wind farms, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen production and long-duration energy storage schemes – all of which experts say will be phenomenally hard to crack. Miliband has said GBE will also invest in community energy schemes. But he has also contradicted Labour's other statements at times, suggesting that GBE will indeed get involved in owning wind farms, for example. 'I often cite the fact that the mayor of Munich owns more of our offshore wind than the British state,' he told the New Statesman. 'We want GB Energy to show that public ownership can work.' The Energy Secretary is expected to set out GBE's strategic objectives formally in a letter in the coming months. This tension became clear last summer when the Government announced a partnership between GBE and the Crown Estate, which owns and leases seabed for wind farms, and appeared to suggest GBE would take stakes in developments. Behind the scenes, wind farm owners 'massively kicked off', says one person involved in talks between industry and the Government. Yet so far, the only projects GBE has committed to are a £180m investment to install solar panels on around 400 schools and hospitals and a £300m pot to invest in factories that will make parts for the country's offshore wind turbines. It's a far cry from the soaring ambitions previously described by Miliband. And hardly the type of work requiring an entirely new quango. Slow progress Dan McGrail, another Siemens veteran who was recently appointed GBE's interim chief executive, has also told trade publication Utility Week that he did not anticipate spending 'significant' sums until next year at the earliest. This slow progress is partly due to the slow grind of Parliament. A bill to formally establish GBE only became law a few weeks ago, with McGrail admitting last month that it did not even have a bank account yet. GBE is also still hunting for a permanent office in Aberdeen, where it expects to house up to 200 staff. Yet eyebrows were raised last week when, after months of speculation, the Treasury appeared to clip the quango's wings by stealth. About £2.5bn of the organisation's £8.3bn budget was handed to Great British Nuclear (GBN), a separate quango running the Government's mini nuclear reactor programme, documents published for the spending review showed. GBN has been renamed to 'Great British Energy – Nuclear', allowing ministers to claim that its budget remains unchanged. But while the organisations will be 'allied', they remain operationally independent – meaning Maier and McGrail have 30pc less money to play with. 'It was a sleight of hand,' one Whitehall insider says. Much of the rest of GBE's cash has also been allocated via loans and guarantees that will require tight oversight by the Treasury. 'Now the dust has settled on the spending review, it's clear the GBE budget has been slashed by Rachel Reeves with billions diverted into nuclear energy – a far cry from the £28bn green pledge that was once promised by the Labour Party,' says Graham Leadbitter, a Scottish National Party MP. Meaningful or 'vanity project'? Still, there remain high hopes for GBE in some quarters. Andy Willis, founder of battery developer Kobo Energy, says he believes the company can make a meaningful contribution to net zero if it successfully breaks down barriers across the green energy sector. 'The big missing link at the moment in the UK is long-duration energy storage,' he says, which is the technology needed to protect the country against 'dunkelflaute' periods of low wind in the winter. Willis also suggests GBE could help to ease bottlenecks such as waiting times for power transformers, which currently take two to three years to arrive due to stretched manufacturing capacity in Europe. He says they could do so by encouraging companies to co-invest in UK factories. It is understood that GBE's bosses are currently focused on three areas: commercial investments, which will see the company take minority stakes in clean power projects; community energy schemes, likely to involve partnering with cooperatives; and supply chains, for example, helping to develop manufacturing of key parts for wind farms. The quango is understood to have around 100 potential projects in its pipeline already, most of them potential investments in floating offshore wind schemes. It is hoped that it will generate its own income in the long run, although there is no timescale for achieving break-even. But Daniel Slater, an analyst at Zeus Capital, says GBE is partly hamstrung by being forced to invest only in renewables. 'Historically, similar companies have been established on traditional energy sources, often using cash flows from oil and gas or power generation to pivot into renewables,' he says. 'GB Energy has to operate with no existing revenues and potentially in markets that are often already subject to government support. It means reaching an independent financial position will be very difficult. 'The option for GB Energy is probably to act as an alternative form of government subsidy programme, while maintaining stakes in projects which could then establish cash flows longer term.' He believes another area that could be worthy of GBE's attention is geothermal heat, potentially for public buildings such as hospitals and universities. But Ashley Kelty, an energy analyst at Panmure Liberum, dismisses GBE as a 'vanity project' that risks duplicating work already being done by other publicly-funded investment agencies. 'It's a waste of time and money – little more than a virtue-signalling gesture,' he says, pointing out that the sums involved are tiny. Its location is, he says, also a mistake. 'Being in Aberdeen is symbolic only. It would be better to be based in London where it is closer to the City and financial institutions. The jobs impact will be negligible.' For now, Miliband's pet project appears to have survived to fight another day after emerging from the spending review with a remaining budget of almost £6bn. But as scrutiny of the quango grows, the question of exactly how he will spend that money will only become more urgent.

