Business

LONDON: NHS hospitals made more than £120m from car park charges in the past year, according to new figures. The Press Association asked 120 NHS trusts across England to give figures on parking charges and fines – 89 provided responses. More than half of those trusts are making more than ...

GLASGOW: People in Scotland are missing out on more than £2bn of social security payments on average each year. The impartial Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) estimates Scotland has £428m worth of unclaimed working tax credits or child tax credits. Those helping look after others are entitled to £190m in ...

LONDON: Many Britons will start 2017 with both a debt- and alcohol-induced hangover after using credit cards to fund Christmas celebrations, according to new research. Some 85% of people surveyed by uSwitch said they would be paying off credit cards into next year. Just over half believe they will still ...

LONDON: Britain’s exit from the European Union will send the country from fifth place to eighth in the global economic ranking in the next 15 years, a new economic analysis has found. The country’s economic prospects will be damaged by Brexit’s negative impact on the value of the pound, analysts at ...

PARIS: Nokia Corp said on Wednesday it had filed a number of lawsuits against Apple Inc for violating 32 technology patents, striking back at the iPhone maker’s legal action targeting the one-time cellphone industry leader a day earlier. Nokia’s lawsuits, filed in courts in Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Munich, Germany, and ...

LONDON: Consumer gloom around inflation is deepening as essential spending saw its biggest rise in 20 months, according to a report. A rise in spending on food and drink has driven essential spending to its strongest level of growth since February 2014, the latest Lloyds Bank Spending Power Report said. ...

LONDON: The famous Boxing day sales have just begun and, if your bank account is empty after Christmas there’s some decent deals to to be grabbed. All the of UK’s big stores including Argos, Amazon, Currys and ASDA have money off top tech such as the iPhone 7, 4K TVs ...

LONDON: Black Friday has ruined this year’s Boxing Day and January sales, retail experts have warned, as a record amount of returned online orders means stock will be stuck in warehouses, potentially leaving shop shelves empty.  As a result as many as one in five “this season” items will be absent in ...

LONDON: Nearly two-thirds of British businesses are “optimistic” about their future in the wake of the Brexit vote, a major survey has disclosed. A poll of 34,000 companies by the Institute of Directors found that 60 per cent of businesses are “optimistic” or “very optimistic” about the year ahead. The businesses, predominantly ...

LONDON: Bread sauce, Uncle Martin, batteries for the presents, crackers. There’s always something you only remember at the last minute. Worse, even if you’ve done your planning perfectly, things break at the worst possible time – and having children and pets running about in a crowded house hardly helps matters. ...