Company insolvencies in England and Wales jump by a fifth
Newsflash: More companies and individuals across England and Wales fell into insolvency last month, as high interest rates continue to weigh.
Company insolvencies jumped by 18% in April to 2,177, the Insolvency Service has reported.
This included 300 compulsory liquidations, 1,715 creditors’ voluntary liquidations (CVLs), 144 administrations and 18 company voluntary arrangements (CVAs).
CVLs allow the directors of an insolvent company to voluntarily wind the company upm while CVAs allow insolvent companies to keep trading, if their creditors agree.
Companies are being hit by high borrowing rates, rising costs, and higher staff wages, explains David Hudson, restructuring advisory partner at FRP:
“Last week’s GDP figures suggests that the UK economy is finally emerging from its lengthy post-Covid hangover. But while there is optimism this growth can be sustained, the coming months will continue to be turbulent with more business faltering as they weather the legacy of high interest rates, input costs and wage growth.
“Indeed, while we anticipate monthly fluctuations as insolvency levels settle, our own data suggests the profile of firms going into administration is increasingly that of larger employers which will ultimately have a more pronounced effect on supply chains and the labour market.”
Seperate data shows that 9,651 individuals entered insolvency in England & Wales in April 2024, 10% higher than in March and 5% higher than in April 2023.
Key events
Closing post
Time to wrap up…. here’s today’s main news stories:
The price cap on British energy bills are forecast to drop by over £100 per year this summer.
And in the City, the stock market is shuffling towards the weekend with the FTSE 100 index down 10 points (-0.15%) at 8428 points.
Hazel Sheffield
China will cut mortgage rates and allow local authorities to turn unsold homes from developers into affordable housing, in a series of drastic measures by Beijing aimed at propping up the country’s faltering property market.
The People’s Bank of China said it would scrap the minimum rate of interest and reduce down-payment ratios to 15% for first-time buyers and 25% for second homes. It will also create a 300bn yuan (£32.8bn) facility to support local state-owned companies to buy homes at reasonable prices, it said in a series of statements on Friday.
The announcement is China’s biggest effort yet to restore confidence in its ailing property market after data released on Friday showed month-on-month house prices were falling at the steepest rate in a decade despite previous efforts to curb losses.
Border Force officers at Heathrow to launch fresh strikes in rosters dispute
Hundreds of Border Force officers at Heathrow Airport are to launch fresh strikes over the half-term school holidays, in an ongoing dispute over a new staff roster.
The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) said more than 500 of its members will walk out on May 31, June 1 and 2.
PCS says its members are committed to the action and expect that their walkouts will disrupt passport checks for travellers coming into the UK at Heathrow airport.
Staff will also refuse to work overtime for three weeks from June 4.
The officers, who work in terminals 2, 3, 4 and 5, took four days of action last month.
PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote said:
“We are keen to resolve this dispute but the Home Office must first put something on the table for our members to consider.
“The Home Office has said it is ‘open to discuss’ a resolution but it only responded to our request for a meeting after we threatened further action.
“Until it comes back with changes to the roster that will benefit our members then the dispute will continue.”
Thames Water’s top investor writes off stake as worthless
The biggest shareholder in Thames Water has written off the entire value of its stake in the water company.
A Singapore-registered subsidiary of Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, which holds a 31% stake in Thames Water, has revealed it will make “a full writedown of [its] investment and loan receivable with accrued interest”.
Omers Farmoor Singapore Pte made the statement in accounts filed today.
The stake had been valued at £990m at the end of December 2021, which was cut to £700m last year.
The move is the latest sign of the utility’s desperate financial situation, reports Bloomberg, coming just weeks after its parent company told its creditors it has defaulted on its debts.
In March Thames shareholders, including Omers, decided not to inject fresh equity into the business after discussions with regulator Ofwat, saying that the company was “uninvestable”.
The government has drawn up contingency plans, known as Project Timber, in case it needs to renationalise Thames via a special administration.
Dear oh dear.
Electronics retailer GameStop has issued a profits warning, at the end of a turbulent week which saw its share price surge, then slump.
GameStop told shareholders today it expects to make a net loss of $27m to $37m in the 13 weeks to 4 May, compared with a $50.5m loss in the previous three months.
Net sales are expected to fall to between $872m and $892m, compared to $1.237bn in the previous quarter.
Shares in GameStop are down 22% in premarket trading, at $21.66.
GameStop’s stock surged at the start of this week, jumping 100% in early trading on both Monday and Tuesday (when it hit $60) as meme stock excitement returned.
