Good morning and welcome to the IC’s live blog, where we round up the biggest business stories of the day.
Report on Woodford investigation due today
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is expected to report to MPs today, after concluding its interviews with Neil Woodford and other executives from Link Fund Solutions, almost two years after the collapse of his flagship fund that left thousands of retail investors trapped.
The regulator launched an investigation into the freezing of Woodford’s Equity Income fund in June 2019 - but has yet to share its findings. It has come under political pressure to publish what it has uncovered, and in February it promised to update the Treasury select committee by the end of this month.
FCA turns on insurance loyalty penalties
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) also said today that it will ban insurers from charging their existing customers more than new ones for motor and home cover, after years of calls for change.
The regulator will implement new measures from September to prevent loyalty penalties and ‘price walking’, when firms increase prices for existing customers every year at the time of their renewal. At the moment, the practise means that customers often have to shop around and switch their insurance cover annually in order to avoid higher prices. The FCA anticipates that its plan will save loyal customers £4.2bn over 10 years.
Surgeons call for specialist hubs to catch up on elective surgeries
The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) has called for a network of specialist hubs focused on routine surgery to deal with a ‘colossal’ backlog of elective operations created last year, as hospitals cleared beds for Covid-19 patients . The Investors’ Chronicle revealed earlier this year that the number of these procedures had dropped 82 per cent in April 2020 at the 38 NHS trusts that responded to our freedom of information requests.
The drop in operations has come as a blow not only for the many vulnerable people awaiting treatment, but also for healthcare firms like Smith and Nephew (SN.), which depend on sales of surgical equipment for these procedures.
“We need government support for a ‘New Deal for Surgery’ to reduce the colossal backlog in elective surgery and to help the NHS weather future pandemics. Surgery must be available on the NHS all year-round, not stop and start,” said Professor Neil Mortensen, President of the RCS.
“If a dangerous new variant of COVID-19 takes hold, or another bad flu arrives in the autumn, we cannot allow surgery to grind to a halt again or waiting lists will become insurmountable.”
The news follows Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s press briefing yesterday, when he warned that the coronavirus variant first detected in India, B.1.617, now could account for up to 75 per cent of new cases in the UK.
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