Good morning.
The PM confirmed last night that England will have to wait another month until ‘Freedom Day'(£).
The four week extension(£) to lockdown will cost hospitality(£) alone another £3bn, but the prime minister has ruled out additional financial support.
Leisure stocks stumbled yesterday in anticipation of the extension of lockdown measures. The Restaurant Group fell 4.3% while Wetherspoon dropped 4%.
And City banks’ plans to get staff back to the office have been thrown into disarray, as staff prove more keen to work from home than their employers.
But: “If you can go to a restaurant… You can come into the office”, says James Gorman. The Morgan Stanley boss(£) isn’t “dictating”, but just in case the message wasn’t clear, he told staff if they weren’t back at their desks “by Labor Day” (6 September), “then we’ll have a different kind of conversation.”
Snapchat is looking forward to filling its new office, as it enters talks to take 114,000 sq ft at HB Reavis’s Bloom in Farringdon, EC1.
But offices filled with industrious lawyers could become a thing of the past, as the rise of the robots threaten to halve the number of human solicitors(£) within 30 years.
Ted Baker has saved more than £35m by renegotiating rents over the past year. The fashion retailer, which blamed its £108m loss on people not needing nice clothes(£) for Zoom meetings, now wants to trial pop-up stores(£) in smaller towns.
Croydon’s Brick by Brick development company has brought two more development sites to market as the council seeks to fend off bankruptcy.
Renting a home is cheaper than paying a mortgage for the first time in six years, according to Hamptons.
Plans to turn a Wandsworth gasholder into the centrepiece of an 800-home scheme are being drawn up by SGN Place and Mitheridge Capital Management.
But developments could grind to a halt over the summer due to an acute shortage of construction labourers(£).
Chris Grigg will walk away from British Land with a £1.3m final pay package, £200,000 more than Simon Carter.
As we all look forward to a British summer holiday, private equity firm CVC Capital Partners(£) has bought holiday park operator Away Resorts(£) for around £250m – four times what it sold for in 2019. Away owns a site called Sandy Balls.
Meanwhile, the parents of the collapsed Stobart Air are closing in on a sale of a £120m stake in London Southend airport to Carlyle Group.
Construction will begin shortly on a new Ardgowan Scotch whisky distillery(£), thanks to an investor appropriately named Grain.
What treats your ears have in store this week, with podcasts aplenty from EG.
And finally, Elon Musk is about to fulfil an goal he set himself in May last year. No, not the one about being the first man on Mars – that might take a while longer. But he is close to his tweeted ambition to “own no house”. The last of Musk’s extensive portfolio – a California Bay mansion – has just gone on the market for $37.5m. Musk says he would like it to go to a large family who will love to live in it, as Musk apparently only ever used it for parties. The Tesla and SpaceX billionaire has already sold his other seven properties and now lives in a $50,000 a month rental near his rocket launch site in Texas. Still, the $150m he’ll have earnt from the sales should be enough to pay the rent until his mission to Mars takes off – although, it does only give him 250 years.