Sarah Butler
Asda has said that food price inflation has continued to ease in April and May.
Food price rises are now in line with historic averages, Asda said, as it revealed underlying sales had risen just 1.4% in the first quarter of the year.
Michael Gleeson, the supermarket’s new finance boss said total sales including new store openings, but excluding fuel, were up 6.6% to £5.3bn and this was “further evidence of the underlying strength of the Asda business.”
However, he admitted that Asda, which has bought and converted hundreds of small convenience stores in the past year, had lost market share in recent months and the underlying sales growth was led by Asda’s George clothing and homewares business indicating that food sales continue to fall.
Heavily indebted Asda is struggling to compete with both its bigger rivals Tesco and Sainsbury’s and discounters Aldi and Lidl despite promising to price match Aldi and Lidl on hundreds of products and expanding its cut price Essentials range.
The latest figures the group has also spent £800m on replacing IT which had been provided by Asda’s former controlling shareholder Walmart.
Profits rise at Brompton
Sarah Butler
Brompton Bicycle sold nearly 2% fewer bikes last year but increased profits by 46% as the London-based group said it sold more directly to cyclists.
The group paid its shareholders dividends of almost £1.2m, a similar amount to the year before as pre-tax profits rose to almost £10.7m in the year to March 2023. Total sales rose 21% to £129.4m reflecting a shift towards more premium bikes and the direct sales.
However, shareholders pumped £19m into the business to pay off loans as Brompton said it was preparing for an “unpredictable” market as retailers had too many bicycles in stock after overestimating demand after the Covid-19 lockdown cycling boom.
Lush pushed into the red by rising costs
Sarah Butler
Ethical cosmetics group Lush has dived £28m into the red after sales fell in the US and Canada and it saw a “dramatic increase” in the cost of raw materials including glycerine and citric acid.
The group said sales rose nearly 8% to £708m after it bought the struggling north American arm from its partner in 2022 and sales rose 2% in its UK home market according to accounts filed at Companies House on Friday.
Lush said it would need additional funds ahead of Christmas and shareholders were set to put in £22m of funds while it expected its banks to lend further support but until those deals had been finalised there was a “material uncertainty” about whether the business was a going concern.
Lush’s financial woes come as its key rival The Body Shop is being put up for auction after administrators to the UK arm failed to agree a restructuring deal with landlords that would have cut rents, as first reported by Sky News.
Potential buyers are thought to include fashion and homewares retailer Next, which has recently snapped up a range of high street names from Joules to Reiss to sell via its online network and restructuring expert Gordon Brothers, which owns the Laura Ashley brand.
However, the group’s former owner Aurelius, the German restructuring group which put the UK arm of The Body Shop into administration in February less than three months after taking control, is the prime bidder as it is the main creditor to the group.
The inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal has heard that former chief executive Paula Vennells did not believe there had been miscarriages of justice.
The inquiry was told that Vennells – who is due to testify next week – did not accept that Post Office sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted for stealing because of incorrect information from their computer system.
Vennells “could not have got there emotionally”, a document prepared by Alisdair Cameron, the business’s current chief financial officer, in November 2020 stated.
The document showed how Cameron believed the company “should have been tackling these issues 10 years ago” but it was not “practically possible” because claimants wanted “an apology as much as they wanted money”.
He told the probe that Ms Vennells had been “clear in her conviction from the day I joined that nothing had gone wrong”.
In the document, titled “what went wrong”, Cameron wrote:
“We should have been tackling these issues 10 years ago.
“However, I do not believe that an earlier settlement was practically possible because the serious claimants believed there had been a miscarriage of justice and required recognition and an apology as much as they wanted money.
“Paula did not believe there had been a miscarriage and could not have got there emotionally.”
More than 900 branch owner-operators were prosecuted by the Post Office despite protesting their innocence and raising issues with the software in their defence.
Alan Bates, the former sub-postmaster and campaigner, has rejected his second offer of compensation for the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.
This latest offer was only around a third of what had been requested by Bates – the inspiration for ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office drama.
The UK government must do more to bring energy prices down, says Mike Thornton, chief executive of Energy Saving Trust, following today’s forecast that bills will fall in July.
“While it’s positive to see energy prices coming down for the next quarter, there’s much more this and future governments must do to both permanently lower energy costs and support progress towards net zero.
“A key issue is that the relative cost of electricity has increased to around four times as high as the cost of gas. The continuing distortion of electricity prices is undermining the roll out of heat pumps, slowing down the move away from expensive and polluting fossil fuels in our homes. While the UK Government has committed to reviewing the way gas and electricity is priced more broadly, disappointingly it’s unlikely we’ll see tangible changes soon. A decision needs to be made in the short term to lower heat pump running costs and give people and industry a clear signal that low carbon heating will be part of a net zero future.
