Cable 'Wants Investigation Into HBOS Life Bans'

An investigation is to be launched into whether the three former HBOS directors blamed for the banking group's collapse can be banned as company directors for life, it has been reported.

The Business Secretary has asked his officials to see if there is enough evidence against Lord Stevenson, the former HBOS chairman, Sir James Crosby, the former chief executive, and Andy Hornby, his successor, to start a formal probe under the Company Directors Disqualification Act.

Vince Cable told The Sunday Times it was the first step in a process which could lead to the three - who have so far not faced formal sanction - being barred from acting as company directors.

The move comes in the wake of a damning report into the collapse of the bank by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards published on Friday.

The group was given a £20.5bn bailout

It found Sir James was the "architect of the strategy that set the course for disaster" and held primary responsibility for the collapse along with former chairman Lord Stevenson and fellow chief executive Andy Hornby.

Their "toxic" misjudgments led to the bank's downfall and a £20.5bn taxpayer bailout at the height of the financial crisis and they should never be allowed to work in the financial sector again, according to the influential commission of MPs and peers.

Mr Cable told The Sunday Times: "It's quite a legalistic process. I can ask (officials) to look at whether the companies investigations branch take action.

"We do have this power which I have begun to initiate."

Sir James stepped down from his role as a member of Bridgepoint's European Advisory Board on Friday but remains chairman of the car credit company Money Barn and a senior independent director for Compass, one of the country's largest catering firms, according to company spokespeople, as well as a trustee for Cancer Research UK.

Mr Hornby's current employer, Gala Coral, has said he has their "complete backing" as chief executive.

Sir James and Lord Stevenson have so far retained their titles, though the Royal Bank of Scotland's disgraced former boss Fred Goodwin was stripped of his knighthood.

Peter Cummings is the only former HBOS director to have been penalised by the Financial Services Authority, after being fined £500,000 and banned for life from working in the City last September.

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Facebook: New Charges For Sending Messages

By James Banks, Sky News Reporter

Facebook is to charge users up to £10 a time to contact people outside of their friends' network.

The social networking site is likely to charge between 70p and £10 to message people who are not "friends" - with the top price reserved for contacting celebrities.

Facebook says it is introducing the payments to prevent spam being sent to users of the network.

However, some analysts fear that it marks the start of what will become a more entrenched payment scheme for the social media site.

At present, users can message anyone who uses the website for free. However, messages to non-friends go to the "other" email box and are treated as spam.

But these latest changes will allow users to pay to prioritise their emails, sending them directly to the main inbox of their prospective friends.

Facebook dropped a scheme allowing users to pay $100 to contact celebrities

There's even the option to pay more to grab the attention of your favourite celebrity, with the charge levied on a sliding scale depending on their fame and popularity.

The scheme has already been tested in the United States.

However, a feature that allowed users to contact the most high-profile celebrities (including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg), for a fee of $100 (£65), was abandoned.

A spokesman for Facebook said: "The system of paying to message non-friends in their Facebook inbox is designed to prevent spam, while acknowledging that sometimes you might want to hear from people outside your immediate social circle.

"We are testing a number of price points in the UK and other countries to establish the optimal fee that signals importance. Part of that test involves charging higher amounts for public figures, based on the number of followers they have.

"This is still a test and these prices are not set in stone."

Experts believe that by getting consumer's credit card details for small purchases now, it means that they will be able to attract greater revenue in the future.

Olly Mann, a gadget columnist, said: "This is probably a prelude to something much more substantial.

"If they can charge for smaller features,their hope is that they can start charging for main features later on."

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Total UK Wealth Tops £7trn As Rich Get Richer

Total household wealth in the UK has soared past the £7trn mark for the first time but society is becoming more divided, according to new research.

Net wealth - the value of residential buildings and financial assets less outstanding debts - is estimated to have hit £7.05trn at the end of 2012.

