The Labour leadership has lost a motion at the party’s conference in Liverpool that called on ministers to reverse the cuts to winter fuel payments. The defeat is a blow to Downing Street, as the prime minister and his team had repeatedly said during the conference that the move demonstrated that they could be trusted…

The Co-operative Group has laid bare the impact of shoplifting as it said the cost of crime in its stores soared by almost 20% to £40m in the first half of the year. The member-owned mutual has spent £18m so far this year on measures to protect staff in its food business, including rolling out…

Rachel Kyte, the new UK special representative on climate, advised the UK government as host of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow in 2021, one of several globally recognised climate and governance experts to do so. But her advice appeared to make little impact on Johnson’s Tory successors, especially when as prime minister Rishi Sunak dismayed…

A new high-speed train linking Paris and Berlin is to launch in December, operators have announced. The daytime service will complement a popular night train route between the two capital cities that relaunched last year to much fanfare but has since been beset by technical problems. The daytime train service, which has been delayed by…

As the Labour party conference kicked off in Liverpool, the rain clouds gathered. Drenched delegates should have been celebrating at their first conference in power for 15 years. Instead, the mood was subdued after weeks of ministers hammering home their message that the Conservative party had left the country in a terrible economic state. Anger…

Yorkshire has the lowest ratio of bank branches to people of anywhere in the UK after a wave of closures that has left many places without a single outlet, research has found. The Yorkshire and the Humber region now has 248 branches left to serve a population of 5.6 million people, according to consumer group…

Adverts for Nike and Sky have been banned by the regulator for using “dark pattern” tactics designed to lead consumers to unintentionally spend money. Nike had advertised a shoe at a low price, causing consumers to click through only to find that it was for a children’s size, while Sky did not make it clear…

The US Department of Justice sued Visa for alleged antitrust violations on Tuesday, accusing one of the world’s largest payment networks of suppressing competition by threatening merchants with high fees and paying off potential rivals. Visa processes more than 60% of debit transactions in the US, bringing it $7bn each year in fees collected when…

There was something striking about Sir Keir Starmer’s defiance of conventional wisdom. There he was addressing his party’s annual conference – the first Labour prime minister to do so in 15 years – facing growing public unease over gifts from rich donors, internal disquiet over welfare cuts, and warnings from pollsters that his chances of…

The Post Office attempted to use Horizon IT data to support a criminal case against a post office owner earlier this year, despite hundreds of post office operators being wrongfully prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting because of bugs in the system. A chain of email correspondence between the Post Office and the Horizon…