Good morning. Here’s your round-up of what’s making the headlines on Tuesday.
Liz Truss will today be named prime minister, having beaten Rishi Sunak in the Conservative Party leadership race yesterday. She will also name her new cabinet – for the real estate industry that will almost certainly mean yet another housing minister to welcome.
Here’s how the industry responded to Truss’s win yesterday.
This morning’s papers focus on how Truss is likely to try to handle the economic challenges ahead for the country, of which there are many.
The latest snapshot from S&P Global and the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply showed a “severe and accelerated” decline in the UK’s manufacturing output in August, as well as weaker activity in the service sector.
That is fuelling further fears (£) that a recession is imminent.
And one of the rate-setters at the Bank of England has made no secret of the fact that further interest rate hikes will now be needed to bring soaring inflation back under control (£) as it rockets away from the bank’s 2% target.
Two pieces of better news coming out of Birmingham. First, the Financial Times reports that the city has been chosen as the new home for a new audit regulator, with a hunt for a headquarters already underway.
That would mark another big step (£) in government efforts to move more officials out of the capital.
And the BBC is lining up a deal with developer Stoford for its new broadcast centre in Digbeth, which will be a redevelopment of the former Typhoo Tea Factory site.
Further afield, environmental consultancy Longevity Partners’ international expansion continues apace. Today the company opens its ninth office – this time in Japan, giving it an Asian headquarters. The company’s founder says its goal is to create “plenty of green jobs and employ more than 100 people in the next few years”.
The findings of the Suburban Taskforce, established as part of a parliamentary inquiry in 2020, suggest that England’s suburbs have been overlooked by policymakers and are being asked to accommodate increasingly large amounts of development.
Co-chair of the taskforce Rupa Huq said suburbs were now “the challenge of our generation”. The taskforce has called for a rethink on how permitted development rights work and national policy guidance for small-scale applications.
Many of those areas may have suffered bank branch and ATM closures in recent years – now the Cash Action Group wants to expand its network of banking hubs, set up to help local residents deposit and withdraw cash regardless of who they bank with. The new move would take the nationwide total to 25 – but getting them up and running has been slow work, as The Guardian reports.
And finally, another week, another planning row from Ivy owner Richard Caring. This one is over windows he has been asked to remove from his £40m mansion in South Kensington. And we wonder why the planning system seems under resourced?
Enjoy the day.