But the increase has not been shared equally between the top and bottom rungs of society, with the top 10% accumulating wealth at a much greater rate.

Researchers for Lloyds TSB Private Banking said that despite the current tough state of the economy, there has been a £2.71trn increase over the past decade, equal to a gain of £86,000 per household since 2003.

Lloyds said a rise in financial assets has boosted the increase in household wealth over the last decade, contributing £1.7trn to the overall increase.

The value of household wealth has grown at a faster rate (62%) than either gross household disposable incomes (44%) or the consumer price index (29%), since 2002.

Financial assets include bank and building society deposits, government bonds, shares in listed companies, life assurance and pensions.

Meanwhile, housing wealth has increased by £1trn over the past decade as the value of property has risen by more than the increase in mortgage debt.

Lloyds economist Nitesh Patel said: "Most of this increase came during the 'boom' years prior to 2007 when the economy grew rapidly, with rising employment and incomes."

However, not everyone has gained equally with the stratification of society strengthening, according to the research.

"While wealth has soared in the past decade, there is a large divide in where it has accumulated," Mr Patel said.

"The wealthiest 10% of households hold 22 times more wealth, on average, than those in the bottom half."

Lloyds used official figures as well as those from its own database to make its findings.

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NI Shoppers Hit With 5p Plastic Bag Levy

A compulsory 5p charge has been imposed on the sale of all plastic shopping bags in Northern Ireland, in an attempt to stem their widespread usage.

The 5p minimum tax per single-use carrier will improve the region's green credentials and help reduce pollution, environment minister Alex Attwood said.

Northern Ireland is the second part of the UK to impose the measure after Wales and follows the example of the Republic of Ireland a decade ago.

Money raised will fund voluntary and community groups working on sustainability projects but small businesses have expressed concern about red tape.

Mr Attwood said: "As environment minister I want us to implement bold challenging new laws to enhance our clean and green credentials. The levy will help to do that."

He said people in Northern Ireland use some 250 million carrier bags a year - almost 30,000 every hour. It amounts to around 140 per person annually.

The tax will apply to all single use bags, including plastic, paper and other natural materials, but there will exemptions for takeaway hot food and drinks, prescriptions, unpackaged food and uncooked meat to protect safety and hygiene.

Plastic bag usage has become a hot issue for many nations

The Stormont minister is considering using the money to help communities and businesses improve the environment and increase recycling in Northern Ireland.

"This levy is intended to help protect the environment by dramatically cutting the number of bags used," Mr Attwood said.

"Working with the retail sector we are aiming for a reduction of at least 80% - some retailers have already indicated that they will be eliminating single-use bags altogether."

However, the Northern Ireland Independent Retail Trade Association (NIIRTA) has expressed major concerns over the levy.

Chief executive Glyn Roberts said: "NIIRTA shares minister Attwood's objective of reducing the amount of carrier bags in circulation and that end up in landfill sites.

"NIIRTA is concerned that the collecting and administration of the levy may pose a real burden on our members and we will be closely monitoring this over the next few months."

Westminster has been urged by a backbencher to follow the example of Wales and Ireland and charge for the use of plastic bags in England.

However, some MPs believe a voluntary effort to cut waste would be more effective.

The Scottish Government has consulted on the issue.

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Banks Braced For £600m City Regulation Bill

By Mark Kleinman, City Editor

Britain's big banks will this week be asked to pay tens of millions of pounds a year more towards the cost of regulating the financial sector under the coalition's new "twin peaks" system of supervision.

I understand that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), which took over responsibility for City regulation last week, will outline plans to charge a total of approximately £600m in fees to major banks, brokers and insurers - a hike of more than 20% on last year's figure.

The "fee blocks" for different categories of City firms will be published in consultation papers by the two new watchdogs.

Insiders say they are set to increase the aggregate amounts payable by the biggest universal banks such as Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland by tens of millions of pounds annually, representing a substantial chunk of the fees increase.

