Category: 3. Business

NatWest and Lombard, the UK’s largest asset finance provider, have today announced a new partnership with the Farming Community Network (FCN), a voluntary organisation and charity dedicated to supporting farmers and their families across the UK.

Recent studies have shown that farmers are at higher risk of poor mental health compared to other professions, making targeted wellbeing support more important than ever. As one of the UK’s leading banks for agriculture, with over 40,000 farming customers nationwide, the bank is uniquely positioned to detect customers in need of support through its dedicated network of face-to-face agricultural specialist managers which are embedded in farming communities across the country.

Through this partnership, NatWest and Lombard’s agriculture sector team have received dedicated training from the FCN, enabling them to spot the early signs of stress and mental health challenges among farmers and their families. This ensures that these colleagues can offer timely support and guidance, helping customers to access FCN’s wellbeing resources, while supporting mental health awareness and resilience within the agricultural sector.

 

Rachael Watson, Head of Agriculture at Lombard, commented:

“Farming is more than a profession—it’s a way of life, shaped by unpredictable weather, market pressures, and the immense responsibility for land and livestock. These realities can have a profound impact on farmers’ mental health. As a bank serving over 40,000 farming customers across the UK, we believe that it’s essential to support the wellbeing of the farming community. By partnering with FCN and embedding wellbeing awareness into every customer interaction, we’re committed to ensuring farmers and their families have access to practical support. Our agricultural specialists have completed FCN’s wellbeing training, equipping them to understand and address the unique challenges faced by farmers today.”

Georgina Lamb, Head of Partnerships for the Farming Community Network, said: “We’re thrilled to partner with NatWest and Lombard to further our mission of supporting farmers and farming families during challenging times. By working together, we can reach more individuals with essential information, resources, and a listening ear, helping them manage stress and build resilience for the future.”

Do you want to know where new homes could be built in North East Lincolnshire, where businesses could develop and how we will protect the environment around them? Would you like to see if, or where, new schools might be built?

Have your say on how North East Lincolnshire grows and develops in the years ahead. Consultation on the draft Preferred Options Local Plan (2025–2043) is open now.

If you live in Immingham, you can visit our face-to-face event this Thursday January 8 at Burton Hall, Civic Centre, Pelham Road, from 5pm until 8pm, when  planning officers will be available to answer questions and help you respond to the latest round of consultation. This event will give you a chance to look at the Council’s preferred housing and employment site options.

This Stage Three consultation on the Local Plan began on December 8 and runs until 23.59 on February 1 2026. Electronic and paper copies of the survey questions are available to give everyone the opportunity to have their say.

The statutory review of the Local Plan began two years ago and attracted responses from more than 1,100 individuals at the last consultation. These have been reviewed and will inform the next phase of the process, and you can still have your say, or make new comments, on any, and all aspects of the Local Plan.

The review had to be paused in 2024 to consider and incorporate Government changes that have increased the housing target for many local authorities, including North East Lincolnshire. As a result, the council is now undertaking this further round of consultation and updating evidence in relation to housing and employment need. Draft Plan changes relate to: 

• Jobs growth and employment needs within the plan period
• The requirements for new homes and the distribution of these homes; and
• Specific site allocations for employment and residential uses.

The new housing target for North East Lincolnshire, based on the Government’s ‘standard method’ introduced in December 2024, is now 622 homes per year, totalling 11,196 homes over the plan period. Adoption of the revised plan is now expected in 2028 with its life extended until 2043.

All comments from the 2024 consultation will be considered equally alongside new submissions. Full responses from the earlier consultation are available on the “What People Said” tab consultation portal.

You can view the Preferred Options document and supporting documents online at www.nelincs.gov.uk/local-plan-review.

Paper copies will be available to read at Cleethorpes Library, Immingham Library, Waltham Library, Grimsby Pop-Up Library, The Gingerbread House, Humberston, Scartho Community Library, and the Municipal Offices, Grimsby.

To take part in this Stage Three consultation visit the Local Plan consultation portal at: https://nelincs-consult.objective.co.uk/kse/

Another face-to-face event will take place on Saturday January 17  at Cleethorpes Library, Alexandra Road, Cleethorpes, DN34 8LG, from 9am until 1pm.

You can also:

• Email: send your comments to [email protected]
• Write to: Spatial Planning, North East Lincolnshire Council, Municipal Offices, Town Hall Square, Grimsby, DN31 1HU.

06 Jan 2026

Consultation has begun on a planning document which aims to help all involved in the delivery and development of new affordable homes in West Suffolk.

