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Wednesday, 28 August 2013

Simplified gas and electricity tariffs to begin by 2014

Regulator Ofgem promises the biggest shakeup of the energy retail market since competition began

All UK households will receive simplified gas and electricity tariffs by the end of the year and must be told the cheapest deal available from their supplier by the spring, industry regulator Ofgem said on Tuesday.

Energy companies must offer no more than four tariffs for each type of fuel in the first stage of a package of reforms, which aim to make the energy market more transparent and simplify pricing.

The reforms, backed by the prime minister, include new standards of conduct – a sign that the regulator is taking more aggressive action against energy companies found to have misled customers. Ofgem said the new guidelines would force suppliers to go through "a culture change" in the way they treat consumers.

David Cameron pledged last year to force energy companies to offer customers their lowest tariffs – a promise the regulator is now trying to deliver.

Ofgem has described the reforms as the biggest shakeup of the energy retail market since competition began. In the first step, new enforceable standards of conduct require suppliers to ensure that every domestic customer is treated fairly. New rules forcing suppliers to put details of their cheapest offers – personalised for individual consumers – on all bills will be introduced by the end of March.

Ofgem's chief executive, Andrew Wright, said the reforms aim to tackle the lack of trust which had "blighted" the energy market following revelations of large-scale mis-selling.

He said: "Suppliers have already taken some steps to make the energy market simpler for customers and we welcome that, but our package of reforms means they must go further. The standards of conduct we have introduced require suppliers to go through a culture change in the way they treat consumers.

"They have to make sure they are embedding simplicity, clarity and fairness into all their dealings with consumers to tackle the lack of trust that has blighted the market. The standards of conduct will also enhance consumer protection as they are backed by Ofgem's power to levy fines."

Ofgem has the power to levy a maximum fine of 10% of a company's annual turnover for breach of conduct although it has never gone up to this ceiling.

Ofgem is working to ensure energy company customers are offered the lowest tariffs.
In May it imposed its biggest fine – £10.5m – on energy company SSE for numerous breaches of the company's obligations relating to telephone, in-store and doorstep sales activities. Ofgem said SSE – which provides gas, electricity, phone and broadband for 9.6m households – had made misleading and inaccurate statements to customers in order to make a sale.

Consumer groups welcomed the reforms but questioned whether they go far enough. The executive director of consumer group Which?, Richard Lloyd, said: "Improving the way suppliers deal with their customers is a step forward but Ofgem's reforms to fix the broken energy market do not go far enough.

"Rising energy bills are consistently one of the top worries for consumers so the government must step in to ensure trust in suppliers is rebuilt and prices are kept in check. We want the government to introduce simple pricing and to ringfence energy supply from generation businesses to increase confidence that there is effective competition in the energy market."

New government figures released this month showed that households in England and Wales cut their energy use by a quarter between 2005 and 2011 as prices soared. The sharp fall was probably caused by a mix of efficiency measures and environmental awareness, as well as steep price rises, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

Households have faced large price increases in recent years at the same time as wages have remained frozen, squeezing budgets. Over the past three years, average bills have risen by 28% to £1,420 a year, Ofgem said.

Energy suppliers insisted that they had already taken steps to simplify tariffs.

Angela Knight, chief executive of the industry body Energy UK, said: "Energy suppliers are ahead of the game in making tariffs simpler and have already made them easier to understand and easier to compare as part of their moves to put the customer first.

"Changes are also well under way in better and clearer communications. Companies are working closely with all the policy makers and the regulator, and most importantly with their customers, as Ofgem knows."

Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk

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Steve Ballmer heads for retirement, but where now for Microsoft?

The software giant made huge profits under its departing CEO – but it will need to adapt to the era of tablets and smartphones

Steve Ballmer's 13 years at the top of Microsoft began as the new century dawned, but he leaves the world's biggest software company at a crossroads where it must choose between the decades-old desktop market or the 21st-century world of mobiles and tablets.

He hinted in the memo for his abrupt announcement on Friday, and in subsequent interviews, that the timing wasn't his choice. "This is an emotional and difficult thing for me to do," he told staff. Asked if it was a sudden decision in a later interview with ZDNet, he said: "I would say for me, yeah, I've thought about it for a long time, but the timing became more clear to me over the course of the last few months."

