A major £13.8m redevelopment is set to begin in the new year - despite the council facing bankruptcy, BBC.com reported. Gloucester City Council's cabinet members will vote later on releasing £4m to start phase one of the Greyfriars Quarter, which will see Eastgate Market relocated to Bell Walk. Under the wider scheme, a new market and food hall will also be created, as well as a park and gardens, all set within the grounds of the 13th Century Greyfriars monastery.

U.K. household spending fell at its fastest pace since the pandemic last month, as families cut back amid growing fears over the economy, The Telegraph reported. Spending on credit and debit cards fell 1.1pc compared with November of last year, according to data from Barclays, the steepest annual drop since February 2021, when the country was still battling strict Covid restrictions. The fall comes despite weeks of discount offers in the run-up to Christmas, particularly those relating to Black Friday late last month.

Scottish mountain bike brand, Deviate Cycles Limited, is insolvent, and the directors have been working with their professional advisers to try to find a buyer. Offers made were deemed insufficient, and so co-founder Ben Jones has stepped in to buy the company's assets, PinBike.com reported. Jones explained that Deviate Cycles, like too many bicycle brands, found itself in financial difficulty in the latter half of 2025 after major delays to stock availability. Stock that was supposed to arrive in the UK and be available for sale in summer did not arrive until late autumn.

Administrators to Petrofac, the collapsed oilfield services company, are racing to secure a sale of its North Sea operations by Christmas - a move which could save thousands of British jobs. Sky News understands that Teneo, which is handling Petrofac's insolvency, received a handful of bids for its profitable UK business late last week. City sources said the administrators wanted to sign a deal with a purchaser before the end of the year.

The Bank of England said on Thursday that it was launching a stress test of how the $16 trillion global private equity and private credit industries would deal with a major financial shock, Reuters reported. The central bank said the system-wide exploratory scenario will produce a final report in early 2027 which will focus on the impact on the British economy as a whole, rather than publishing details on the vulnerabilities of individual firms. "Private equity and private credit play an increasingly valuable role in helping UK companies to innovate, invest and grow.

The Bank of England has sounded the alarm about foreign hedge funds buying up UK debt, warning that their speculative trades could spark a crisis, The Telegraph reported. The British Government is becoming increasingly reliant on a small group of opaque foreign investors to finance its large deficit, Threadneedle Street officials warned. Buying UK government bonds, known as gilts, allows hedge funds to bet on tiny differentials between current and future prices. However, they also often borrow against the same gilts to juice the returns on their investments.

British banks will no longer need to hold so much capital, as the U.K. joins the U.S. in unwinding some measures put in place after the global financial crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported. The benchmark ratio of capital to risk-weighted assets will fall to 13% from 14%, the Bank of England said Tuesday. The BOE, like the Federal Reserve, both regulates banks and sets interest rates. The lenders it oversees include major international players such as HSBC and Barclays, whose shares rose in London.

Fifty higher education providers in England are at risk of exiting the market within the next two to three years, MPs on the House of Commons education committee have been told as part of their inquiry into university funding and the threat of insolvency, The Guardian reported. The evidence follows last week’s gloomy forecast from England’s higher education regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), which warned that three in four universities were likely to be in the red next year as financial turmoil continues in the sector.

U.K. Treasury chief Rachel Reeves Wednesday announced a second consecutive year of hefty tax rises, a move aimed at reassuring investors that the British state wasn’t slowly going bust under the weight of growing welfare spending and ballooning interest payments on government debt, the Wall Street Journal reported.

U.K. insolvencies are rising sharply, with a leading trade credit insurer saying any new government policies that stand to raise business costs risk further pressuring vulnerable sectors, Bloomberg News reported. The increase reflects the impact of measures announced in last year’s budget, including higher minimum wages and reduced business relief rates, according to Coface SA. The data analyzed by the firm showed insolvencies rose 3.9% year-on-year between May and October, reversing a decline seen before the policies took effect in April.