Business

Legal & General (L&G), the FTSE-100 insurance and asset management group, is preparing to kick off a search for a successor to chairman Sir John Kingman. Sky News has learnt that the company, which this week announced a major corporate deal in the US, is close to appointing headhunters to oversee the appointment process. City

Apple has reportedly been ordered by the UK government to allow it access to encrypted data stored by the company’s users worldwide in its cloud service. At the moment, only the Apple account holder can access such data – not even the US technology giant can see it. Apple, which makes iPhones, iPads and iMacs,

The government is spending £22bn on “unproven” technologies which will have a “very significant effect” on energy bills, according to an influential committee of MPs. There has been no assessment of whether the programme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is affordable for billpayers, said a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC)

Sir Keir Starmer has reinforced his commitment to reducing household energy bills by £300 a year by 2030. The prime minister told Sky News’s political editor Beth Rigby that the figure is “what we are driving towards” and his plan to build more nuclear reactors will help. Politics live: Chancellor reacts to grim growth figures

The Bank of England has cut interest rates by another quarter percentage point, bringing down the cost of borrowing to 4.5%. And in a sign that households can expect more cuts in the months to come, two members of the Bank‘s Monetary Policy Committee said they would have preferred to reduce rates even more, by

Planning rules will be ripped up to make it easier to build new nuclear reactors and create thousands of highly skilled jobs, the government has announced. The reforms are the latest in a series of proposals designed to “get Britain building” to help grow the economy, after powers for environmental quangos to delay infrastructure projects

Tesco has expressed interest in acquiring more than 100 Crown Post Offices whose future has been placed under review as the state-owned company explores shifting them to a franchise model. Sky News has learnt that Nigel Railton, the Post Office chairman, told a group of MPs this week that Britain’s biggest retailer had informed it

An arms race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy, triggered by recent panic over Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, risks amplifying the existential dangers of superintelligence, according to one of the “godfathers” of AI. Canadian machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, author of the first International AI Safety Report to be presented at an international AI summit in Paris

The Treasury Select Committee has sent a formal notice to HM Revenue & Customs demanding answers to critical questions about how it has been enforcing trade sanctions on Russia, following a Sky News investigation into the government department. Last month Sky News reported that while HMRC had issued six fines in relation to sanction-breaking since

What if Britain has, almost entirely by accident, navigated itself into about the best possible position it could be in, as Donald Trump embarks on a trade war with nearly all his economic partners? I realise this might, at first, sound a little odd. After all, when the world is facing economically-destructive measures (blanket tariffs

Donald Trump has ordered sweeping tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, kicking off a trade war that will affect the globe. Here we look at the tariffs and what they all mean for the world: What did Trump announce? The US president has confirmed that goods from Mexico and Canada will face 25% tariffs, while

The UK economy is forecast to improve more slowly than previously predicted after stagnant growth late last year. The EY ITEM Club expects UK gross domestic product (GDP) to grow by 1% in 2025, down from a previous estimate of 1.5%. The economic forecaster is the latest influential group to cut its predictions amid continued

Barclays says an IT glitch that left some customers locked out of their accounts has been resolved after the disruption entered a third day. The bank said the “technical issue” has been fixed and delayed payments processed. In a statement on Sunday, Barclays said: “We are working on bringing balances up to date for some

Barclays has advised customers to seek help from friends and family or even contact food banks after a major IT glitch left some locked out of their accounts. Hundreds of people reportedly claim they are experiencing interrupted services and missing funds after the issue struck on what was payday for many British workers and the

Barclays has advised customers to contact food banks after a major IT glitch left some locked out of their accounts – with the disruption likely to continue today. The bank has warned that some customers may see an outdated balance, and payments made or received may not show following the initial outage on online and

Donald Trump has said he will place 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and 10% tariffs on goods from China from Saturday. The move raises fears of price increases for US consumers as the US president suggested he would try to blunt the impact on oil imports. He has been threatening the tariffs

The UK’s benchmark stock index has reached another all-time high, in a month of record breaking. The FTSE 100 index of most valuable companies on the London Stock Exchange closed at 8,666.65, breaking the record set on Thursday night after four consecutive days of rises. January has been the best month in more than two

India’s richest family has clinched a landmark deal to buy a 49% stake in the Oval Invincibles in a deal that will unite the London-based team with the ownership of the Indian Premier League’s Mumbai Indians. Sky News can exclusively reveal that the Ambani family, who have a fortune estimated to be tens of billions

The government supports a third runway at Heathrow, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced. The chancellor said there had been “no progress in 80 years” and that a third runway was “badly needed”. She said the airport “connects us to emerging markets all over the world” and its expansion would increase trade opportunities. Ms Reeves said

Retailers have suffered unprecedented annual levels of shoplifting losses and incidents of violence and abuse against staff, according to industry data, although one major chain has told Sky News there are now signs of a fightback. The British Retail Association (BRC) used the publication of its annual retail crime survey, covering the 12 months to