SPAR UK has announced the appointment of Michael Fletcher as its new managing director.
Fletcher spent 22 years at Tesco plc, where he held numerous senior commercial roles in the UK, Ireland and Asia. He joined Co-op Retail in 2013 where he held the position of chief commercial officer before moving on to become CEO of Nisa Wholesale, a role he held until 2022.
Since leaving Nisa, Fletcher has taken on several non-executive director and board advisory roles. He is also the founder and chief executive of Sleet Brush Limited, where he focuses on designing and implementing innovative solutions to complex retail and wholesale challenges.
“Michael has outstanding credentials in commercial, retail and FMCG sectors, with experience across various trading environments,” Nick Bunker, non-executive chair, SPAR Food Distributors Ltd, said.
“His professional capabilities and high standards consistently drive excellent business performance and operational resilience. We are delighted with his appointment and look forward his lasting and positive contribution to the SPAR business.”
Fletcher added: “SPAR is a globally recognised and respected brand, and I am thrilled to join the team. I look forward to supporting the ongoing strengthening and development of the SPAR proposition in the UK.”
The Metropolitan Police has identified two new suspects in its investigation into possible criminal offences as part of the Post Office Horizon scandal. This takes the total number of individuals to four as the force also revealed it believes more suspects will be identified as the inquiry progresses.
Scotland Yard said members of the investigation team met with Sir Alan Bates, the leading Post Office campaigner, and fellow victims to update them on the development.
A Met spokesman said: “On Sunday Nov 17, members of the investigating team met with Sir Alan Bates and a number of affected sub-postmasters to provide an update on our progress and next steps, following an invitation to do so.
“Our investigation team, comprising of officers from forces across the UK, is now in place and we will be sharing further details in due course. The team is preparing to contact other affected sub-postmasters soon. While four suspects have been formally identified at this stage, this number will grow as the investigation progresses.”
However, Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner, has warned it could be years before anyone faces charges because of the “tens of millions of documents” that must be worked through.
Speaking previously on the matter, he said, “I think at the core of this you’ve potentially got fraud, in terms of false documents, if it’s for financial purposes.
“Clearly, we have to prove beyond all reasonable doubt, so really it’s 99.9 per cent, that individuals knowingly corrupted something. So that’s going way beyond incompetence, you have to prove deliberate malice, and that has to be done very thoroughly with an exhaustive investigation.
“So it won’t be quick. But the police service across the country are alive to this and we will do everything we can do to bring people to justice if criminal offences can be proven.”
More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 as a result of the Horizon scandal, in which the faulty computer software incorrectly recorded shortfalls on their accounts. Of these, hundreds of people are still awaiting compensation despite the previous government announcing that those who had convictions quashed were eligible for payouts of £600,000.
Oral evidence at the Post Office inquiry concluded this month.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper has announced plans to rebuild neighbourhood policing and combat surging shop theft as part of an ambitious programme of reform to policing.
In her first major speech at the annual conference hosted by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners on Tuesday, Cooper highlighted four of the key areas for reform: neighbourhood policing, police performance, structures and capabilities, crime prevention.
The initiatives she announced include:
a Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee to get policing back to basics and rebuild trust between local forces and the communities they serve
a new Police Performance Unit to track national data on local performance and drive up standards
a new National Centre of Policing to harness new technology and forensics, making sure policing is better equipped to meet the changing nature of crime
The home secretary also announced more than half a billion pounds of additional central government funding for policing next year to support the government’s Safer Streets Mission, including an increase in the core grant for police forces, and extra resources for neighbourhood policing, the NCA and counter-terrorism.
In her speech, Cooper said that without a major overhaul to increase public confidence, the British tradition of policing by consent will be in peril.
“I am determined that neighbourhood policing must be rebuilt,” she said, pointing to its decline over the past decade. Cuts to community-based roles have left town centres vulnerable to rising crime and antisocial behaviour, she added.
“Shop theft is up at a record high, street theft is up 40 per cent in a year… Criminals – often organised gangs – are just getting away with it. We cannot stand for this,” she said.
Cooper reiterated the government’s commitment to deliver an additional 13,000 police officers, PCSOs and special constables in neighbourhood policing roles, adding that further steps will be announced in the coming weeks.
The reforms will restore community patrols with a Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee and an enhanced role for Police and Crime Commissioners to prevent crime. The changes will also ensure that policing has the national capabilities it needs to fight fast-changing, complex crimes which cut across police force boundaries.
“The challenge of rebuilding public confidence is a shared one for government and policing. This is an opportunity for a fundamental reset in that relationship, and together we will embark on this roadmap for reform to regain the trust and support of the people we all serve and to reinvigorate the best of policing,” Cooper said.
Britain's annual inflation rate jumped more than expected in October to back above the Bank of England's target as households and businesses faced higher energy bills, official data showed Wednesday.
The Consumer Prices Index reached 2.3 per cent from a three-year low of 1.7 percent in the 12 months to September, the Office for National Statistics said in a statement.
CPI was last at 2.3 percent in April, the ONS added in a statement, while analysts' consensus had been for the rate to climb back to 2.2 percent.