The Affordable Housing Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) is primarily aimed at developers as well as registered providers who manage affordable housing schemes on a day-to-day basis.

Once adopted, the SPD will serve to provide further guidance on the application of existing affordable housing policies in the adopted West Suffolk Local Plan adopted in July 2025 and will help deliver the council’s strategic priority for affordable, available and decent homes.

As the local housing authority, West Suffolk is responsible for helping people in housing need, the majority of whom are from West Suffolk or have a local connection. There are a few exceptions such as veterans, people fleeing domestic abuse, and care leavers.

Affordable housing is housing for sale or rent, for those whose needs are not met by the market and includes a number of tenures including affordable rent (around 80 per cent of market rent levels) social rent (which is lower than affordable rent) discounted market sales, shared ownership and other routes to home ownership

Cllr Richard O’Driscoll, Cabinet Member for Housing at West Suffolk Council said: “There is a huge need for more affordable housing in West Suffolk. High rents and a lack of affordable housing is a significant factor in the number of households that at risk of homelessness that we help. We also have close to 2,500 households on our affordable housing register including around 850 in urgent or high need. 
“We recognise that the challenges around housing is not something we can tackle on our own. That’s why our Housing, Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy sets out a partnership approach, and we recently held a very positive developer forum which discussed working together to deliver more homes that are genuinely affordable.”

Cllr Frank Stennett, the Cabinet Member for Planning at West Suffolk Council said: “One of the ways we are also looking to address the need for more affordable homes is through the West Suffolk Local Plan adopted in July last year. It includes a new policy requiring 40 per cent of new homes on greenfield sites to be for affordable housing against the old requirement of 30 per cent. 
“This Affordable Housing Supplementary Planning Document complements the local plan with further guidance all with the purpose of aiding the delivery and development of new affordable homes here in West Suffolk.”

The purpose of the consultation is to double check that the SPD provides clear guidance for the application of adopted Local Plan affordable housing polices for developers, registered providers and others involved in affordable housing delivery.

The Affordable Housing Supplementary Planning Document consultation runs to 17 February. The draft SPD can be read online where people can leave their feedback. Hard copies can be viewed at West Suffolk House, Mildenhall Hub and Haverhill House.

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Drivers over the age of 70 will have to have their vision checked every three years, under plans to reform driving laws in Britain.

The changes are part of the government’s new road safety strategy, which will be published on Wednesday.

Other proposed measures include lowering the drink-driving limit in England to match the limit in Scotland, and giving penalty points for not wearing seatbelts.

These measures were first reported in August and are expected to be confirmed in this week’s strategy.

6 January 2026

Bank interest rates for corporations

Data for cost of borrowing and deposit interest rates for corporations (Chart 1)

The composite cost-of-borrowing indicator, which combines interest rates on all loans to corporations, remained broadly unchanged in November 2025. The interest rate on new loans of over €1 million with a floating rate and an initial rate fixation period of up to three months decreased by 4 basis points to 3.15%. The rate on new loans of the same size with an initial rate fixation period of over three months and up to one year rose by 7 basis points to 3.33%. The interest rate on new loans of over €1 million with an initial rate fixation period of over ten years increased by 7 basis points to 3.49%. In the case of new loans of up to €250,000 with a floating rate and an initial rate fixation period of up to three months, the average rate charged rose by 8 basis points to 3.67%.
As regards new deposit agreements, the interest rate on deposits from corporations with an agreed maturity of up to one year stayed almost constant at 1.91% in November 2025. The interest rate on overnight deposits from corporations stayed almost constant at 0.52%.
The interest rate on new loans to sole proprietors and unincorporated partnerships with a floating rate and an initial rate fixation period of up to one year remained broadly unchanged at 4.00%.

Data for bank interest rates for corporations (Table 1)

Bank interest rates for households

Data for cost of borrowing and deposit interest rate for households (Chart 2)

The composite cost-of-borrowing indicator, which combines interest rates on all loans to households for house purchase, remained broadly unchanged in November 2025. The interest rate on loans for house purchase with a floating rate and an initial rate fixation period of up to one year remained broadly unchanged at 3.54%. The rate on housing loans with an initial rate fixation period of over one and up to five years stayed almost constant at 3.35%. The interest rate on loans for house purchase with an initial rate fixation period of over five and up to ten years showed no change at 3.48%. The rate on housing loans with an initial rate fixation period of over ten years stayed almost constant at 3.15%. In the same period the interest rate on new loans to households for consumption showed no change at 7.33%.
As regards new deposits from households, the interest rate on deposits with an agreed maturity of up to one year remained broadly unchanged at 1.75%. The rate on deposits redeemable at three months’ notice stayed constant at 1.21%. The interest rate on overnight deposits from households showed no change at 0.25%.

