The administrators are in

Wexford & Vale, the 190-store homeware retailer, appointed administrators on Thursday after weekend rescue talks with its lenders failed, putting around 2,800 jobs at risk. Trading continues while the administrators market the business, and reports suggest a pre-pack sale — agreed before the appointment and completed immediately after — to a vehicle backed by the founding family.

Landlords and unsecured suppliers, who tend to fare worst in retail failures, are already organising.

The Competition and Markets Authority referred Coldstream Logistics' £1.9bn acquisition of Braemar Foods Distribution for an in-depth Phase 2 investigation on Thursday. The two firms run overlapping chilled-distribution networks, and the regulator's concern is that supermarkets and food producers would face fewer credible options for temperature-controlled haulage in parts of the UK.

The parties argue the deal creates efficiencies that will lower costs. They now face a review of roughly six months, with divestments — or prohibition — among the possible outcomes.

The FCA fined Pennine Bank £38m on Thursday for operational resilience failures, after a 2025 outage at its main cloud provider locked customers out of payments for the best part of three days. The regulator found the bank had never properly tested how it would cope with the loss of the provider, had no credible exit plan, and could not stay within the disruption tolerances it had itself set.

The decision is being read as a warning shot for every firm that has moved core systems to a handful of large cloud vendors.