The Bank of England (BoE) target stands at 2.0 percent.
"Inflation rose... as the increase in the energy price cap meant higher costs for gas and electricity compared with a fall at the same time last year," ONS chief economist Grant Fitzner said of October's data.
Britain's energy regulator Ofgem sets a price cap quarterly that suppliers can charge customers. The latest increase in October was 10 per cent but this is expected to drop markedly in January according to forecasts.
The regulator had cited rising prices on international energy markets owing to increasing geopolitical tensions, and extreme weather events driving competition for gas, as the reasons behind the sharp rise.
"We know that families across Britain are still struggling with the cost of living," senior Treasury official Darren Jones said in reaction to Wednesday's inflation reading and saying the Labour government needed to do more to help.
Food and non-alcoholic beverage prices rose by 1.9 per cent in the year to October, up from 1.8 per cent to September 2024. The annual rate of 1.9 per cent in October compares with 10.1 per cent in the same month last year.
Analysts said despite prices rising faster than expected, the BoE remained on course to keep cutting British interest rates.
"But it lends some support... that the Bank will skip the December meeting and cut rates only gradually, by 25 basis points in February and at every other policy meeting until rates reach 3.50 percent in early 2026," forecast Ruth Gregory, deputy chief UK economist at Capital Economics research group.
The central bank earlier this month trimmed borrowing costs by 25 basis points to 4.75 per cent.
Following its decision, the BoE added that a maiden budget from Britain's Labour government in October, featuring tax rises and increased borrowing, would boost growth but also lift inflation.
Thousands of British farmers today (19) are set to march to Parliament Square to protest against the end of an inheritance tax exemption that has helped family farms pass down the generations, saying the move will threaten food production.
First unveiled in chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Budget, the plans to impose inheritance tax on farms worth more than £1m have sparked fury among rural communities, who have contested the government’s assertion that small family farms will not be impacted by the changes.
Opposition to the so-called "tractor tax" is one part of a wider backlash against Reeves's financial plans. Farmers say the change will threaten the viability of family farms, which often have tight profit margins, and that their children will have to sell land to cover the tax bill, raising the risk that food production will suffer.
The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has organised an event in which 1,800 of its members will meet with local MPs at Westminster to voice their anger on Tuesday, as thousands are also separately expected to stage a demonstration in Whitehall. Protest organisers say that while this event will be peaceful and include children driving toy tractors, rallies could escalate in the future if the government refuses to budge.
In an interview with BBC News, Tom Bradshaw, president of the NFU, said that farmers felt particularly aggrieved because last year, when Steve Reed was shadow environment secretary, he said Labour was not planning to change agricultural property relief (the inheritance tax exemption). He said farmers only started hearing rumours that the government was going to go back on this about a week before the budget.
He said he did not accept the government’s claims that most farms will not be affected by the change. Instead, he said, “75 per cent of the commercial farms in the United Kingdom will be within the scope of this policy change.”
Bradshaw also said farmers were willing to work with the government to produce a better version of the policy. He explained: "This policy is ill thought through. There’s still a 20 per cent benefit for the uber-wealthy to invest in agricultural land, and with the changes they’ve made to pensions, they’ve now incentivised people to rip money out of pensions and invest in up to £1m of agricultural land.
"That is not going to deliver for food security. It’s absolutely nonsensical. It’s not joined up. There’s no thought about the impact on food production or the families that produce this country’s food.
"Let’s sit down [with the government]. Give us the question. Tell us what the exam question is. We will work with you. If you want to stop people using land as a tax dodge, let’s work out the policy that does that. But this policy is not the answer."
The government argues that tax exemptions have led to wealthy non-farmers seizing agricultural land and pricing out genuine young farmers, and point to Budget funding of £5bn to help farmers produce food.
Britain's biggest retailers have written to finance minister Rachel Reeves to warn her that last month's budget will make both higher prices and job losses a certainty and dent investment.
The letter, coordinated by the British Retail Consortium trade body and signed by 79 retail bosses, including those at Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's, Next, Asda, Morrisons, Kingfisher, Amazon UK and Boots, called for a meeting with Reeves to discuss their concerns and work on a solution.
The Labour government's October 30 budget statement raised employers' National Insurance contributions by 1.2 percentage points to 15 per cent from April next year, and also lowered the threshold for when firms start paying to £5,000 from £9,100 per year. It also raised the minimum wage for most adults by 6.7 per cent from April.
The letter said the UK retail industry, which has three million direct jobs and 2.7 million more in its supply chain, was facing a rise of £7 billion in annual costs from 2025 when higher business rates and the impact of new packaging levies are also taken into account.
"It will not be possible to absorb such significant cost increases over such a short time scale. The effect will be to increase inflation, slow pay growth, cause shop closures, and reduce jobs, especially at the entry level," it said.
The retailers want the government to phase the introduction of the new lower earnings threshold for National Insurance, delay the introduction of packaging levies, and revisit and bring forward proposed changes to business rates.
On Saturday, prime minister Keir Starmer said he would defend decisions taken in the budget "all day long".