Prime minister Boris Johnson and chancellor Rishi Sunak have vowed to overhaul rules governing Britain's huge asset management industry to make it easier to firms to invest in the U.K., Yahoo News reported. The pair issued a rallying cry to Britain's investment industry on Wednesday night, calling for money managers to plough more cash into British businesses and assets. The prime minister and the chancellor sent an open letter to senior investment industry professionals, calling for an "investment Big Bang" to help drive the country's recovery from COVID.

Inflation in Britain will rise to an annual rate of 4 percent later this year, according to new projections by the Bank of England, a level that is double the central bank’s target and one that hasn’t been reached in a decade. But policymakers didn’t feel the need to immediately slow their efforts to stimulate the economy, the New York Times reported. They said that the increase in prices would be temporary and that inflation would return to its 2 percent target in 2023.

AIB has set aside €100 million to compensate investors affected by a failed series of boom-time UK commercial property funds, including clients who were not part of a settlement agreement with the lender last month after taking legal action, the Irish Times reported. The High Court was told on July 8th that AIB had settled 270 cases over investor losses from collapsed UK property funds, known as the Belfry Funds.

Takeovers of British companies hit a 14-year high by value in the first seven months of 2021, Refinitiv data shows, with no sign the buying spree is slowing after U.S. companies targeted a leading supermarket and defence groups, Reuters reported. The total value of UK deals in the seven months was $198 billion, a more than threefold increase on the same period last year, which included the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Deals involving a British target totalled $34.9 billion in July, 5% less than June but more than seven times the value in July 2020.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.