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Wednesday 04 November 2026 3:00 am | Updated: Tuesday 03 November 2026 5:19 pm The Shadow MPC has called for interest rates to be hiked. The Bank of England should raise interest rates on Thursday in order to “protect credibility” and stamp out any risks of inflation spiralling out of control, top economists have said.

Poundland filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators at the High Court last Thursday, leaving the jobs of its 12,000 staff uncertain. Owner Gordon Brothers stopped funding the chain, and it is believed to be unwilling to accept Martin Property's offer of about £15m, only half payable immediately. The offer falls short of repaying a £30m shareholder loan, while Gordon Brothers said in a letter reported by Sky News that it had supplied £85m of extra financing since buying the chain for £1 last year.

The international benchmark Brent fell over 6.5% to as low as $105.55 a barrel on Monday, its lowest since 16 October, after Tehran said talks with Washington to end the eight-month war were continuing. Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said mediated consultations were very intensive, according to state media outlet IRNA. Yields on 10-year UK bonds fell 10 basis points to their lowest since 22 September, while IAG shares rose 4.2% in London.

Virgin Media O2 is set to shed thousands of roles as it looks to save around £300m. The BBC understands the cuts could be a sizeable chunk of its 16,000-strong workforce, and most affected staff are in non-customer-facing roles. The Prospect union called the cuts disappointing and very unsettling, while the firm, with £27.2bn of liabilities against £45.9bn of assets as of 30 June, declined to comment.

Taiwanese tech site Benchlife reported that Nvidia has delayed its rumored RTX 5080 Super, a 24GB card tipped for a January 2027 launch. Benchlife said the release date 'remains unclear' and the 'probability is extremely high' that it will not debut in January. TechSpot's October 2026 data shows the RTX 5080 up 39% month-on-month in the US, where it sells for $2,200, or 120% over MSRP.

BBC File on 4 Investigates has found that four data centres in the UK are already looking at gas-fired power stations to meet their electricity needs. If run at full capacity, they would need 1.3 gigawatts and could emit an estimated 4.1 million tonnes of carbon a year, more than Manchester, Liverpool and Southampton combined. Ofgem's Nathan MacWhinnie said the grid is at capacity in many places, and some developers have been told they could wait up to 10 years for a connection.

Revolut says it has cut its AI coding inference costs by roughly 90 percent in under a year by making self-hosted models its default instead of commercial services like Claude. Ops and infrastructure lead David Abitbol said coding time improved 60 percent for roughly 2,000 engineers. Running GLM 5.1 at $0.30 per million input/output tokens cost about a tenth of OpenAI's Codex or Anthropic's Claude Code, Abitbol said.

Primark will launch home deliveries in the UK by December next year, boss George Weston said, after pulling plans forward by about two years. It snapped up a robot-assisted Sheffield warehouse from Debenhams and takes it over by the middle of next year. Sales rose 4% to £9.8bn in the year to 12 September, but profits fell 10% to £1bn after price cuts.

FCA chief Nikhil Rathi said he is prepared to investigate a possible leak of market-sensitive information that lifted bank shares before John Healey's maiden Budget. In a letter to the Treasury Committee, he said the FCA would consider evidence from the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury before deciding what action, if any, to take. Committee chair Meg Hillier had asked whether the leak of the windfall tax's severity was an improper release of inside information.

Openreach has warned firms across the UK that they have less than 100 days to switch to digital services before the Public Switched Telephone Network is switched off, with a final deadline of 31 January next year and no extension. Around a million copper-based lines remain active, 300,000 of them at business premises. Openreach raised rental prices for WLR and legacy ISDN services by an extra 40%, effectively doubling 2025 rates.

The UK government proposed on Tuesday a default option giving private sector retirees an income for life, often linked to inflation. The government says 17 million workers would be affected, and nearly half of pension pots accessed for the first time in 2025-26 were emptied. Pensions minister Torsten Bell said workers deserve a much better deal, while Yvonne Braun of the Association of British Insurers wants people to keep their freedom to decide.

Drax has proposed a £20 billion datacentre at its North Yorkshire biomass power station with Brookfield and Radiant, a plan announced on Tuesday. The first phase would deliver up to 100MW by early 2028, backed by a proposed £2.5 billion investment, with a second phase adding 500MW between 2028 and 2031. Drax CEO Will Gardiner said the project could help secure the site's long-term future and protect hundreds of jobs. The first phase still needs planning permission, approvals, commercial agreements and a tenant.

Roli, the music device maker, went into administration after two licensed insolvency practitioners were appointed joint administrators on October 20, the company told users by email on Monday. It is the second time Roli has gone bankrupt, after its 2021 administration, and some customers say they paid for orders months or years ago with no refund. Its backers TriplePoint Capital and Hoxton Ventures did not respond to requests for comment, and the company did not reply to WIRED.

Asda has appointed David Potts, 69, as chief executive with immediate effect as it struggles to lift sales. Potts started at Tesco aged 16 and led Morrisons from 2015 to 2023, while executive chair Allan Leighton, 73, steps back to a non-executive role. Asda's sales fell 0.5% in the three months to 4 October, and Aldi is poised to overtake it as the UK's third-largest supermarket.

The National Cyber Security Centre said AI-powered malware is 'highly likely' to feature in a ransomware attack on Britain's critical national infrastructure between now and 2028. Its pessimistic scenario sees China having 'likely played a role' in supplying AI tools that let attackers hide their activities. A four-week pilot called Project DROMOS uncovered hundreds of potential security issues, while Cyber Shield, backed by £60 million, will roll out over five years.

Twenty-nine NHS trusts listed as benefiting from Palantir's Federated Data Platform said in Freedom of Information responses that they were not using it, according to campaign group Medact. That is about 21 percent of the 137 trusts NHS England lists as realising benefits, while the government must decide in December whether to keep the £330 million deal. Palantir says the software has helped deliver 100,000 additional operations.

The National Cyber Security Centre said on Tuesday it was working with British firms hit by hackers who raised freezer temperatures across Europe. Retailers in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden reported refrigeration problems on Monday, with some temperatures reaching 50C (122F). Chichester said the national impact was minimal, while NCSC chief executive Richard Horne called the attacks the 'foothills' of a wider threat.

Downing Street said on Tuesday that Poundland's 600 stores and 12,000 staff are at risk as the discount retailer hurtles towards collapse. Gordon Brothers must explain why it rejected solvent offers, including a Martin Property Group bid that lacked up-front payment for a £30m loan. The firm says it has found buyers for about half the stores, sources said, before the moratorium lapses next Thursday.

Barclays will this month start offering early full and final settlements to tens of thousands of customers who have complained of car loan mis-selling. The offers must at least match the Financial Conduct Authority's £9.1bn scheme, which the regulator partly suspended after legal challenges, with a hearing due in February next year. Customers have a month to accept, and Barclays has set aside £430m for alleged motor finance mis-selling.

Capita's Smart DCC handed over running Britain's data network for 39 million smart meters this week, ending its 13-year licence. The network will become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Smart Energy Code Company, whose board includes Dame Gillian Guy of Citizens Advice. Ofgem said Smart DCC had 'played a critical role', while three in 10 households still do not have a meter.