Pensioners are ‘big winners’ with triple-lock set to rise by 3.9%, lifting state pension to £13,000 – business live
Posted on Tuesday September 15, 2026

Wage growth – used to set triple-lock pension – slows to 3.9%, meaning state pension should hit £13,000 next year

• ‘Costing billions’: is the pensions triple lock a lifeline or simply unaffordable?

If the state pension rises to £13,000 next year, it will probably breach the UK’s tax-free personal allowance (currently £12,570) – the amount you can earn before paying income tax.

However, pensioners who don’t receive any other income should still be exempt from paying tax if the state pension exceeds the personal allowance.

In the 2025 Budget the government announced the personal allowance would be frozen at its current level up to April 2031.

It also announced that pensioners whose sole income is the basic or new state pension would not have to pay small amounts of tax via simple assessment from 2027/28 if the new or basic state pension exceeded the personal allowance from that point. To date the government has not published any further details of how this is to be done.

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Scrap windfall tax on oil and gas firms early, North Sea industry urges
Posted on Tuesday September 15, 2026

Labour should replace levy in 2027 rather than 2030 as energy bills are poised to surge over the winter, says lobby group

The North Sea oil and gas industry has called on Labour to scrap the windfall tax on fossil fuel firms three years early, as Britain heads into a winter with energy bills expected to reach their highest level since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), the industry’s trade body, wants the tax replaced in 2027, rather than in 2030, with a narrower levy that only applies during price spikes.

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Make NHS and MoD uniforms in UK, fashion firms urge Burnham
Posted on Tuesday September 15, 2026

More than 1,200 people including Ben Fogle sign letter saying buying British will help preserve manufacturing firms

• Business live – latest updates

London fashion week is only days away, but one industry organisation has turned its attention to clothing that is a little less catwalk-worthy – the uniforms worn by British defence forces and NHS staff.

On Wednesday afternoon, the thinktank Fashion Roundtable will hand deliver a letter to No 10 urging Andy Burnham to commit to manufacturing these uniforms in the UK.

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Trump facing AI backlash in Congress as push for guardrails intensifies
Posted on Tuesday September 15, 2026

President has dismissed anxieties over AI’s dangerous potential even as Democrats and some Republicans acknowledge risks

Donald Trump is facing a rare backlash from the US Congress as Democrats and some Republicans push for guardrails on the world’s most powerful AI companies.

Concerns over the dangerous potential of AI reached fever pitch this week after tech leaders sounded the alarm over the rapid advancement of the technology and its potential threat to humanity.

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Trump facing AI backlash in Congress as push for guardrails intensifies
Posted on Tuesday September 15, 2026

President has dismissed anxieties over AI’s dangerous potential even as Democrats and some Republicans acknowledge risks

Donald Trump is facing a rare backlash from the US Congress as Democrats and some Republicans push for guardrails on the world’s most powerful AI companies.

Concerns over the dangerous potential of AI reached fever pitch this week after tech leaders sounded the alarm over the rapid advancement of the technology and its potential threat to humanity.

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Why a decade of doomsday warnings failed to slow the AI race
Posted on Tuesday September 15, 2026

From Stephen Hawking to Jacob Coxon’s viral Anthropic resignation, fears that AI could threaten humanity have shaken the industry without stopping its pursuit

Before an Anthropic researcher resigned and declared human extinction imminent last week, tech leaders and scientists had sounded the alarm about a superintelligent AI ending humanity for over a decade.

The development of artificial intelligence “could spell the end of the human race”, warned professor and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in 2014 – a little less than a decade before the public got its hands on the generative AI features of the original version of ChatGPT.

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Pietersen’s England return is just pure content at a time when cricket needs it | Barney Ronay
Posted on Tuesday September 15, 2026

While there’s a statistically significant chance it will all go south, KP’s mentorship could be a throwback to better days

At the end of his time as consultant to the England cricket setup Gilbert Enoka praised Brendon McCullum’s incredible work in healing the culture of his team. Enoka is best known as the architect of the no-dickheads policy in sport. This is basically Doctor Dickhead. Dickheads? He’s not having them.

“There wasn’t one dickhead in there,” Enoka announced, proudly. And history has shown this to be correct. All the evidence suggests the numerical value of dickheads in the England cricket team was something other than one. And yes, zero is not one. Fair point. But so are all the other numbers, the ones that go up the other way into plurals, multiples, an infinity of dickheads.

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Are Manchester United as poor as the early Premier League table suggests?
Posted on Tuesday September 15, 2026

Michael Carrick’s side are 13th in the table after four games but, City mitigation aside, several areas need attention

Manchester United are 13th in the Premier League, having taken four points from their first four games: a 2-0 defeat at Hull, 5-2 win against Ipswich, 2-2 draw at Everton and the 1-0 defeat by Manchester City on Sunday. Mitigation regarding the City reverse can be found in the derby coming three days after the Champions League win against Sabah on Thursday, with Enzo Maresca’s side having 48 hours more rest after winning at Porto. So are United, who host Brighton in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday before visiting Fulham in the league on Sunday, as poor as the table suggests?

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