Victoria will open mass vaccination hubs on Wednesday in an effort to speed up the inoculation process. Those eligible under stage 1A and 1B...

Pregnant women in the UK can now be offered a Covid-19 shot, government advisers said on Friday, but should not have the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation recommended expectant mothers should only have the BioNTech/Pfizer or Moderna shot.The US will invest $1.7bn to tackle Covid-19 variants, as public health experts warn that new strains of the virus could drive up infections even as more Americans are vaccinated. The White House announced on Friday that it was allocating funds from the $1.9tn economic relief package signed into law last month, to fight the variants.There have been 77 cases of a new variant linked to a surge in Covid-19 cases in India found in the UK, as the government seeks to fortify its defences against strains that may be able to evade existing vaccines. The cases were reported by the government on Thursday evening, along with 56 new cases of the variant first identified in South Africa.The number of EU citizens arriving in the UK before the pandemic has been revised upwards by the official statistics body. The Office for National Statistics on Friday said that during the nine-years to March 2020, before the first lockdown, EU net migration averaged 216,000 people per year, 76 per cent higher than previous figures.A worker prepares a dose of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at Dae Hueng Presbyterian Church in Gardena, California © Patrick T Fallon/AFP via Getty ImagesModerna has warned that it will deliver fewer than expected vaccines to the UK, Canada and some other countries, after a shortfall in production in its European supply chain. The Boston-based biotechnology company said on Friday that it will reduce the number of doses it is sending to the UK from April.Apple has temporarily closed its stores in Michigan, which has become the latest hotspot for coronavirus in the US. “Due to current Covid-19 conditions, we are temporarily closing our stores in Michigan. We take this step with an abundance of caution as we closely monitor the situation,” the company said on Friday.Santander has told UK mortgage brokers that when assessing the mortgage application of a self-employed borrower it would set aside the 2020-21 accounting period if their business had been adversely affected by the coronavirus crisis. From Monday, Santander will base its assessment on income in the two tax years prior to the pandemic. The chief executive of the Co-operative Group will receive a bonus of more than £1m this year despite the mutual choosing not to relinquish business rates relief. Steve Murrells will receive £1.35m, an increase of £735,000 on 2019’s outcome, taking his total pay to £2.2m. Over half of this year’s bonus is a deferred award from 2018.

HSBC chief executive Noel Quinn has abolished the entire executive floor of its Canary Wharf skyscraper in east London, as the bank becomes the latest to drive through sweeping changes to post-pandemic working practices.Top managers have been booted out of their 42nd-floor private offices, which have been turned into client meeting rooms and collaborative spaces, Quinn told the Financial Times. Executives — the CEO included — now hot desk on an open-plan floor two storeys below.“Our offices were empty half the time because we were travelling around the world. That was a waste of real estate,” he said. “If I’m asking our colleagues to change the way that they’re working, then it’s only right that we change the way we’re working.“We don’t have a designated desk. You turn up and grab one in the morning,” he added. “I won’t be in the office five days a week. I think it’s unnecessary . . . It’s the new reality of life.” HSBC has made previous efforts to modernise a culture that has been compared to Britain’s vast imperial-era civil service. More than 20 years ago, management told staff preparing to move into the new Canary Wharf headquarters that they were “encouraged to embrace the proposed open-plan layout”.More changes were coming, Quinn promised. To achieve its goal of cutting 40 per cent from its global head-office costs, HSBC does not plan to renew many of its city-centre leases due in the next three to five years. The bank is also shifting to a policy of about two employees per desk, excluding branches.“We will have a very different working style going forward that will be much more hybrid, where colleagues can part work in the office, part at home,” the CEO said.Quinn, a plain-speaking 59-year-old HSBC lifer from Birmingham, is also taking aim at other parts of the bank’s operations. The bank is in the middle of a programme to cut 35,000 jobs to reduce headcount to about 200,000. This will help it eliminate $5.5bn of costs with earnings under pressure from ultra-low interest rates and a slowdown in global trade.HSBC’s Covid-related office changes echo those of its peers. Britain’s biggest mortgage lender Nationwide will allow its 13,000 office-based staff to work from home full-time if they wish. Lloyds is carrying out trials of hybrid working this spring after 77 per cent of employees “expressed a desire” to continue working remotely.Standard Chartered signed an agreement with flexible office company IWG to allow many of its 95,000 staff to work from “near-home” locations rather than commuting into cities.Quinn, who has been in charge for more than a year and a half, has started to make his mark on other aspects of the bank’s leadership. Last week, he shifted four top divisional executives to Hong Kong from London.

