Business live blog, Monday June 30 — as it happened

He added: “The company has left the government with very little time to act. The government is supporting the Official Receiver to carry out their statutory duties, including managing the situation on the site to determine next steps. This will include urgently reporting back on all potential uses of the site, prior to a wind-down of the refinery.

“The government believes that the business’s leadership have a responsibility to the workers and the local community. We call on them to do the right thing and support the workers through this difficult period.”

Hikma Pharmaceuticals is to invest $1 billion to expand manufacturing and research and development in the United States.

The FTSE 100-listed generics manufacturer announced the five-year commitment at its facility in Columbus, Ohio, becoming the latest multinational to announce large investment plans in America following pressure from President Trump to base more manufacturing in the US.

The company is one of the world’s biggest generic drugs groups, with 29 manufacturing plants, more than 800 products and 9,500 employees. Based in Mayfair and listed on the London Stock Exchange since 2005, it has a market cap of £4.5 billion.

The company has operated in the US, the world’s most lucrative drugs company, since 1991 where it has spent more than $4 billion over the past 15 years to expand its R&D and manufacturing capabilities.

Santander is understood to be among bidders that have submitted a binding offer for TSB, at a reported valuation of £2.3 billion.

The Spanish lender is believed to be vying with Barclays, and a number of unnamed suitors, to buy the high street lender from rival Sabadell, which is expected to hold a board meeting as soon as tomorrow to decide on whether to proceed.

Sabadell confirmed last week that it had received some preliminary non-binding expressions of interest for TSB, which was spun out of Lloyds Banking Group and briefly floated in 2014 before being bought by Sabadell for £1.7 billion in 2015.

Santander and Sabadell declined to comment.

Union bosses have called on ministers to step in immediately following a report that the parent company of one of Britain’s last remaining oil refineries has fallen into administration.

Unite said the Lindsey oil refinery, which employs a workforce of 440 in Lincolnshire, is “strategically important, and the government must intervene immediately to protect workers and fuel supplies”.

The union demand follows a Sky News report that State Oil, the parent company of Prax Group, has called in administrators. An official announcement is expected later today.

Lindsey is one of only a handful of refinieries left in Britain, and and produces about a tenth of the country’s output including petrol, diesel, kerosene and aviation fuel.

Unite said that it has “constantly warned the government that its policies have placed the oil and industry on a cliff edge. It has failed to act and instead put its fingers in its ears.”

Thames Water has asked a group of senior creditors to allow it to draw down a further £157 million from the £1.5 billion loan facility that is keeping it afloat.

The request came as the creditors continue talks with regulators about their £5 billion rescue plan, which is the only option left on the table for the company to avoid the government’s special administration regime (SAR), a form of temporary nationalisation..

Thames has asked super senior creditors — the group whose debt holds the highest priority in a company’s capital structure — to extend a deadline and waive certain conditions so it can continue to access the loan. It has so far spent almost half of the initial £1.5 billion loan facility.

Steve Reed, the environment secretary, said on June 19 that his department had “stepped up” preparations for SAR after KKR, the US private equity giant, walked away from a multi-billion pound rescue plan.

An employee works at the battery manufacturing plant for the Nissan Leaf car at Nissan’s plant in Sunderland

OLI SCARFF/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Nissan Motor will begin talks this week to seek job cuts at its Sunderland plant, as the Japanese carmaker targets a 15 per cent reduction in its global workforce in the face of slowing sales.

It did not say how many job cuts it was targeting. Japan’s Kyodo News, which earlier reported the planned cuts, said Nissan was aiming to lay off 250 workers. The car manufacturer employs about 133,500 people globally, with about 6,000 workers in Sunderland.

• Nissan lobbied ministers to relax electric car sales targets

“We will begin discussions with some of our employees at the Sunderland plant this week about voluntary retirement opportunities and support from the company,” Nissan said.

Along with the job cuts, Nissan chief executive Ivan Espinosa has announced plans to close seven plants worldwide, although Sunderland is not expected to be among them. The factory is seen as critical to Nissan’s European operations and it plans to make the new version of its Leaf EV.

Energy suppliers that fail to meet Ofgem’s financial resilience targets are getting an unfair advantage and should be named, according to rivals.

The regulator has come under fire from Utility Warehouse, Britain’s seventh-largest supplier, and Good Energy, a leading smaller supplier, for failing to identify three companies that are falling short of the minimum “capital target” that came into force at the end of March.

The rules were introduced after dozens of poorly-capitalised suppliers went bust in the energy crisis of 2021-22, costing households billions of pounds.

Stuart Burnett, chief executive of Telecom Plus, said: “Ofgem’s approach is already creating an unlevel playing field, and should undercapitalised suppliers fail, it is the consumer that will suffer the most.”