"The PRA's remit is to focus on the major risks within the financial system, and the biggest banks are at the centre of that focus," a source said.

Under the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the predecessor body to the FCA and PRA, the financial industry paid £489.1m last year to its regulator.

The big banks paid on average between £20m and £30m each, according to previously-published figures, whereas under the new regime they are expected to pay in the region of 25% more.

Although the overall budget increase had been anticipated, the extent to which big banks would be forced to stump up for it was unclear until now.

Last week, the FCA set out plans to charge £391.5m in fees, a figure which included a discount based on the recouping of some enforcement costs. The regulator is responsible for supervising the behaviour of 26,000 firms.

The PRA, which is part of the Bank of England and employs 1300 staff supervising 1,400 banks and insurers, will announce its budget and fee proposals on Tuesday.

Andrew Bailey, the PRA chief executive, told the Treasury Select Committee recently that "the starting point was to set a budget for the PRA in its first year which is no higher than what we think the PRA would have cost during the next year under the current FSA set-up".

That comment implied that the PRA's budget in 2013-14 could be no higher than £235m. Insiders said the actual figure to be disclosed would be lower, and probably in the region of £210m.

The PRA has previously set out its approach to levying fees, but the consultation will shed the first light on exactly how much the big banks will be liable to pay.

"In April 2013, the Bank will explain the allocation of the PRA's annual funding requirement across the six categories of firms that it will prudentially regulate, and consult on the fee rates proposed for firms in the fee blocks. Firms will have two months to respond to the proposals," the PRA said recently.

Chancellor George Osborne is taking steps to prevent the financial industry benefiting from fines paid by regulated firms.

Under the FSA, fines levied for misconduct were used to reduce the following year's fee pool, but under the new Financial Services Bill, the FCA must pay all penalty income directly to the Exchequer.

The major banks are unlikely to criticise the fees increase publicly, given that the new bill confronting them will still be modest in the context of their operating income.

The FCA and PRA declined to comment further ahead of the announcements.

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Labour 'Wants Payday Lenders Off High Street'

Payday lenders and betting shops that "engulf" people in debt could be banned from high streets under a Labour Government.

Ed Miliband has used the launch of his party's local election campaign to propose changes to planning laws, allowing councils to refuse permission for certain businesses.

It marks the start of what is likely to be a month of tough campaigning ahead of the poll on May 2, with Nick Clegg also poised to set out the Liberal Democrats' stall.

At the start of a three-day tour of 10 towns, Mr Miliband told supporters in Ipswich high streets were changing, "often not for the better".

"One of the fastest growing businesses on the high street are the payday lenders," he said.

Nick Clegg will attack Labour and the Tories

"In hard times, it is no wonder people turn to them. But often they just engulf people in debts that they cannot pay.

"Too many councils are finding that they don't have the real power to stand up for local people. But that is what politics is supposed to be about: standing up for those without power and giving power to them.

"Currently if a bank branch closes down, a payday loan shop can move in and open up in the same place, even if there's another lender just down the street. And there's nothing the council can do That can't be right."

Meanwhile, the Deputy Prime Minister will launch a blistering attack on the Conservatives and Labour as he begins his appeal for votes.

Mr Clegg will claim his political rivals have both squandered taxpayers' money on "vanity projects", and argue that his party would "spread the burden of austerity fairly, investing in jobs and help for hard-pressed families".

"Despite all their stated differences, a vote for Labour or the Tories will be a vote for the same thing," the Lib Dem leader will say.

"Their record in local government shows that even when millions of families are feeling the pinch, they'll both squander taxpayers' money on waste, inefficiency and their own vanity projects."

Mr Clegg will highlight changes to the personal tax allowance - raised to £9,440 over the weekend - and pledge to continue to fight for the introduction of a mansion tax.

The Tory poster campaign focuses on tax

Over the weekend, the Conservative Party launched a poster campaign, claiming 24 million people are now paying £600 less income tax than they were when Labour were in power in 2010.