“There is no time for delay. No one should take this lower price cap as a sign of stability, with forecasts showing that energy prices are set to rise again this autumn and will be staying high overall for the next decade. We still urgently need policies that support people to use less energy and install cost effective energy efficiency improvements in their homes, to bring down energy bills and carbon emissions for the long term.”
British energy cap forecast to fall 7% in July
Just in: the price cap on British energy bills are forecast to drop by over £100 per year this summer.
Analysts at Cornwall Insight estimate that the price cap will drop by 7% when regulator Ofgemm sets it for the July – September quarter.
That cap limits the maximum cost of each unit of energy, and Cornwalll estimate the bill for a typical dual fuel household would drop to £1,574 per year, down from £1,690 per year at present.
They say:
While a reduction in the price cap is good news, bills still remain hundreds of pounds above pre-crisis levels and concerns continue to be raised about the effectiveness of the price cap in bringing consumer costs down to more affordable levels for households.
If Cornwall are right, this would mean the cap would be around £500 a year lower than last summer, when it was effectively £2,074 per year [although there is no limit on how much a customer could pay].
Cornwall also forecast the cap will rise slightly in October before falling again in January 2025.
Getting back to the Royal Mail, the UK postal workers’ union has warned Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský they could call a strike if he fails to meet their demands in his Royal Mail takeover bid.
Dave Ward, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, told the Financial Times that the CWU would take “take whatever steps necessary to protect” employment conditions and Royal Mail’s universal service obligation.
Ward added:
“There are certain things that if they are attacked, we would take industrial action. We would call a ballot of our members.”
Ward’s comments raise the threat of industrial action that has. disrupted operations in the past.
The Royal Mail’s USO is to deliver letters to all addresses in the UK six days a week. The industry regulator, Ofcom, has been studying options to reform the USO, but changes are not expected before the next election.
Today’s insolvency data shows the construction sector saw the highest number of company failure, at 17% of the total, followed by wholesale and retail trade and motor repairs at 16% and accommodation and food services at 15%.
Insolvencies have risen the most in the hospitality sector versus a year ago, according to the Insolvency Service.
Kelly Boorman, national head of construction at RSM UK, says building firms are recovering from “legacy contracts” in which costs were set before Covid-19, which drove up raw material costs.
Boorman adds:
Looking ahead in Q3 2024, we’re likely to see construction insolvencies accelerate, due to added strain in the market as businesses struggle with a lack of working capital, accumulated debt and falling cashflows brought about by legacy contracts.
In addition, there’s growing uncertainty around future spend due to the political environment and looming general election, which is causing concerns around the supply chain, the government contracts that will be available, as well as the time to award and mobilise these projects.
Although company insolvencies are climbing, they are still below the levels seen after the last financial crisis.
Frances Coulson, head of insolvency and restructuring at law firm Wedlake Bell, says. UK companies are continuing to be hit by the tough economic climate, but that lenders are reluctant to put them into insolvency.
Coulson says:
Corporate insolvencies remain at a high level some 18% above last month and above March 23 and although the pressures on business are being somewhat ameliorated by easing of cost of borrowing and inflation, they are still likely to continue to do so for a while yet.
Creditors voluntary liquidations are the highest but whilst the rates of corporate insolvency are higher they are nowhere near the 2008-9 financial crisis levels. Lenders still seem reluctant to press the insolvency buttons possibly because the value will be low unless there is a significant improvement in the economy.
However, it still very much in evidence in our day-to-day work that companies are continuing to feel the pinch of a tough economic climate.”
Hunt: Royal Mail bid would face national security review
A takeover bid for Britain’s Royal Mail would be subject to “normal” national security scrutiny, says chancellor Jeremy Hunt.
But Hunt also indicated that the government would not be opposed in principle to an overseas buyer taking control of the postal operator.
Asked about Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský £3.5bn proposal to buy Royal Mail, Hunt told reporters:
“As a rule, we welcome international investment in British companies”.
Hunt argues that this open approach has helped the UK attract “greenfield foreign direct investment”, bringing in capital and expertise from overseas.
The chancellor adds:
“We will continue with that approach. But we do always look at national security considerations and make sure that in terms of our core infrastructure, there are no risks to those going forward.
Any bid for Royal Mail will go through that normal process.”
