Good morning,
Countryside Partnerships(£) has been urged to find a buyer by its largest investor. Browning West, which owns 15.3% of the housebuilder, issued the instruction after Countryside rebuffed a £1.5bn overture from In-Cap last week.
Boris Johnson will announce plans to extend the right to buy(£) to millions of people who rent from housing associations this week. The PM is also expected to use the speech to call for more “flat-pack” homes.
And ministers are drawing up plans to seize billions of pounds in frozen oligarch assets, including property and cash, to help rebuild Ukraine(£).
More than a tenth of homes are now sold “in secret”, as off-market sales(£) move from being the preserve of the super-rich to the mainstream.
The Membership Collective Group(£) is still looking to expand, but instead of opening more Soho House sites it plans to open two more homeware stores.
Elon Musk has told staff at Tesla to come back to the office or quit(£). He is also planning to cut staff by 10%(£), after having a “super bad feeling” about the economy.
The Platinum Jubilee is over, but if you are still in a nostalgic and royalist mood why not listen to this week’s EG Like Sunday Morning: The Platinum Edition – packed to the gunwales with olde worlde charme.
And if you simply enjoyed the long weekend, why not join the 70-plus firms in the UK(£) which are taking part in the world’s biggest pilot study to make the four-day week(£) permanent?
Ministers in Scotland are considering a four-day week for public sector staff(£), as they try to close a potential spending gap of £3.5bn.
Meanwhile, a glitch in the personal tax allowance regime combined with pay rises triggered by inflation(£) will push a million more high-earning workers into the 60% bracket.
Despite the cost of living crisis, shopper numbers(£) edged up in May. But total numbers are still significantly below pre-pandemic levels.
Plans for an £11m veterinary life innovation centre(£) in Aberdeen have been given the thumbs up. It is hoped the development will act as a catalyst to bring more life sciences firms to the Highlands.
Meanwhile, The Guardian travels to Leeds to see how the city is luring companies to the North.
And The Times (£) pays a visit to a Roman villa, which has been built recently in Somerset.
It also chats to Taylor Wimpey’s new boss Jennie Daly(£), the first woman to run one of the UK’s big listed housebuilders.
And asks Whitbread’s Alison Brittain(£) about its plans to conquer Germany.
In California, residents of Hollywoodland(£) want to get rid of the famous sign, saying the tourists who flock to see it are creating a fire risk.
And finally, isn’t it a good thing that auctioneers have such a broad training? Take the example Siobhan Tyrrell, head of valuations at Dawsons Auctioneers, who recently went on a routine valuation to a bungalow in Enfield. The family of its 90-year-old owner were wanting to sell it to pay for her care. “There was nothing exceptional in the house until I walked into the bedroom and saw the painting hanging, off kilter, above a bed,” recalls Tyrrell. “Although I’m a general valuer and not a painting specialist, I recognised it was significant straight away.” In fact, it turned out that the 50cm x 43.5cm painting, which had been given to the woman by her father, was a depiction of the Madonna and Child by 15th-century Italian master Filippino Lippi(£), a pupil of Botticelli. Thanks to the eagle eyes of Tyrrell, it has now sold at action for £255,000 – about the same price as the bungalow.