"We're restoring fairness at the very heart of our tax and welfare systems," Prime Minister David Cameron added on Twitter.

Elections are taking place in 212 areas across the country, including in North Tyneside and Doncaster, where voters will choose who they want to represent them as mayor.

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Disability Benefits: New System Rolled Out

By Siobhan Robbins, Sky Reporter

A petition calling on Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith to live off £53 a week has been handed in to his office - as major changes to disability benefits are rolled out.

New claimants in parts of northern England will now receive Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in place of the old Disability Living Allowance (DLA), which critics say will leave many worse off.

The new system which includes face-to-face assessments and regular reviews will take at least two years to roll out across the country.

Iain Duncan Smith: Old system is "ridiculous"

Steven Sumpter from Worcestershire, who suffers from ME and diabetes so finds walking painful, told Sky News he was worried about the future.

Previously, to get disability benefit he had to prove he was unable to walk 50m, but that will be changed to 20m.

He said he fears in the future he will lose half of the money he receives and the subsidised car he relies on.

"It means every single trip to the shops and the doctor will turn into maybe three hours of effort and that will leave me in bed, exhausted and in pain for days afterwards," he said.

The Government insists DLA was outdated and the changes mean those who really need support will now receive it.

Mr Duncan Smith has described the previous system as "ridiculous".

"We've seen a rise in the run-up to PIP. And you know why? They know PIP has a health check. They want to get in early, get ahead of it. It's a case of 'get your claim in early'," he told the Daily Mail.

He added that rigorous new health checks for claimants were "common sense".

Some charities have already expressed concerns that it will mean 600,000 people miss out on support.

Chief Executive of Scope, Richard Hawkes, admitted changes were needed but claimed the Government was motivated by cost cutting.

"The Government has already announced how much the Disability Living Allowance budget is going to be reduced, they've already announced how many people are going to lose DLA and they're introducing a test which is going to provide them with the results they want to reduce those costs.

It'' not right, it's not fair," he told Sky News.

PIP will initially be introduced for new claimants in northwest England, Cumbria, Cheshire, northeast England and Merseyside.

Campaigners handing in the IDS petition at Caxton House, central London

Meanwhile, welfare reform campaigners have delivered a petition bearing 450,000 names to the Department of Work and Pensions.

Mr Duncan Smith was challenged to live on £53 a week after a market trader on a radio show said that was all he had to live on despite working 50 to 70 hours a week.

Asked whether he could live on £53 a week, the former army officer, who now earns around £1,600-a-week after tax replied: "If I had to I would."

The Cabinet minister has since dismissed the campaign as a "complete stunt".

Musician and part-time shop worker Dominic Aversano, who started the petition on campaigning website Change.org, said: "I don't think Mr Duncan Smith has a choice about whether to listen to the petition because so many people have signed it.

"I think it has changed the debate around welfare cuts. I was surprised because I didn't think we would have such a large response. I am delighted."

As well as the Personal Independence Payments, other reforms, including a below-inflation 1% cap on working-age benefits and tax credit rises for three years, have already come into force.

Around 660,000 social housing tenants deemed to have a spare room will lose an average of £14-a-week in what critics have dubbed a "bedroom tax".

Trials of a £500-a-week cap on household benefits are also due to begin in four London boroughs.

Chancellor George Osborne insisted on Sunday that the public was behind his changes to the benefits system.

Mr Osborne also said he felt "angry" that too much money was being "spent in the wrong way in our welfare system".

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Luxembourg 'May Ease' Bank Secrecy Laws

Luxembourg has said it is prepared to ease its banking secrecy rules and work more closely with foreign authorities amid a crackdown on tax havens.

Its finance minister, Luc Frieden told Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of the possible shift in policy.

He said there was an international trend towards automatically exchanging information about depositors, adding: "We no longer strictly reject this, in contrast to before."

"Luxembourg does not rely on clients who want to save tax," he said.