Ballmer had come under intense pressure since May, when ValueAct Capital Management bought in to the company, saying it was undervalued – and Ballmer himself was part of the problem.

But the attacks had begun even earlier, starting in earnest in 2011 when the influential investor David Einhorn, of the Greenlight Capital hedge fund, called for him to step down, saying he should "give someone else a chance" and that "his continued presence is the biggest overhang on Microsoft's stock".

Microsoft's shares fell below $40 in June 2000 after the dotcom bust, and since then have not gone above $38 – compared with an all-time peak of $58.72 in December 1999. That has frustrated shareholders and led to activists seeking to force Microsoft to dump unprofitable businesses such as search, and concentrate on its highly profitable Office and Server businesses, rather than consumer-facing ones likeXbox and smartphones.

As ValueAct began to look likely to win a seat on Microsoft's board – from which it could begin a proxy fight to force him out – Ballmer decided to move on, even though the company is still in the midst of a huge upheaval that will rearrange its 97,000 staff from five product-oriented divisions to a "vertical" model, mimicking Apple's, where marketing and design teams work across all products and services.

Key reasons for the heightened pressure on Ballmer were the failure of Windows 8, released last October, to lift PC sales out of a continuing slump, and Microsoft's still-tiny share of the fast-growing smartphone and tablet markets, said Al Hilwa, a director at research company IDC.

"If Windows 8 had buoyed PC sales it would have let out some of the pressure on him to announce his planned departure since the turnaround would be seen as well under way," Hilwa told the Guardian. "Instead, it is clear there is more work to do. To be sure, he is going to be at the helm for some time and so these are still problems for him to tackle."

A key challenge is that Microsoft has failed to find any big-money hits with consumers in the 21st century – leaving it reliant for its gigantic profit flows on Windows licence sales, and renewing licences from businesses.

Now Ballmer's successor will have to decide whether to chase consumers with newer products, or intensify the focus on big business as a source of profit. The slump in consumer PC sales – down 20% over the past year – has not been compensated for by tablet or smartphone sales. Newer businesses are losing money. In the last two years alone, Microsoft has lost almost $3bn on its Bing search engine and other internet projects – not counting a $6bn write-off on the 2007 purchase of online advertising agency aQuantive. Last quarter it took a $900m hit on its Surface tablet, which has sold poorly, and only 300,000 of its Surface Pro tablet for business are reckoned to have shipped in the quarter to June – against a world market of 45.1m. Smartphones using its Windows Phone software have only single-digit share in the world market, and only 4.4m out of the 141.8m smartphone users in the US, Microsoft's home market.

There is no chance of Bill Gates returning to the chair, say insiders, because he is focused on his charity work. Instead, potential candidates must know how Microsoft operates – and have the mixture of experience, engineering and vision to lead the company.

Stephen Elop, who left Microsoft's Office division in September 2010 to take over at Finnish phone maker Nokia, is seen as a strong outside candidate because of his earlier experience with the enterprise and consumer markets, as well as the key business of mobile.

Satya Nadella, who looks after the Cloud and Servers businesses, could also be favoured. Qi Lu, an ex-Yahoo engineer leading the Bing search team, is seen as another front runner.

"Taking an internal candidate like Nadella or some of the other people on the Windows team, that makes sense to keep a steady hand through this reorganisation and strategic shift," Norman Young, an analyst at Morningstar, told Reuters. "But a strong case could be made that the company needs a breath of fresh air, someone who can execute on the strategy but also bring an outsider perspective."

Ballmer oversaw a series of errors that have left Microsoft scrambling to catch up with Apple, Google and Amazon. While Apple's success with the iPod was unexpected early in the century, Microsoft's reaction was at first uncoordinated, and then it undercut licencees by launching its Zune music player in autumn 2006. That was Ballmer's idea – but it arrived just as the digital music boom ended and smartphones took over.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced he is to retire
Similarly, in autumn 2009 he personally killed a project devised by Xbox innovator J Allard – a book-like tablet called Courier which could have arrived at the same time the next year as Apple's iPad. Instead, the iPad went into the market unopposed.