Data for bank interest rates for households (Table 2)

Further information

The data in Tables 1 and 2 can be visualised for individual euro area countries on the bank interest rate statistics dashboard. Additionally, tables containing further breakdowns of bank interest rate statistics, including the composite cost-of-borrowing indicators for all euro area countries, are available from the ECB Data Portal. The full set of bank interest rate statistics for both the euro area and individual countries can be downloaded from ECB Data Portal. More information, including the release calendar, is available under “Bank interest rates” in the statistics section of the ECB’s website.

For media queries, please contact Benoit Deeg, tel.: +49 69 1344 95686

Notes:

• In this press release “corporations” refers to non-financial corporations (sector S.11 in the European System of Accounts 2010, or ESA 2010), “households” refers to households and non-profit institutions serving households (ESA 2010 sectors S.14 and S.15) and “banks” refers to monetary financial institutions except central banks and money market funds (ESA 2010 sector S.122).
• The composite cost-of-borrowing indicators are described in the article entitled “Assessing the retail bank interest rate pass-through in the euro area at times of financial fragmentation” in the August 2013 issue of the ECB’s Monthly Bulletin (see Box 1). For these indicators, a weighting scheme based on the 24-month moving averages of new business volumes has been applied, in order to filter out excessive monthly volatility. For this reason the developments in the composite cost-of-borrowing indicators in both tables cannot be explained by the month-on-month changes in the displayed subcomponents. Furthermore, the table on bank interest rates for corporations presents a subset of the series used in the calculation of the cost-of-borrowing indicator.
• Interest rates on new business are weighted by the size of the individual agreements. This is done both by the reporting agents and when the national and euro area averages are computed. Thus changes in average euro area interest rates for new business reflect, in addition to changes in interest rates, changes in the weights of individual countries’ new business for the instrument categories concerned. The “interest rate effect” and the “weight effect” presented in this press release are derived from the Bennet index, which allows month-on-month developments in euro area aggregate rates resulting from changes in individual country rates (the “interest rate effect”) to be disentangled from those caused by changes in the weights of individual countries’ contributions (the “weight effect”). Owing to rounding, the combined “interest rate effect” and the “weight effect” may not add up to the month-on-month developments in euro area aggregate rates.
• In addition to monthly euro area bank interest rate statistics for November 2025, this press release incorporates revisions to data for previous periods. Hyperlinks in the main body of the press release lead to data that may change with subsequent releases as a result of revisions. Unless otherwise indicated, these euro area statistics cover the EU Member States that had adopted the euro at the time to which the data relate.
• As of reference period December 2014, the sector classification applied to bank interest rates statistics is based on the European System of Accounts 2010 (ESA 2010). In accordance with the ESA 2010 classification and as opposed to ESA 95, the non-financial corporations sector (S.11) now excludes holding companies not engaged in management and similar captive financial institutions.

Getty Images

Nestle

Premier Inn gears up for second Chichester location

6 Jan 2026 Property

Whitbread PLC, the parent company of Premier Inn, the UK’s largest hotel company, has announced plans to build a new 82-bedroom Premier Inn in Chichester satisfying the company’s long-term goal to secure a second hotel in the cathedral city.

The site on Bognor Road, which was acquired from Hanbury Properties, is located adjacent to the main A27 / A259 junction, offering a highly accessible location for business and leisure travellers looking to spend time in the historic city.

This new location complements the existing Premier Inn at Gate Leisure Park to the south west of Chichester city centre and brings the total number of Premier Inn bedrooms in the Chichester catchment to 165, completing Whitbread’s network plan for the city.

Whitbread Acquisitions Manager Louise Woodruff said:

“From Roman ruins to the racing circuit at Goodwood, Chichester’s diverse cultural offer and successful business economy is fuelling year-round demand for high-quality, affordable hotel bedrooms from our customers.

“This consistent demand has underpinned our search for a suitable second Premier Inn location in Chichester which we are pleased to have acquired from Hanbury Properties, who have provided us with a fully serviced site, ready for development in the Spring. 

“Purchasing the site freehold shows how flexible we can be to bring high-quality locations like this one into our pipeline, and our in-house development team is itching to get started and begin constructing our newest hotel in southern England later this year.”

James Belbin, Director of Hanbury Properties, said:

“We’re delighted to complete the sale of this site to Premier Inn and look forward to seeing their plans come to life.  It’s an excellent location for a new hotel and will help to underpin the next phase of development at Cathedral Business Park.