Last month's 10bn euro (£8.5bn) bailout of Cyprus, whose banking system was swollen by foreign deposits attracted by low taxes and easy regulation, has put the spotlight on tax havens.

Australia has warned 2,000 top firms that their tax arrangements are to be revealed, while Britain has pushed for bank secrecy changes.

Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne have both urged the G20 group of countries to improve transparency.

Some firms have been criticised over 'transfer pricing', where local divisions must buy goods and services from a parent firm - often from a small office in places such as Luxembourg.

Austria and Luxembourg are the only European Union states that do not share with other EU members the identities of EU residents with cross-border bank accounts.

German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said he was pleased with the comments from Luxembourg.

"I welcome every step towards automatic information exchange," he told the Saarbruecker Zeitung newspaper.

Amid growing outrage over the scale of tax evasion, Mr Schaeuble said last week that Berlin would push the EU to take legal measures against tax havens.

The German government this weekend also urged several German publications to hand over details they have obtained on suspected tax cheats.

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Miners Strike: Margaret Thatcher's Triumph

She called them "the enemy within" and the 1984-85 miners' strike was the most divisive confrontation of Margaret Thatcher's 11 years in power.

It was a vicious, violent industrial dispute that changed the face of Britain and its industrial landscape forever.

It pitched striking miners against the police, family members and communities against each other and even saw Britain's security services and foreign governments, including Libya and the Soviet Union, dragged into the controversy.

It also confirmed Mrs Thatcher's status as an unrivalled hate figure for British trade unionists and left-wingers.

During the year-long dispute, 11 people lost their lives: six pickets, four teenagers looking for coal and a taxi driver taking a non-striking miner to work.

More than 11,000 arrests were made and more than 8,000 people were charged, mostly for breach of the peace.

But it ended with humiliating defeat for the miners and a political triumph for Mrs Thatcher and the Conservatives.

It was a humiliation, too, for Labour's leader Neil Kinnock and was a turning point in industrial relations in Britain.

In a speech to Conservative MPs during the strike, Mrs Thatcher declared: "We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty."

Later, she said she had seen the strike coming since 1974, when the miners had brought down Edward Heath's Conservative government.

The dispute ended in humiliating defeat for the miners

She had avoided a miners' strike in 1981 by backing down because coal stocks were low. But after her crushing defeat of Michael Foot's Labour Party in the 1983 general election, she knew a strike was inevitable, she said.

"I had never had any doubt about the true aim of the Hard Left," she wrote in her memoirs, The Downing Street Years. "They were revolutionaries who sought to impose a Marxist system on Britain, whatever the means and whatever the cost."

The miners' leader Arthur Scargill was a Marxist who provided "the shock troops for the Left's attack", she claimed.

The strike was over plans by the National Coal Board to close dozens of uneconomic pits and stem financial losses running into billions.

Mrs Thatcher had recently appointed the American Ian MacGregor as the board's chairman, after he earned a reputation as an industrial hard man by transforming the fortunes of British Steel and halving the workforce in two years.

Anticipating a strike, Mr MacGregor - under orders from Mrs Thatcher's Energy Secretaries Nigel Lawson and then Peter Walker - built up massive coal stocks at power stations.

The strike began in Mr Scargill's Yorkshire power base and soon spread. But it was weakened by two flaws: first the snubbing of the strike by thousands of miners in areas like Nottinghamshire, who formed the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, and secondly Mr Scargill's refusal to hold a ballot, which meant he never got political backing from Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party or the TUC leadership under general secretary Norman Willis.

Many moderate Labour MPs who instinctively wanted to support a union steeped in the party's history were dismayed by Mr Scargill's tactics.

But besides the failure to hold a ballot, public support for the miners was undermined by horrific picket line violence, although the police came in for criticism too.

The most notorious clash between pickets and police came at the Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham in June 1984. There were about  5,000 on each side and brutal violence erupted.

