Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt is seeking to fill a fiscal shortfall of £35 billion ($41 billion) when he sets out the government’s tax and spending plans next month, officials familiar with the matter said, Bloomberg News reported. The government has drawn up a menu of 104 options to cut spending to get public finances back onto a sustainable track, according to the officials, who cited Treasury and Office for Budget Responsibility data from this week.

Despite the increasingly pessimistic economic outlook, numbers of businesses in Yorkshire and the Humber experiencing insolvency-related activity saw a decrease last month, falling by 13.1% in September compared with August 2022 – the second largest drop of any of the regions and nations in the UK, Bdaily.co.uk reported.

UKCloud and its parent Virtual Infrastructure Group have been forced into liquidation, potentially bringing an end to the ailing business, The Register reported. As a British public-sector IT provider, UKCloud had central and local governments, the police, the Ministry of Defence, the NHS, Genomics England, the University of Manchester, and more as clients.

Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who warned that Liz Truss’ economic plans for Britain were a “fairy tale,” won the contest to succeed her as prime minister on Monday, taking over the world’s sixth-biggest economy at a time of deep financial and political turbulence, the Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Sunak will formally enter Downing Street after his only remaining rival for the job, former defense minister Penny Mordaunt, said on Twitter she would drop out of the contest. “Rishi has my full support,” she wrote. Mr.

British government debt rose to the highest level in almost 60 years last month and retail sales slumped, underscoring the scale of the economic challenges facing whoever replaces Prime Minister Liz Truss after her administration imploded under the weight of its failed financial plan, the Associated Press reported. Public borrowing rose to 98% of economic output in September as rampant inflation increased interest payments on what the government owed, the Office for National Statistics said Friday.

Liz Truss said on Thursday she would resign as prime minister, brought down by her economic programme that sent shockwaves through the markets and divided her Conservative Party just six weeks after she was appointed, Reuters reported. A leadership election will be completed within the next week to replace Truss, who is the shortest serving prime minister in Britain's history. George Canning previously held the record, serving 119 days in 1827, when he died.

The UK Treasury is set to transfer more than £11 billion ($12.4 billion) to the Bank of England this fiscal year to cover projected losses in its bond-buying program, Bloomberg News reported. The capital transfer was detailed in an update to the “Central Government Supply Estimates” published on Tuesday by the Treasury. The new £11.175 billion injection is listed under “assistance to financial institutions - payment to the Bank of England.” Parliament is set to debate the contents of the statement on Monday. The BOE is to begin unwinding its quantitative easing program next month.

British food prices rose at the fastest pace since 1980 last month, driving inflation back to a 40-year high and heaping pressure on the embattled government to balance the books without gutting help for the nation’s poorest residents, the Associated Press reported. Food prices jumped 14.6% in the year through September, led by the soaring cost of staples such as meat, bread, milk and eggs, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday. That pushed consumer price inflation back to 10.1%, the highest since early 1982 and equal to the level last reached in July.

A surge in bad loans awaits UK banks as higher interest rates saddle homeowners with an estimated £52 billion ($58.6 billion) of added mortgage payments over the next three years, an analyst warned as he downgraded his ratings on several lenders, Reuters reported. The jump in costs will help push the personal debt service burden toward about 10% of post-tax income and further into the “dangerous territory” traditionally associated with large increases in impairments, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Ed Firth wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday.

A plan to give the British government power to override watchogs would raise "serious concerns" about the ability of regulators to oversee the City as a global financial centre, Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. While Britain remains home to Europe's biggest financial sector after its exit from the European Union, banks are keen for regulators to help boost the City's global competitiveness.