Emily Gosden has the full story here.

Motorists are still being hit with high fuel margins despite lower prices at the pump, the competition watchdog has said.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said retailers’ margins — the difference between what they pay for fuel and what they sell it at — remained high compared to historic levels.

Fuel prices across the UK fell for both petrol and diesel over the three months to the end of May by 7.6 pence per litre (ppl) and 8.4 ppl respectively.

But the CMA found that fuel margins remain elevated which suggests overall competition in the UK’s road fuel retail market remained “weak”.

Supermarket fuel margins fell from 8.9 per cent in December 2024 to 7.9 per cent in February 2025, before rising to 8.3 per cent in March 2025, the regulator found.

Non-supermarket fuel margins fell from 9.9 per cent in December 2024 to 8.9 per cent in January 2025, before rising to 10.4 per cent in March 2025.

Having started the week on the front foot, the FTSE 100 has taken a step back during the morning session, to trade down 16 points or -0.2 per cent at 11.30am.

Among the biggest losers as the index struggled for direction were Intermediate Capital Group, the global alternative asset manager, which lost 3.5 per cent, Marks & Spencer was down 2.6 per cent while Experian, the credit and data analytics group,retreated 2.3 per cent.

Rolls-Royce was at the top of the leaderboard, up 2.3 per cent, followed by Imperial Brands, up 1.6 per cent, and Auto Trader which added 1.3 per cent.

The pound was trading slightly down against the dollar, losing 0.1 per cent at $1.369, and the euro, down 0.1 per cent while Brent oil was off 9 cents at $66.71 at €1.168.

Gold firmed up 0.4 per cent at $3,287.29 per ounce as the dollar hovered near its lowest level in more than three years, amid expectations US interest rates could be cut faster as economic activity shows signs of slowing.

Alexander Darwall, a stockpicker once so admired that Jupiter blamed him for £4.3 billion of client defections when he left, is selling up.

Darwall is selling his business Devon Equity Management to Martin Gilbert’s River Global for up to £2.46 million. He will join River Global as co-head of European equities.

London-based Devon has struggled to win business in recent years after a period of underperformance and Darwall’s spectacular misreading of one of its biggest investments, Wirecard, which turned out to be a massive fraud.

Read more: Star stockpicker Alexander Darwall sells fund for just £2.46m

Mortgage approvals and home lending rose in May in a sign of an improving housing market and gradually falling interest rates.

Official figures from the Bank of England showed that new mortgages rose by 2,400 to 63,000 last month, up from 60.6k recorded in April and beating expectations of around 59k.

The total volume of mortgage lending also rose sharply by £2.8 billion between April and May, when credit contracted by £800 million, the Bank. said. Remortgage approvals also posted the highest figures since February 2024 at 41,500.

The effective interest rate paid on the average new mortgage in the UK fell from 4.49 per cent to 4.47 per cent between April and May. The Bank cut interest rates from 4.5 per cent to 4.25 per cent on May 8 and is expected to do so again in August, according to financial market projections.

DINENDRA HARIA/SOPA IMAGES/ZUMA

WH Smith will receive less from the sale of its 230-year-old high street business to Hobbycraft-owner Modella, the retailer said on Monday as it completed the sale.

It blamed a “more cautious outlook amongst stakeholders”, adding: “This, combined with a period of softer trading, has resulted in a reduction in the ongoing cash flow of the business.”

WH Smith now expects gross cash proceeds of up to £40 million, compared to £52 million it had previously forecast.

WH Smith sold the high street business to focus on its travel business.

Simon French, the managing director and chief economist at Panmure Liberum, says the nuances in the second release of GDP data from the Office for National Statistics today need to be considered. “Expect plenty of data cherry-picking his week,” he writes.

In his column in The Times today on Labour’s first twelve months, French says: “There is a credible argument that things could have been considerably worse given the structural challenges inherited from the Conservatives. Yet a series of policy missteps have needlessly sapped momentum. In essence, Labour’s first year has been defined less by a transformative economic mission and more by steady progress, punctuated by damaging miscalculation.”

Households saved less in the first three months of the year, data from the Office for National Statistics showed.

The household saving ratio is estimated to have decreased by 1.1 percentage points to 10.9 per cent in the quarter, which the ONS said was driven by a fall in the non-pension savings contributions. This was down from 12 per cent in the fourth quarter.

Real household disposable income per head fell by 1 per cent in the first quarter, down from a 1.8 per cent rise in the fourth quarter.

Defence, aerospace and gold mining stocks led the risers in early trading on the FTSE 100.

Rolls-Royce has been helped by cuts in US tariffs for the aerospace sector which have come into force, while miners Fresnillo and Endeavour were lifted by a rise in the price of gold, supported by a weaker dollar.

Energy stocks fell on a lower oil price.