Thatcher refused to back down as miners clashed with police

Mounted police charged the miners with truncheons and inflicted serious injuries on several pickets.

A defiant Mr Scargill was at the heart of the clashes, in which 93 arrests were made and 51 pickets and 72 police injured.

Earlier in the dispute, responding to criticism of police tactics on picket lines, Mrs Thatcher said in a TV interview: "The police are upholding the law. They are not upholding the Government.

"This is not a dispute between miners and government. This is a dispute between miners and miners. It is the police who are in charge of upholding the law. They have been wonderful."

After more clashes some weeks later, she said: "You saw the scenes on television last night. I must tell you that what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of the law and it must not succeed.

"There are those who are using violence and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it. The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob."

But trade union and left-wing critics of the Prime Minister claimed the real "enemy within" was the security services, after it was revealed that MI5 agents had been infiltrating striking miners.

There was also an intense propaganda war between Mrs Thatcher and Mr Scargill throughout the dispute. And in some of the more bizarre twists of the year-long strike, Mr Scargill turned to Colonel Gaddafi and Mikhail Gorbachev for funds.

Libya is thought to have provided £150,000, but in a behind-the-scenes move, Mrs Thatcher successfully persuaded Mr Gorbachev not to help the miners.

In the autumn of 1984, the strike began to crumble as more and more miners, running out of money and suffering huge financial hardship, returned to work.

Over the winter, more and more miners, their families suffering terrible poverty, went back and by the end of February, what Lady Thatcher called "the magic figure" - more than half - were back at work.

Looking back on the strike, Mrs Thatcher said it had been about more than uneconomic pits and had been a political strike.

"What the strike's defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left," she wrote in her memoirs.

"Marxists wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics. They failed."

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Warning First Class Stamp Could Cost £1

First class stamps could soon cost £1 each, according to a new campaign group that opposes Royal Mail privatisation.

Save Our Royal Mail (SORM), set up by groups representing the countryside, the elderly, small firms and the blind, has urged the Government not to "rush headlong" into a sell-off.

It fears a spiralling of prices if stamps are no longer regulated and became eligible for VAT.

SORM has also warned that privatising the Royal Mail could lead to fewer deliveries in the countryside and "rocketing" costs to small businesses.

The claims come a day after Sky's City Editor Mark Kleinman revealed Mark Russell would take the helm of the stepped-up plans of the £4bn privatisation of the Royal Mail.

The campaigners warned that free postal services for the blind would also be under threat, a freepost service to British forces could be scrapped and the Royal Mail's iconic red pillar boxes could be lost.

Campaign Director Mario Dunn said: "Save Our Royal Mail is a broad-based and growing campaign.

"We want to take our message to the politicians - do not rush headlong into a sell-off if you cannot guarantee a privatised Royal Mail will constrain its prices and provide these services at their current level."

Sorm has warned of a risk to the iconic red mail box

However, a Royal Mail spokesman downplayed concerns of change and said: "Stamp prices, whether set under public or private ownership, are subject to significant competitive pressures.

"Customers have many alternatives to the post and there are now many postal providers. It is pure speculation to suggest that stamp prices could reach £1 in the next few years - in fact in 2013 there was no increase in the price of first class or second class stamps."

"Clearly, the rules governing the implementation of VAT are a matter for HMRC, not Royal Mail.

He added: "VAT exemptions for core postal service delivery products such as stamps, by universal service providers (USP), are in place in the vast majority of EU countries under the European VAT Directive.

"Under the Postal Services Act 2011 Royal Mail is the USP in the UK. The VAT exemption would apply regardless of whether Royal Mail was in public or private ownership.

"Similar VAT exemptions are in place for universal service providers in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. In each country the USP is privately owned."

A Department for Business spokesman added: "Royal Mail will continue to be the designated universal service provider regardless of its ownership.

"An ownership change would not, therefore, trigger a change in the current VAT exemption which applies to first and second class stamps as part of the one price, anywhere service."

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