Landsec: Workers returning to the office
Julia Kollewe
Landsec, one of Britain’s biggest developers, said more workers were returning to its offices, especially in the West End, but wrote down the value of its City of London office portfolio by nearly 14%.
The company said the number of workers coming into its offices rose 18% across London in the past year. Chief executive Mark Allan explained that numbers were growing across all five weekdays but most strongly between Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Allan added:
“Being sat here in the City on a Friday morning and it was fairly busy on the way in, so I think things are continuing to grow steadily.”
The company’s loss before tax narrowed to £341m in the year to 31 March from £622m the year before. It has invested heavily in the West End, where 72% of its London offices are, up from 48% three years ago. Landsec is also building more offices in Victoria and the South Bank and has a couple of projects in the City, the financial district that has been hit by the move to hybrid working.
Allan said:
“Our consented pipeline [projects with building permission] continues to focus in the main on the South Bank because it benefits from Waterloo station and London Bridge station as two of the three busiest overland stations in London. It’s got all of the well established immunity and vibrancy down there that employers and employees are looking for. So we expect to be investing into that Southbank portfolio for the next few years.”
Virtually all of Landsec’s West End office space is occupied (99.6%) compared to 93.7% of City offices. It wrote down the value of the City office portfolio by 13.9%. Its shopping centres and outlets are 95.4% full. It owns malls such as Buchanan Street in Glasgow, Westgate in Oxford and Bluewater in Kent. Landsec has sold more than £600m of non-core assets such as hotels and retail parks in the last seven months.
Allan said the UK property market was starting to recover, after high interest rates hampered developers’ ability to refinance. He had predicted “a period of at least 18 months of relatively limited transactional activity” in November 2022.
“So we are pretty much now at the end of that 18-month period, and we are starting to see clear evidence of investors looking more seriously at some of these sectors again.”
Today’s increase in insolvencies will be of no surprise to anyone who has been paying any attention to the economy recently, says Tom Pringle, restructuring and insolvency partner at the law firm Gowling WLG.
Companies continue to weather the storms of Brexit, labour shortages and high inflation, often with balance sheets that are struggling to recover from the hit of the economic climate, and with the cost-of-living crisis hitting employees and customers alike.
Now, a prolonged higher interest rate environment is chipping away at margins and threatening to pick companies off as they need to refinance or reconsider their survival-based options.
Directors of struggling companies need to be aware that there are many options now available to them to save or rescue their businesses, as long as they get the right advice as early as possible and engage with key stakeholders. The longer this is delayed, the fewer options remain.”
Company insolvencies in England and Wales jump by a fifth
Newsflash: More companies and individuals across England and Wales fell into insolvency last month, as high interest rates continue to weigh.
Company insolvencies jumped by 18% in April to 2,177, the Insolvency Service has reported.
This included 300 compulsory liquidations, 1,715 creditors’ voluntary liquidations (CVLs), 144 administrations and 18 company voluntary arrangements (CVAs).
CVLs allow the directors of an insolvent company to voluntarily wind the company upm while CVAs allow insolvent companies to keep trading, if their creditors agree.
Companies are being hit by high borrowing rates, rising costs, and higher staff wages, explains David Hudson, restructuring advisory partner at FRP:
“Last week’s GDP figures suggests that the UK economy is finally emerging from its lengthy post-Covid hangover. But while there is optimism this growth can be sustained, the coming months will continue to be turbulent with more business faltering as they weather the legacy of high interest rates, input costs and wage growth.
“Indeed, while we anticipate monthly fluctuations as insolvency levels settle, our own data suggests the profile of firms going into administration is increasingly that of larger employers which will ultimately have a more pronounced effect on supply chains and the labour market.”
Seperate data shows that 9,651 individuals entered insolvency in England & Wales in April 2024, 10% higher than in March and 5% higher than in April 2023.
Bank of England to expand in Leeds
The Bank of England is expanding its Leeds office, in a drive to enhance its staff presence across the country.
The BoE has announced details of plans for an expanded and permanent presence in the city (whose football team is on the verge of a return to the top flight).
It aims to have a headcount of at least 500 staff in Leeds by 2027, or around one in ten of its workforce. This will be done through voluntary internal relocations and new Leeds-based recruitment.
The BoE says:
The increased office space in Leeds aims to improve trust and wider understanding of the Bank’s work across the UK, ensure as an organisation it better represents the people it serves, help tap into wider talent pools across the UK, and retain talented colleagues.
Three years ago, the Bank announced it would create a new northern hub in Leeds. But in November 2022, it put the plans on ice as it tried to examine ‘post-pandemic ways of working’.