In search, Ballmer in 2003 personally vetoed the idea of buying Overture, which owned key technologies relating to search ads – arguing Microsoft could build its own as it began competing head-on with Google that year. Instead, it has lost billions of dollars on its Bing search engine, while Google licensed Overture's patents for its money-spinning AdWords service.

Amazon, thought of as just a retailer, stole a march by offering "cloud" services such as storage and processing, a space it now dominates. Microsoft, reliant on desktop software sales, was slow to pick up on its importance, despite Gates having espoused it in 2001.

Nor is Microsoft out of the woods, even as it readies the launch of an update to Windows 8. PC makers, seeing sales to consumers slump, are wary about Microsoft's entry into the "devices" business with its Surface tablets. A source at one of the PC industry's biggest suppliers said: "So far Microsoft has been co-operating with us, rather than being in direct competition. But they're at an inflection point. They either pull back [from the Surface] or they push deeper. And if they do the latter, then we are in competition."

With PC companies under increasing pressure, – with Dell seeking to go private, and HP seeing single-digit margins from PCs – that could drive them towards other platforms, or to compete fiercely with Microsoft's products.

Hilwa argues however that Ballmer did deliver exactly what the market wanted. "During the period he ran Microsoft, Ballmer is third only to Exxon's Rex Tillerson and GE's Jeff Immelt in the dollar volume of company profits he has delivered," he said. From 2000 to 2012, Microsoft's profits totalled $172,813bn, against $199,393bn at GE and $388,480bn at Exxon."I'm not sure there is someone who can do Steve's [Ballmer's] job 'better'. It's an incredibly difficult job, perhaps intractable," Brad Silverberg, a former senior Windows executive and co-founder of Seattle venture capital firm Ignition Partners, told Reuters. "Perhaps the way the job is defined needs to change, and this is the harbinger of bigger changes to come."

Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk

George Osborne's homes scheme could sideline first-time buyers, say lenders

Help to Buy scheme may 'give with one hand and take with the other' by pushing costs up by 11% by the end of 2016

George Osborne's policy of kickstarting the housing market with subsidised mortgages could inflate prices to pre-crash peaks and sideline the first-time buyers it is designed to help, according to a group representing some of the UK's biggest banks and building societies

In the latest warning about the impact of the Help to Buy programme, lenders said property prices could rise by 11% by the end of 2016, with artificially inflated valuations the biggest threat to its success. Without a housebuilding programme to address the extra demand, property prices could spiral to new highs, said the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association.

"If house prices continue to rise for the duration of the scheme, then in essence we will be giving with one hand and taking away with the other," said Peter Williams, executive director of the IMLA and director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research.

House prices in London are above their 2007 peak, according to the Nationwide building society, but taken across the entire country they remain 9% lower, as IMLA warned that under the scheme the average UK home would cost £180,256 by the end of 2016. That would take average prices close to 2007 peak of £181,975.The Help to Buy scheme, announced by the chancellor in March, aims to grant mortgages to homebuyers with a deposit of as little of 5% of a property's price.

The first part of the programme, which allows buyers to subsidise purchases of newbuild homes with an interest-free loan from the government, launched in April. It has been credited with reversing a fall in housebuilding and boosting consumer confidence. However, the second part, which will be introduced at the start of 2014 and will offer a taxpayer-backed guarantee to lenders who offer mortgages worth up to 95% of the property's value, has attracted criticism from economists, politicians and other commentators, who have warned it could fuel a house price bubble. Albert Edwards, who heads the global strategy team at Société Générale, described it as a "moronic policy".

IMLA, whose members include subsidiaries of Santander, Barclays and Nationwide that offer mortgages through brokers, said 60% of its members believed the scheme could be undermined by a house price bubble.

While all respondents agreed first-time buyers had the most to gain from the second part of the scheme, they are likely to be the hardest hit by a rise in prices to 2007 levels. This would push the cost of a 5% deposit from £8,321 at the end of this year to £9,013 by the end of 2016.

