Wage more than £10 to help with housing costs

staff reporter,London(wp/es):
A rise in the London Living Wage to more than £10 to reflect the sky-high cost of housing was backed by Labour mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan today.
The frontrunner to replace Boris Johnson used a keynote speech to urge the Living Wage Commission to change the way it calculates the recommended minimum earnings to better mirror the pressure on families in the capital.
Mr Khan called on businesses to see it as a “badge of honour” to pay staff the Living Wage, currently £9.40 per hour in London and £8.25 elsewhere.
The complex calculation to set the rate is thought to underplay the capital’s housing costs. Mr Khan, who urged it to identify “a more consistent, fair formula”, is writing to the body.
“Of principal importance for Londoners will be the inclusion of a real reflection of the cost of housing and the extent of its impact on in-work poverty,” he said. He was speaking at the Resolution Foundation think tank which yesterday revealed a million Londoners live in homes where half the earnings are spent on housing — more than anywhere else in the country.

Marks & Spencer's change at the top may not stop it from sinking

business correspondent,London(wp/es):
Marc Bolland spent much of the Christmas break trudging around York in his wellies, surveying the flood’s impact on Marks & Spencer’s stores.
Now he’s making an even soggier departure from the company he’s run for the past six years.
While Steve Rowe’s appointment is the right move, the timing of the announcement smells worse than a water-damaged basement.
In July, senior M&S sources were telling people like me that Bolland would be staying on for another two years.
Yet today, we’re told he informed the board in the summer that he wanted to leave in early 2016. Peculiar, no?

Communication issues aside, how Bolland must wish that he had quit immediately in the summer.
Back then, shares were flirting with 600p. It even looked as if his turnaround of general merchandise was bearing fruit.
But despite improvements to the winter ranges, sales in recent weeks have been dismal — clearly far worse than he’d feared.
M&S, which has the biggest share of the market in woollens and coats, has inevitably been hit disproportionately badly, despite Bolland’s improvements to M&S’s buying and online sales.
Few — and certainly not me — foresaw just how bad its numbers would be, even after Next’s shocker on Tuesday.
However, going forward, Bolland’s transformation of the food offering and his modernisation of the general merchandise division during his six years in charge give Rowe a decent head start.
With his energy and popularity in the company, Rowe has as good a chance as any of making M&S work again.
The trouble is, in a High Street dominated by weird weather and ever-faster fashion from discount rivals, it’s still far from clear if anyone can hold back the flood threatening M&S