“The site was a former WWII fuel depot that required significant investment, including full remediation, a new slip lane and traffic light junction off the A259, bus stop, a 220m estate road, and services under the A27 to facilitate development – so it’s not been the most straightforward site to deliver.   

“This sale represents the culmination of all that hard work.  It’s been a pleasure working with all the acquisition team at Premier Inn to bring this site forward, and it’s great to know that this hotel will create valuable jobs and help contribute positively to the local community in the years to come.” 

The Bognor Road acquisition is Whitbread’s latest commitment to investing across Sussex and the south coast of England where it sees a strong opportunity to grow Premier Inn. 

Later this year the business is set to expand its network of trading hotels in West and East Sussex to 23 locations following the opening of its newest Premier Inn on Bognor Regis Seafront in April.

The construction of the first Premier Inn in Littlehampton Town Centre is also due to commence in February following the completion of the demolition of the former supermarket occupying the site. Whitbread is also seeking a new location for Premier Inn in Rye.

The acquisition of the Chichester location forms part of Whitbread’s ongoing expansion of Premier Inn across the UK and Ireland. Currently the business offers its customers close to 86,000 bedrooms from more than 840 hotels and it sees the long-term potential to expand to 125,000 rooms in these two core markets.

In this study, we established a methodology for single-molecule genome RNA sequencing within cultured influenza virus populations and demonstrated the potential for experimental mutation prediction through sequence distribution analysis. To validate this approach, the sequencing of UMI-tagged linearized plasmids was conducted. The analysis revealed that focusing solely on sequences with three or more reads that shared the same UMI led to an enhancement in sequence accuracy by more than tenfold. This resulted in an error rate that was on the order of 10⁻⁵ per bp per read. Assuming that PCR and sequencing introduce errors at a rate of approximately 10⁻³, the probability of two or more errors occurring at the same base position among three reads theoretically decreases to the order of 10⁻⁶. The discrepancy between this theoretical value and our measured data is likely attributable to mutation-prone regions, such as homopolymers and amplification bias, where error-containing sequences were preferentially amplified and detected as majorities.

It is widely acknowledged that PacBio sequencers frequently generate errors in homopolymer regions, and our study observed analogous trends. Specifically, when the UMI redundancy threshold was set to 3, error rates in homopolymer regions were found to be higher than those in non-homopolymer regions. However, the integration of UMIs has led to a significant reduction in this error gap, thereby validating the efficacy of UMI technology in addressing erroneous reads. This finding indicates that UMI-based methods have the potential to enhance the accuracy of PacBio, especially for genes and sequences that contain homopolymer regions. The implications of this study extend to other single-molecule sequencing platforms such as nanopore.

A subsequent analysis of RNA from virus populations derived from single virus particles exhibited elevated error rates when compared to in vitro transcribed RNA, a phenomenon that is presumably attributable to mutations introduced during viral replication. The observed mutation distribution comprised both mutations consistent with a neutral, Poisson-like accumulation and mutations that deviated substantially from a Poisson distribution. This pattern indicates the coexistence of neutral and non-neutral mutations within the viral population, forming a quasi-species structure. The deviation from Poisson expectations suggests that certain mutations were subject to selective pressures, likely influencing replication efficiency or protein function under the specific culture conditions. For instance, the mutation detection rate near the HA antigenic site (amino acids 180–200) was 1.62×10⁻⁴, approximately 1.5 times higher than the genome-wide mutation rate, highlighting a potential hotspot under positive selection. This finding corroborates prior reports of higher sequence variability in antigenic regions (Thyagarajan and Bloom, 2014; Wu et al., 2020). On the other hand, the observed mutation rates among genes do not align with the findings from previous phylogenetic research Eisfeld et al., 2014 on ‘highly conserved’ and ‘highly divergent’ genes, suggesting a lack of correlation between the distribution size and the evolvability of each gene. Such discrepancies may reflect differences in observation timing. Traditional phylogenetic analyses capture fixed mutations shaped by long-term selection, while our study detects earlier-stage mutations that have yet to undergo full selective filtering. Thus, the weak correlation with phylogenetic conservation likely arises because many observed mutations are still under selection. A comparison between RNA extracted from viral populations and in vitro transcribed RNA revealed greater protein sequence diversity in the former, as quantified by Shannon entropy. This greater diversity reflects the accumulation of mutations during replication and the latent evolutionary potential of viral populations.