A recovery in the housing market has accompanied a turnaround in the economy since the beginning of the year. GDP has risen by 1% in the first six months, with most sectors of the economy showing they expanded compared to last year.

However, the TUC is warning that a rise in UK population, by 2.3 million to 63.7 million over the last five years, means the benefits of GDP growth have been spread over a greater number of people. According to a TUC analysis, GDP per head is still 0.7% lower than when the coalition took office and 7.5% lower than the UK's peak level in late 2007.

The TUC's general secretary, Frances O'Grady, warned that the recent burst of borrowing by consumers to fund everything from house purchases to the weekly shop was based on extra debt and not on a rise in incomes.

She said: "Too many people are having to run down their savings or turn to credit cards to spend in the shops, rather than see their incomes grow. And behind improving employment figures are millions of workers whose incomes are falling and who can't get enough hours to make ends meet.

"We all want to see the UK economy back on track but any talk of recovery is meaningless unless we get the right kind of growth."

The current level of GDP per head at £23,728, is mere 0.7% higher than at the lowest point of the recession in September 2009, the TUC said.

Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk

Tuesday, 27 August 2013

Business booming for pubs, restaurants and legal firms

Optimism in the service sector at 15-year high after strongest trading since 2007, CBI reports

Pubs, hotels, restaurants, accountants and legal firms have enjoyed their strongest three months of trade since the beginning of the financial crisis, strengthening hopes that the UK economy is heading into a solid recovery.

A quarterly survey of the service sector by the CBI, the business lobby group, found the highest proportion of business and professional service firms reporting a rise in business volumes since November 2007 and the most positive outlook on profits since February 2008.

A total of 31% of the companies surveyed, which include accountants, lawyers and marketing firms, said business volumes rose, against 11% saying they had fallen – giving a positive balance of 20% for the quarter to August, the best reading since the early days of the financial crisis.

Optimism about the future was at a 15-year high, with a balance of 22% of companies saying they planned to hire staff and 39% expecting to expand their business. Among consumer services firms, such as hotels, bars and travel companies, a balance of 15% saw a rise in business volumes and a balance of 28% were optimistic about their prospects as the UK celebrated a warm and sunny summer.

But these companies said increased business was not translating into more jobs. They expected to continue to cut staff and rein in investment over the next quarter after profits unexpectedly fell back at the fastest rate for over a year as hoped-for price rises failed to come through. A balance of 11% said they had cut the number of people they employed and 24% said they would cut more jobs in the coming three months.

Stephen Gifford, the CBI's director of economics, said: "We've seen a further build-up of momentum in the service sector this quarter, with business and professional services firms in particular seeing a turnaround in their fortunes.

"Confidence has risen strongly across the board, and the outlook is positive in the short term. But consumer services firms are a bit more worried about the longer term, and have scaled back their investment and expansion plans."

The picture is well illustrated by the experience of British visitor attractions. The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, which represents venues from the British Museum to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, said its members had seen a 22% rise in visitor numbers this spring and summer compared with last year thanks to good weather, the legacy of the 2012 Olympics and the relative strength of the euro against the pound, which has encouraged visitors to cross the Channel.

But director Bernard Donoghue said visitor attractions were having to offer deals and keep prices down despite rising food and energy costs. "Visitor attractions know that where they do charge, the proposition has to be really attractive to appeal to a hard-pressed consumer," he said.

The CBI's largely positive survey of 161 businesses follows figures published last week that have boosted hopes the UK is heading into a strengthening recovery. On Friday the Office for National Statistics upgraded its estimate of economic growth in the second quarter of this year to 0.7% from 0.6%, making it the strongest three months since Britain got a temporary boost from the Olympics in 2012.

The figures indicated a broad-based bounceback as the improving economic climate in the eurozone lifts demand for British exports, while an uptick in the housing market and a decent summer had boosted consumer confidence.

Tesco and its market research partner, Dunnhumby, released figures over the weekend suggesting that consumer confidence is at its highest level for at least three years. They found that the proportion of consumers agreeing that the economic situation in the country had improved in the last few months had risen to 21% in July from 10% in April, while the proportion feeling that pressure on their finances was increasing dropped to 33% from 41%.

