1 A generation of passengers will be put off travelling by rail for good because of industrial action, ministers fear as Britain faces the worst week of rail disruption for 30 years. Millions of people have been advised to avoid travelling by rail as the country faces five days of industrial action, effectively delaying the return to offices by a week as an estimated 80,000 trains are cancelled.
2 A third of the world’s economies will be in recession this year and even countries that avoid an official downturn will feel the strain, the head of the International Monetary Fund has warned. Kristalina Georgieva said: “This is going to be a tough year, tougher than the year we leave behind, because the three big economies, the US, the EU and China, are all slowing down simultaneously.”
3 Rishi Sunak will be forced to abandon plans for a bonfire of EU laws before the end of the year. The government has committed to removing about 4,000 pieces of EU-derived laws from the British statute book by December. But the scale of the task means that it is increasingly seen in Whitehall as an impossible deadline, with internal estimates suggesting that thousands of officials will have to be diverted to review legislation full-time.
4 Wine consumption in France is set to slump by 60 per cent over the next ten years, after already falling from an average of 120 litres a person a year in 1960 to 40 litres in 2020. That will lead to “massive and historic” cuts in the wine sector, which employs 500,000 people in France, industry leaders say.
5 China’s health officials have accepted that its number of Covid-related deaths is “huge” but argue the mortality rate may still be within the normal range for the world’s most populated nation. Tong Zhaohui, vice-president of Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing, agreed the number was large but said the percentage of deaths may still be low.
Advertisement
6 House prices are on course to suffer their biggest decline since the financial crisis, with economists warning of a market “correction” this year caused by rising borrowing costs and a likely recession. Two thirds of economists surveyed by The Times expected house prices to fall by more than 4 per cent, with most warning of near double-digit declines, which would make 2023 the worst year for the housing market since 2009.
7 Sales and profits at Richer Sounds fell last year as demand for home cinemas and new sound systems retreated after Covid restrictions were ended. Nevertheless, Julian Richer, who founded the electronics retailer in 1978, was still paid £10.5 million as part of the deal he struck almost four years ago to sell most of the business to its employees.
8 Crucial pre-launch testing of the pensions dashboard programme, an ambitious state-backed project to help tens of millions of workers to keep track of their pension arrangements has fallen behind schedule, experts have warned.
9 The annual Times economists survey, now in its sixth year, paints an uncertain picture for the UK and global economy in 2023, a year likely to be dominated by war, global political trade tensions and the battle to bring down inflation. Britain is on course to be among the worst-performing of the world’s big economies this year.
10 The government has no contemporary estimate for the level of fraud and error in a pandemic employment scheme, despite concerns that rogue suppliers and employers may have exploited it to steal funds from the taxpayer. The Department for Work and Pensions has admitted that it has not done any work to understand the value of losses, or even an estimated rate of loss, since the launch of Kickstart in 2020.