The reference sequences employed for mapping viral genomes in this study were derived from single particles that contributed to the formation of each virus population. Nevertheless, subtle differences were observed among the consensus sequences from four virus populations, suggesting that even within the same PR8 strain, various mutations had accumulated during laboratory passaging, resulting in genetically diverse populations at the outset. This finding suggests that the experimental strain already possessed a mutation pool, and the observed mutation distribution reflects this background diversity. A comprehensive understanding of the effects of long-term passaging on viral population structure and mutation origins is imperative to obtain significant insights.

As this study did not impose specific selective pressures, we did not observe a significant increase of particular mutations previously linked to drug resistance or host adaptation was not observed within the populations. However, resistance mutations such as I38M, which have been demonstrated to confer resistance to the endonuclease inhibitor baloxavir (Jones et al., 2021; Taniguchi et al., 2024), were detected (see Figure 3—source data 1 and 2 for a list of all mutations detected). Conversely, mutations fixed in PR8-related strains were already present in populations derived from single particles. These findings imply that the viral quasi-species may serve as a latent genetic reservoir, from which advantageous variants can be selected in response to environmental pressures. While genetic variation was also detected in HA and NA, we did not impose drug or immune selection pressure in this study. Therefore, we did not expect to observe mutations that are already known to confer major antigenic changes in these proteins, and we consider it difficult to speculate on their functional implications in this context. Nevertheless, the detection of resistance-associated mutations indicates that the quasi-species pool may indeed harbor functionally relevant variation, even in the absence of explicit selective pressures. Thus, the real-time observation of mutation proliferation under diverse culture conditions will yield pivotal insights into the mechanisms underlying existing mutation expansion, thereby facilitating the prediction of novel mutations.

The predominant paradigm in evolutionary biology is the neutral evolution hypothesis, which posits that most evolutionary processes can be explained by random genetic drift. Consequently, elucidating the origins of these evolutionary processes is paramount for making accurate evolutionary predictions. A comprehensive analysis of neutral mutations necessitates the quantification of minor variants. The sUMI method was employed to detect mutations present at 0.1% frequency in populations by sequencing 10,000 molecules. Furthermore, the sequencing error rate was reduced to the order of 10⁻⁵, comparable to reverse transcriptase error rates. This enabled theoretical detection of mutations at a frequency of 0.05% by analyzing over 100,000 molecules with high accuracy. It is anticipated that this approach will yield comprehensive insights into mutation occurrence rates and distributions of mutations in neutral evolution. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the applicability of this method for mutation forecasting by using logistic modeling based on mutation fitness and initial frequencies. Subsequent applications will encompass the comprehensive detection and quantitative estimation of adaptive mutations under diverse environmental conditions, including the presence of drugs and different host species.

In summary, experimental evidence has demonstrated the efficacy of UMI technology in reducing sequencing errors and accurately measuring mutation distributions within viral populations. Furthermore, evidence was presented demonstrating that sequence distributions within individual populations manifest non-random directional biases. With the continued development of methods to quantify mutation bias and latent evolutionary potential, it is anticipated that laboratory-scale prediction of drug-induced mutations and pandemic-capable strains will become a reality. The broad distribution of mutations indicates that viral populations possess diverse mutation pools, where selective pressures enhance robustness through adaptive mutation selection. This mechanism signifies the ability of viruses to adapt to environmental changes with flexibility, thereby providing critical insights for predicting long-term viral evolution and pandemic emergence. A more thorough examination of the roles of mutations in the context of adaptive viral evolution in response to drug treatment is merited.

The George & Dragon is not just a place for a drink and a meal, as it also contains a small volunteer-run village shop selling essentials.

“The whole community aspect of the pub and the shop are vitally important to the village. Which is why when a pub dies or goes out of use people say ‘can we open this ourself’ and they do and it makes such a difference,” Mrs Swettenham said.

There are also community allotments just past the beer garden and a little library within the pub.

The success of the pub has inspired other community projects in the village, which sits at the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

The Hudswell Community Charity has converted the redundant St Michael’s Church into a walkers’ hostel, and has also been involved in the development of affordable housing in the village.

Mrs Swettenham said they had been fortunate with their previous tenant and had received a lot of interest in the vacancy.

She said they were hopeful they could find someone to continue to develop the pub’s business, its role in the community and maintain its reputation for good beer and food.

“I would say a good pub, which is more than a pub, it’s a meeting place and a place where people can enjoy each other’s company.”

She said the board of HCP was very supportive of its tenants and was committed to keeping the pub open, while keeping its traditional feel.

“People want, especially in the Dales, an old-fashioned, fire-lit, dog-friendly, nice local pub,” she said.