The U.K. Department for Work and Pensions says lowering the age of entitlement would be "neither affordable nor fair," the BBC reported. More than 69,000 people have signed a Commons petition calling for a reduction to be introduced with immediate effect. Until 2010, the state pension age was 60 for women and 65 for men, but qualifying ages were brought in line for everyone by 2018 and have been rising since. In 2020, a further change to the rules required men and women born between 6 October, 1954, and 5 April, 1960, to have to wait until their 66th birthday to receive their pension.
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Britain opened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers from the U.S. and the European Union on Monday as travel industry leaders urged the government to further ease restrictions and allow people to enjoy the benefits of a successful COVID-19 inoculation program, the Associated Press reported. The new rules came into effect amid reports that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government may add a new category to Britain’s traffic light system of travel restrictions, a move industry officials say would make many people decide to stay home.
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The French government accused Britain on Thursday of enforcing discriminatory new rules that will lift quarantine requirements for most vaccinated travelers — but not for those arriving from France, the New York Times reported. The British authorities announced on Wednesday that, starting in August, a quarantine would no longer be required for travelers from the United States or from most of the European Union who had been vaccinated with shots authorized by either American or European drug regulators.
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Private equity group American Industrial Partners has moved to take control of one of Sanjeev Gupta’s key assets, the Dunkirk aluminum smelter, in an escalation of an acrimonious battle between the businessman and the suitor he spurned, Bloomberg News reported. A U.K. holding company for the smelter has been placed into administration, according to a filing last week. The legal action was initiated by AIP, according to a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be named as the matter isn’t public. AIP owns most of the senior debt on the Dunkirk plant.
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Fully vaccinated travelers from the United States and much of Europe will be able to enter Britain without quarantining starting next week, U.K. officials said Wednesday — a move welcomed by Britain’s ailing travel industry, the Associated Press reported. The British government said people who have received both doses of a vaccine approved by the FDA in the U.S. or by the European Medicines Agency, which regulates drugs for the European Union and several other countries, will be able to take pre- and post-arrival coronavirus tests instead of self-isolating for 10 days after entering England.
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British retailers reported only a slight slowdown in July after sales growth hit its highest in almost three years in June, the first full month after non-essential shops reopened from a coronavirus shutdown, industry data showed on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The Confederation of British Industry's measure of the volume of sales compared with a year earlier dipped to +23 from June's +25, which was the highest since August 2018. The CBI said that the growth in orders was the fastest since December 2010 and the pace of sales was expected to pick up again in August.
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A British court on Monday granted a bankruptcy order against Vijay Mallya, paving the way for a consortium of Indian banks led by the State Bank of India (SBI) to pursue a worldwide freezing order to seek repayment of debt owed by the now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines, the Financial Express reported. “As at 15.42 [UK time], I shall adjudicate Dr Mallya bankrupt,” Chief Insolvencies and Companies Court (ICC) Judge Michael Briggs said in his ruling during a virtual hearing of the Chancery Division of the High Court.
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The U.K. government could face “limitless” losses as a result of businesses that accept payments in untaxed and untraceable cryptocurrencies going bust, an insolvency expert has warned, The Guardian reported. A growing number of companies, including the ethical cosmetics firm Lush and office-sharing firm WeWork, have begun taking payments for goods and services in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, alongside debit payments, credit or cash.
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The British government said that the post-Brexit trade rules it negotiated with the European Union “cannot go on” and need a major rewrite, straining already-tense U.K./E.U. relations and drawing a message of concern from the U.S. government, the Associated Press reported. The government said Britain would be justified in unilaterally suspending the legally binding Brexit agreement but had decided not to do so just yet. Since the U.K. left the EU’s economic embrace at the end of 2020, relations have soured over trade arrangements for Northern Ireland, the only part of the U.K.
Britain's supermarkets, wholesalers and hauliers were struggling to ensure stable food and fuel supplies after an official health app told hundreds of thousands of workers to isolate after contact with someone with COVID-19, Reuters reported. Coronavirus cases in Britain have been broadly rising for a month, with more than 44,000 recorded on Wednesday. "We're very concerned about the situation," Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said.