Last week, the CBI said it expected the economy to grow by 1% this year after releasing positive figures for the manufacturing sector.

Philip Clarke, chief executive of Tesco, suggested that good weather and Britain's sporting success over the summer, when Andy Murray won the Wimbledon tennis championship and England's cricketers secured the Ashes, had helped consumers feel more confident. But he warned: "The underlying picture is complex and it's not yet clear if the recent improvements in consumer confidence are thanks to these short-term factors, or part of a more significant shift."

Stephen Gifford at the CBI said: "Conditions remain tricky as households grapple with the prolonged squeeze on real incomes and business confidence remains vulnerable to any adverse developments in the global economy."

Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk

George Osborne under pressure to speed up Royal Bank of Scotland split

MPs voice concerns that chancellor will row back on plan to break up RBS to avoid disrupting the bank's recovery

An influential group of MPs has stepped up its drive to have Royal Bank of Scotland split up, amid concerns that Whitehall officials could back away from the proposal.

Members of the parliamentary commission on banking standards have demanded that plans go ahead to split the operations of the troubled institution, which is 81% owned by the taxpayer, into a so-called good bank and bad bank, in a bid to speed up its recovery and the sale of the government's stake and to help it increase business lending.

The split, which is designed to take toxic loans off its balance sheet and place them with a state-owned bank, has the backing of former Bank of England governor Mervyn King and the former Tory chancellor Lord Lawson.

The chancellor, George Osborne, has asked for a report by advisers Rothschild and Blackrock Solutions on whether the plan is likely to work, but reports suggest the inquiry has found little evidence that the bank's lending capacity is being constrained by bad debts and it is believed the bank sees the proposed changes as unnecessarily complex.

The commission, chaired by Conservative MP Andrew Tyrie, now fears Whitehall officials and the chancellor himself will sweep the proposals under the carpet to avoid disrupting the bank's recovery.

It has written to the Financial Times insisting on a speedy resolution.

In the letter, the commission writes that it is "important for all the options for [RBS's] future structure to be examined as a matter of urgency". It adds: "The chancellor's review also needs to examine whether, over time, the taxpayer may in fact be better off as a result of a split."

Tyrie said: "It is crucial that Rothschild approach this important work with a good deal of independence of mind."

Aides to the chancellor have insisted that, in his view, there are no presupposed right or wrong answers and that he is open to suggestions on the idea of a split. But some Treasury officials are believed to share the view of the bank's outgoing chief executive Stephen Hester, who is opposed to the plan.
Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk
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HS2 high-speed rail project is grand folly, say business leaders

Institute of Directors claims there is no business case for the line linking London with Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds

The Institute of Directors (IoD) has urged ministers to abandon the "grand folly" of the £50bn HS2 high-speed rail project, saying little more than a quarter of its members believe it will prove value for money.

The IoD's head, Simon Walker, said the business case for the line linking London with Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds over the next 20 years "simply is not there".

The call comes amid increasing unease among MPs about the scheme, which the thinktank the Institute of Economic Affairs has warned could see costs spiral to £80bn.

Labour has made it clear that the bill for the line and rolling stock should rise no further, while the other main business organisation, the CBI, said in June that investors and taxpayers needed confidence the business case was watertight and costs would be controlled.

Walker, publishing a survey of more than 1,300 business leaders, argued that the money could be better spent elsewhere. "Station upgrades, inter-city improvements, tunnels, electrification and capacity improvements should all be considered alternatives. It is time for the government to look at a thousand smaller projects instead of falling for one grand folly," he said.

IoD members have growing concerns that the line will benefit London more than the regions for which HS2 supporters claim it offers a lifeline. Even when the costs of the scheme were said to be just over £30bn, at the start of the year, the organisation was warning that businesses needed convincing of its economic value.

Although Labour leaders still support the scheme, former grandees Lord Mandelson and Alistair Darling have said it should be scrapped. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, said on Friday that there would be no "blank cheque" from a Labour Treasury.

However, Lord Adonis, the former Labour transport secretary who was architect of the scheme and is now head of a review on economic growth, has said any move by Labour to drop the scheme would be "an act of self-mutilation". He has consistently argued that upgrading existing lines would be hugely expensive and disruptive, providing far less additional capacity than building new lines.

