Nationwide, Britain’s biggest building society, has warned that efforts to curb mortgage lending in an attempt to cool the London housing market could have “unintended consequences” for the rest of the country, The Telegraph reported. Mark Rennison, the lender’s finance director, said that concerns about house prices had been exaggerated and did not warrant changes to the Government’s controversial Help to Buy scheme. It came after Nationwide revealed that profits had more than doubled, with the value of its mortgage loans rising by 31pc in the last year.

A group of 13 companies involved in a carbon credit scheme have been wound up in the High Court on grounds of public interest, Insolvency Today reported. Following an investigation by the Insolvency Service, the companies, which raised over £19m through the sale of carbon credits to the public for investment, were put into liquidation. The investigation found Eco-Synergies Ltd, a wholesaler of Voluntary Emission Reduction (VER) carbon credits, was at the heart of the scheme.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said the government will consider scaling back its Help to Buy mortgage support scheme if the Bank of England believes it is inflating a housing bubble, as official data showed an annual house price rise of 17 per cent in London, the Financial Times reported. Mr Cameron told the BBC he agreed with Mark Carney, BoE governor, when he said last weekend that the sharp rise in house prices posed “the biggest risk” to the UK’s economic recovery.

A new standards body for British bankers will be launched this year, with a chairman appointed by an independent panel led by Bank of England governor Mark Carney, the Irish Times reported. Richard Lambert, a former director general of the Confederation of British Industry, who was tasked with setting the body up, said the Banking Standards Review Council (BSRC) would be a champion for better banking standards in the UK.

People could be stopped taking out mortgages worth many times their salary to buy new homes, the Governor of the Bank of England has said, The Telegraph reported. Mark Carney said in an interview that capping the size of mortgage ratios to salaries was one measure the Bank was considering to controlling the housing market. The Bank was also watching to see if the Government’s Help to Buy scheme – in which the Government gives people taxpayers money to cover deposits on new homes worth up to £600,000 - was fuelling them.

The Co-op's members voted unanimously on Saturday to accept a controversial plan to overhaul the 150-year-old organisation, which has been rocked by a series of crises, The Guardian reported. The decision to endorse reforms put forward by City grandee Paul Myners will be seen as a major victory for its executive directors. Spelling out the scale of the crisis facing the group, Richard Pennycook, the group's interim chief executive, pointed out that debt interest payments were now costing the organisation £100m a year.

Britain's Co-operative Bank said on Saturday it had completed a 400 million pound ($674 million) fundraising to bolster its capital position, Reuters reported. The capital raise, which was launched on Friday, is subject to shareholder approval at a general meeting that will be held in due course, the bank said in a statement.

After decades of building a global investment bank, Barclays is sounding a retreat, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The British bank announced on Thursday plans to take an ax to its investment banking business — which has major operations in New York as well as London and Asia — by slashing half of its capital and more than a quarter of its work force, or 7,000 jobs. Instead, Barclays will focus on four core areas: retail and corporate banking, primarily in Britain; credit cards; banking in Africa; and, to a lesser extent, investment banking.

Plans to give HM Revenue and Customs the power to dip into bank accounts to recover unpaid tax will leave people open to fraud and error, a Commons watchdog has warned, The Guardian reported. The Treasury select committee, led by Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, said the current proposals are "very concerning" because people will be at risk of having money wrongly taken out by HMRC. Around 17,000 a year people could be affected by the new tax collection powers, which are expected to raise around £100m a year.

Centrica issued its second profits warning in six months yesterday, after admitting 180,000 households had quit its domestic arm British Gas, and the mild winter meant its remaining customers turned their heating down, The Independent reported. The Big Six supplier said it would not raise prices for British Gas customers this year. However, despite admitting that wholesale energy costs had fallen, it made no offer to cut prices.