Consumers around the world have stockpiled an extra $5.4tn of savings since the coronavirus pandemic began and are becoming increasingly confident about the economic outlook, paving the way for a strong rebound in spending as businesses reopen.Households around the globe accumulated the excess — defined as the additional savings compared with the 2019 spending pattern and equating to more than 6 per cent of global gross domestic product — by the end of the first quarter of this year, according to estimates by credit rating agency Moody’s.And booming global consumer confidence suggests shoppers will be willing to spend again as soon as shops, bars and restaurants reopen when restrictions to control the spread of the virus are eased. In the first quarter of this year the Conference Board global consumer confidence index hit its highest level since records began in 2005, with significant uplifts in all regions of the world.Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said: “The combination of an unleashing of significant pent-up demand and overflowing excess saving will drive a surge in consumer spending across the globe as countries approach herd immunity and open up.”If consumers spend about a third of their excess savings they would boost global output by just over 2 percentage points both this year and next, Moody’s estimated.Despite the global economy last year suffering its largest fall in output in modern history, household incomes have largely been protected by unprecedented government stimulus schemes in most advanced economies. Consumers also reduced spending in the face of high uncertainty about jobs and incomes, and because many service businesses were shut or restricted. As a result, in 2020 household saving rates in many advanced economies reached their highest levels this century, according to OECD data, and bank deposits increased rapidly in many countries.Zandi said excess saving was highest in developed economies, in particular North America and Europe where lockdowns have been widely implemented and government spending has been high.In the US alone, households have piled up more than $2tn in extra savings, Moody’s estimated. That is before the giant transfers from President Joe Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus programme kick in. Together they are enough to potentially fuel an “extended consumption splurge”, said Krishna Guha, economist at the investment banking adviser Evercore ISI.Silvia Ardagna, economist at Barclays, expects “a fairly rapid acceleration in household spending this year” in the US and “to lesser extent” in the UK, though she warned that “a slower vaccination rollout may mean any pent-up demand is not realised in the euro area” in the next two quarters. A number of Middle Eastern countries where government support has been generous also have significant excess savings, while in Asia, accumulated excess savings were lower than in other regions as the pandemic has been contained and the impact on household behaviour was less pronounced.In South America and eastern Europe savings were lower as a result of the heavy hit from the pandemic and less government support.However, the impact of the pandemic has been highly unequal and savings have been largely accumulated by richer households in all regions. The Morning Consult consumer confidence index showed overall steady improvements between January and April across 15 large economies but a larger share of lower income households reported their financial conditions had worsened compared with a year ago.More than one-third of richer households in many countries, including China, Australia, Italy, Russia and the US, said now was a good time to make big purchases, but that was not the case for poorer households, data from Morning Consult showed.Jan Hatzius, economist at Goldman Sachs, estimated that nearly two-thirds of US excess savings were held by the richest 40 per cent of the population and suggested this could hold back the scale of the economic boost because “high-income households will hold [rather than spend] the bulk of excess savings”.Adam Slater, lead economist at Oxford Economics, said: “If excess savings are mostly held by wealthier households and these are treated as a wealth increase rather than an income addition, we would expect a much lower level of [additional] spending.”Nearly three-quarters of the UK households that reported increased savings plan to continue to hold them in their bank accounts, according to the Bank of England. Others plan to use their savings to pay off debts, invest or top up their pensions.This is in line with the Conference Board findings that showed double-digit percentage point increases in the proportion of consumers who increased savings and investments in shares in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the same period last year.

The result left United second in the standings on 66 points from 32 games, eight behind leaders Manchester City and 10 ahead of third-placed...