Warning to anyone with a UK landline ahead of ‘big change' being rolled out nationwide
Warning to anyone with a UK landline ahead of ‘big change' being rolled out nationwide

Scottish Sun

timean hour ago

  • Scottish Sun

Warning to anyone with a UK landline ahead of ‘big change' being rolled out nationwide

Virgin Media customers will receive a letter informing them of their switchover date FINAL CALL Warning to anyone with a UK landline ahead of 'big change' being rolled out nationwide A MAJOR change affecting thousands of people who use landline phones in the UK is on its way. Virgin Media is in the process of sending out new advice to all its customers who use the ageing devices. 1 Digital Voice is an initiative that is being rolled out across the UK and affects everyone with a landline, regardless of who supplies the service It comes as the service provider continues to move all landline phones over to a high-speed broadband connection. Digital Voice, a UK-wide initiative, is forcing everyone with a landline to go digital. This affects anyone with a landline phone, regardless of who their supplier is. Landlines were traditionally wired in through the old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) via legacy copper networks. In recent years the country has been outfitted with fibre broadband networks, and now landlines are being moved to work on these networks instead as the PSTN is too old and expensive to maintain. 'To make sure all your services are tip-top for the future, we're switching all our customers to our fibre phone network,' Virgin Media said on its website. 'This upgrade is rolling out nationwide, and we want to make sure everyone's ready. 'The Digital Voice Switchover is a big change, but it's designed to make landline services more reliable and future-ready.' That means if you have a landline, it will need to be switched to work over your home broadband connection instead of being plugged into your home's phone line socket. Thousands of homes warned of old landline switch off happening in 84 locations The firm's advice mirrors that set out by BT and the UK government. Virgin said there is 'no extra cost' to switch, and that your phone number will stay the same. 'To keep you connected to all the people and things that matter, we need your help to change how you plug your phone in and switch over to our new, ultra-reliable fibre network,' Virgin said. 'When you switch, your phone will need to be plugged directly into the WiFi Hub.' The WiFi Hub is the name of Virgin's home WiFi router. The firm says if you don't already have a Hub, it will send one to you. If you do not have home broadband, you are unlikely to have the Hub, but it is necessary to have one in order for your landline service to switch to a digital connection. Virgin Media confirmed you will not be forced to buy a broadband plan if you don't want one, it's just that you need the WiFi Hub in your home to plug your landline into. 'If you've already switched over to our fibre phone line, meaning your phone line is already connected to the WiFi Hub, then you're up and running on our new network, and there's nothing for you to do,' a spokesperson for Virgin said. 'To make sure you continue to get the great service you expect, you'll need to follow a few simple instructions from us when the time comes. "So, it's important that you keep your eye on your letterboxes and inboxes so you don't miss this information.' What to do in an emergency Virgin says landlines will stop working on the new technology if there is a power cut. In a statement, the company said: 'In the unlikely event of a power cut or a network disruption, you won't be able to make or receive calls on your landline. "Always keep a mobile phone charged and handy.' The firm directs customers without a mobile phone, and those with accessibility needs who rely on landlines, to ask about the provision of an emergency backup line, a battery-powered second phone line. You should be on the lookout for a letter or email from Virgin Media concerning your specific switchover date. 'On this day, you'll need to use an adaptor to plug your landline into our WiFi Hub,' Virgin said. 'We'll either send you the adaptor and step-by-step instructions or arrange for an engineer to carry out the switch for you.' Digital Voice is said to be a better quality phone line as it will be going over a faster digital broadband connection rather than an analogue copper wire.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store