Sterling has continued to strengthen this morning as the dollar slid as optimism over US trade deals increased market bets for earlier interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.

The pound was up 0.03 per cent against the dollar at $1.3716.

The FTSE 100 has opened around 11 points higher, up 0.13 per cent to 8,811.98. The more UK-focused FTSE 250 was flat at 21,722.05.

Oil prices fell at the prospect of another Opec+ output increase in August improved supply expectations. Brent crude futures dropped 0.5 per cent to $66.49 a barrel.

Gold, a safe haven asset, rose to $3,294.64 an ounce.

Dame Meg Hillier says the Lifetime Isa needs to be reformed before it can genuinely be described as a market-leading savings product

TIMES MEDIA LTD

MPs have called for the government to reform Lifetime Isas amid concerns that the accounts are too complicated, penalise some savers and may even have been mis-sold to people who could be eligible for universal credit, Ben Martins reports.

The Commons Treasury committee warned that the dual-purpose objective of the products, which are known as Lisas and are meant to help people save to buy their first home and put away money for retirement, had made them “complex and increases the risk of consumers choosing unsuitable investment strategies”.

Dame Meg Hillier, who chairs the committee, said that while the MPs were “firmly behind” the aims of the ­accounts, “the question is whether the Lifetime Isa is the best way to spend ­billions of pounds over several years to achieve those goals”.

“The Lifetime Isa needs to be reformed before it can genuinely be described as a market-leading savings product.”

Range Rover for export at Liverpool, Merseyside

ALAMY

Tariff cuts for carmakers and the aerospace sector have come into force after Sir Keir Starmer finalised parts of a deal for relief from US import taxes.

Car makers such as Jaguar Land Rover, Mini, and Aston Martin are expected to be shipping cars to America today. They will face a 10 per cent tariff quota, down from 27.5 per cent, while the aerospace sector will see a 10 per cent levy removed entirely.

Starmer and President Trump finalised the deal for the sectors at the G7 summit. However, tariffs on steel have been left at 25 per cent rather than falling to zero as originally agreed. Talks are ongoing to secure zero tariffs.

Gross domestic product is estimated to have grown by 0.7 per cent in the first quarter of the year, unrevised from the first estimate, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed today.

In output terms, growth was driven by an increase in the dominant services sector. Manufacturing and construction also grew, helped by an increase in exports ahead of President Trump’s ‘liberation day’ tariffs that he announced in early April.

Recent data from the ONS showed the economy contracted by 0.3 per cent in April after US tariffs and higher employers’ National Insurance were introduced.

Tritax Big Box, the company that tabled a £485 million bid for larger rival Warehouse Real Estate Investment Trust last week, has said it expects to deliver earnings growth of 50 per cent in the medium-term. The forecast came ahead of an “investor summit” this afternoon.

Colin Godfrey, chief executive of Tritax Big Box, said: “Today’s investor seminar provides the platform to showcase the significant growth opportunities our strategic focus creates. With record rental reversion, an attractive logistics development pipeline and, thanks to our innovative power-first approach, the potential for major data centres”.

China’s factories face slowing demand from overseas buyers

GETTY

China’s manufacturing activity contracted for a third month in June, the official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) showed. PMI rose to 49.7 in June from 49.5 in May, remaining below the 50-mark that separates growth from contraction and in line with economists’ forecasts.

The figures suggest factories are battling to find domestic buyers as overseas sales slow in the face of the uneasy trade truce with the US. Beijing is unlikely to be able to meet its 2025 growth target of “around 5 per cent” if the country’s vast manufacturing sector stagnates or shrinks.

Asia shares strengthened as signs of progress in a trade standoff between the United States and Canada helped risk sentiment.

Japan’s Nikkei rose 0.8 per cent and China’s SSE Composites gained 0.25 per cent.

The FTSE 100 is forecast to open flat when trading begins shortly. The index rose as in a global rally on Friday, fuelled by growing optimism that the US and China are nearing a trade agreement.

Investors are also eyeing the progress of a huge US tax-cutting and spending bill making its way through the Senate. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would add $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt, which could test foreign buyers’ appetite for US government bonds.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney with President Trump at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, Alta.

ALAMY

Canada scrapped its digital services tax targeting US technology companies on Sunday, just hours before it was due to take effect and in a bid to advance stalled trade negotiations with the United States.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and US president Donald Trump will resume trade talks in order to agree on a deal by July 21, Canada’s finance ministry said in a statement.

Trump abruptly called off trade talks on Friday over the tax, saying that it was a “blatant attack” On Sunday, he had pledged to set a new tariff rate on Canadian goods.

The breakdown in trade talks comes after the two leaders met at the G7 in mid-June, and Carney said they had agreed to wrap up a new economic agreement within 30 days.