Coalition ministers plan to introduce legislation to clear the way for phase one of HS2, to Birmingham, this year – with construction beginning in 2017 – after the appeal court dismissed arguments from local councils, residents' associations and other objectors along the first part of the line that proper environmental assessments had not been made. However, the protesters still believe a successful appeal to the supreme court could stop HS2 or delay it for years.

According to the government timetable the West Midlands part of the line would be ready in 2026, with the full Y-shaped route to Manchester and Leeds completed by 2032-33.

The survey of IoD members found only 27% felt HS2 represented good value for money and 70% thought it would have no impact on the productivity of their business. The IoD said in a statement that the government assumption that time spent on a train was unproductive for business was "wildly inaccurate" as only 6% of directors said they never worked on a train. By contrast, 48% of members claimed they spent at least half the journey working, 26% worked for between a quarter and half the time, and 21% up to a quarter of the journey.

Walker said: "Some of the specific claims that the government has used to support its economic case for the project have been challenged by our members, who by and large do not feel that their business will benefit."

He concluded that the IoD could not support the government's economic case for HS2 "when so many of our members are doubtful of the benefits" and warned that for all the advantages of infrastructure investment, "the business case for HS2 simply is not there".

A Department for Transport spokeswoman said: "We need to build HS2 to free up valuable space for passengers and freight because without it, our existing rail network will be full by the mid-2020s at a cost to passengers and businesses up and down country.

"The scheme is forecast to generate more than £50bn of benefits for the economy but we know we must maximise every economic benefit HS2 has to offer."

Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk

Monday, 26 August 2013

US to relax quantitative easing but emerging markets grow tense

As the US Federal Reserve tapers QE and interest rates rise, there are reasons not to fear a repeat of the Asian crisis

Brazil last week became the latest country to take emergency action to shore up its currency as anxious investors piled out of emerging markets. India, Indonesia, Turkey: there was more than a whiff of panic in the air as policymakers tried to reassure financial markets they remain a good bet.

The Brazilian real has lost 20% of its value against the dollar since the start of the year, the rupee is down 15% and the Turkish lira down 10%. The situation has alarming echoes of the catastrophic Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Back then, Thailand became the first of the fast-growing "Asian tigers" forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as foreign investors lost heart and left and its currency plunged, sparking a chain reaction that spread across much of the continent.

This time the looming crisis has been caused by a change of heart by the Federal Reserve, thousands of miles away in Washington. In 1997, it was Alan Greenspan's decision to push up US interest rates that sparked investors to pull their cash out of riskier markets to take advantage of better returns back home. This time, it's the stated intention of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed's board of governors, to start"tapering" its unprecedented $85bn a month programme of quantitative easing (QE), perhaps as soon as next month.

Under QE, the Federal Reserve hoovers up assets, mainly US government bonds or US treasury notes in a bid to push up their prices, which helps to reduce interest rates across the economy and create the conditions for recovery. But a side-effect of the policy is that banks and other investors use the cheap cash to go on a global shopping spree, looking for tempting investment prospects from Rio de Janeiro to Jakarta.

When the money is flooding in, inflating share prices and driving down the cost of government borrowing, it's easy for politicians in emerging economies to believe their own hype - political stability, the rising middle class, a large and growing workforce, huge untapped potential. But when the tide turns, they can suddenly become acutely vulnerable.

There are several reasons to be optimistic that we're not heading for a repeat of the Asian crisis. Many of the countries involved have piled up vast stockpiles of foreign currency reserves in the past 15 years in a deliberate bid to avoid being forced into the hands of the IMF. Few are reliant on the foreign-currency denominated loans that were a particular problem back then, and the Federal Reserve is acutely aware of the risk of sparking a new global financial crisis.

But while Central bankers have always known that the scale of the so-called "unconventional measures" that they unleashed on the world since the Great Crash of 1929 was unprecedented, they have no idea what the consequences will be as they start to unwind them. Just about every country that's been wooed by Wall Street over the past five years has good reason to be afraid.

Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk