EDITION 890
11 OCTOBER 2021

There is no escaping it: too much news is bad for you. It should come with a government health warning: “This intellectual diet is fine taken in small doses, and preferably in weekly instalments, via a well-balanced newsletter, such as 10 things from William Montgomery."

So, as another week slips by, here are 10 things which caught my attention and may have escaped yours. Please feel free to share on social media and forward to your colleagues and friends so they can also subscribe, learn and engage. I would be very grateful if you did.

William Montgomery
Editor and CEO of TEN

1. How to manage an unstructured boss. You’ve landed your dream job, with a boss whose work you admire. But it turns out that boss is not interested in the practical aspects of managing. So what do you do? You can set your own short- and long-term targets, but, better still, you can learn to manage upwards. READ MORE >>

2. UK on course for EU trade war. There are fears that the UK is heading for a trade war with the EU following signals from London that proposals to be unveiled in Brussels over Brexit arrangements do not go far enough. The Brexit minister, Lord Frost, is expected to say that the bloc’s scrapping of its prohibition on British sausages to resolve the dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol is not sufficient. The peer will demand “significant” changes to the post-Brexit agreement he negotiated. The Guardian

3. Universal credit cut. As of this week, no one eligible for universal credit (UC) will receive the £20 uplift that was introduced last year to help families during the pandemic. Defending the decision to remove the uplift, Deputy PM Dominic Raab stressed that it was “always meant to be temporary”, but hundreds of charities have warned that it will tip families into poverty. The former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith (who devised UC) urged the PM to at least “pause” the removal while the cost of living is rising. The Government has promised a £500m fund to help struggling claimants get into the workforce. BBC

4. Inflation will last longer. The Bank of England’s new chief economist has said that inflation is rising faster than expected and will last for longer than anticipated. Speaking to the Commons Treasury select committee, Huw Pill said that the recent rise in prices would prove to be temporary but the “magnitude and duration of the transient inflation spike is proving greater than expected”. Markets are pricing in a 15-basis-point rate rise from 0.1% to 0.25% by the end of the year. The Times

5. Financial literacy is in crisis. More people than ever are now fully responsible for their financial futures, as pensions backed by employers and governments have become relics. The problem, according to the Financial Times: The state of financial literacy is in "crisis." This comes as interest rates globally are near zero, eliminating safe returns on savings and forcing people to take on more risk with their nest eggs in the stock market. Research has found financial literacy today is especially lacking among younger people, leading groups to advocate for childhood education of financial topics in schools around the world. Should personal finance be taught in schools? VOTE HERE >>

6. The sweet spot for free time. In today’s “always-on” world, many people balancing work with family life say they haven’t enough time for themselves – but according to a new study, there may be a limit to how much free time is good for us. The researchers analysed data from two large surveys on how people use their time, which had involved more than 35,000 people, and found that both too little and too much leisure time were associated with lower subjective well-being. The sweet spot was between 2.5 and five hours a day. Any more than that, and subjective well-being started to tail off. However, the researchers didn’t find that long hours of leisure time inevitably made people feel worse. It depended on what they did with all that time. In cases where the subjects filled the empty hours with purposeful and productive activities, the negative relationship vanished: more was better. The Guardian

7. Medical matters. Britain is in the grip of a mental health pandemic as it was revealed that one in four adults in a study said their state of mind was now worse than before the virus emerged. One in 12 of all adults polled has had panic attacks and one in 15 has had suicidal thoughts. Experts fear that if the government does not tackle the problem, the nation “will be plunged into a post-Covid mental health crisis that could take more than a generation to recover from. Meanwhile, only 58% of patients were seen face to face by GPs in England in August, the first month with no pandemic restrictions – scarcely more than during the lockdown in January, when the proportion was 54%. Before the pandemic, more than 80% of patients were seen face to face. Daily Mirror

8. City renters in facing uphill struggle. London’s rental market is soaring above an affordable level for the majority of people, according to new data from the ONS. For three-quarters of households in the capital, rents are set at more than 30% of their income. Only the city’s top earners are renting at what the ONS classifies as an ‘affordable’ rate (less than 30% of a tenant’s earnings). Comparisons with other regions show how expensive rent is in the capital: the average household in London spends 38% of its income; in the Midlands, England's most affordable region, that figure drops to 22%. The Guardian

9. Meat consumption falls by 17%. A study has shown that daily meat consumption in the UK has fallen by 17% in the past decade. The research, published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health, found that while most people are eating significantly less red and processed meat compared to a decade ago, they are eating more white meat. The overall reduction is not happening quickly enough to meet the National Food Strategy’s goal of a 30% drop in meat consumption over the next ten years. The Independent

10. The bottom line. 65% of UK voters are in favour of raising the minimum wage to £15; 14% oppose the idea. 76% of Labour voters support the rise, compared to 59% of Conservatives. The Independent