
Poundland set for ‘restructuring' after takeover by Gordon Brothers
Poundland is set for a 'restructuring' process after the high street discount chain was sold to investment firm Gordon Brothers.
Pepco Group, which has owned Poundland since 2016, said it has completed the sale of the business for a 'nominal' fee.
It comes after an auction by Poland-based Pepco to sell Poundland after a sharp downturn in trading over the past year.
Poundland's more-than-800 stores and roughly 16,000 employees will be transferred to the ownership of Gordon Brothers, which owns brands including Laura Ashley, as a result.
However, as part of the deal, Poundland is set to undergo a restructuring plan. Poundland said the details will be communicated 'in due course'.
Stephan Borchert, Pepco Group chief executive, said: 'This transaction will strongly support our accelerated value creation programme by simplifying the group and focusing on our successful Pepco business.'
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The Sun
44 minutes ago
- The Sun
Chocolate lovers rush to Aldi as supermarket launches £3.99 dupe of viral ‘Dubai chocolate'
CHOCOLATE fans are dashing to Aldi as the budget supermarket unveils a £3.99 version of the viral 'Dubai-style' chocolate bar. Now available in Aldi stores across the UK, the 100g bar promises a rich and indulgent experience—without the luxury price tag. The treat features creamy pistachio layers and crunchy kadayif pastry, all wrapped in silky milk chocolate. Inspired by a viral hit that exploded on social media, the chocolate has already caused a stir online. AldiUK teased the launch on Facebook, writing: 'THIS IS NOT A DRILL. The Dubai Style Chocolate Bar lands in store tomorrow! Will you be picking one up.' Fans flooded the comments with excitement. One wrote: 'More temptation.' Another added: 'You knocked it out of the park with this. Absolutely amazing.' A third asked: 'Hey dear Aldi, are these a special or permanent fixture? Xx' The chocolate is part of Aldi's Specialbuys range, meaning once it's sold out, it may not return. With no buying limit, shoppers are expected to stock up quickly. This isn't the first time retailers have tried to cash in on the Dubai chocolate craze. Lidl's JD Gross version flew off shelves, and Waitrose offers a similar pistachio white chocolate bar for £2.75. Morrisons stocks its own version—Bolci Dubai Chocolate—for £5. The trend shows no signs of slowing down, as chocolate lovers continue to seek out these premium-style treats at lower prices. If you're keen to try one, it's worth getting to your local Aldi early to avoid disappointment. As word spreads, demand is expected to spike. To get the best deal, savvy shoppers are encouraged to compare prices using online tools like PriceSpy, Google Shopping, or Idealo. These platforms let you check price histories and spot deals across retailers. SAVE MONEY AT ALDI Grabbing hot Specialbuys like this chocolate bar is just one way to save at Aldi. The discount chain frequently tops Which? rankings for the cheapest supermarket, offering consistent value for everyday essentials. In April, a typical basket of 79 items cost an average of £135.95 at Aldi—cheaper than rivals including Lidl and Tesco. Bargain hunters should also keep an eye out for Aldi's red sticker items, usually marked down in the morning. These offer major discounts on products close to their sell-by date or with minor packaging damage. Aldi's budget-friendly alcohol selection is another way to save, with own-brand options often coming in much cheaper than big-name labels. Don't forget about Too Good To Go 'Surprise Bags', available in selected stores. These offer a low-cost mix of near-date groceries that would otherwise go to waste. How to save money on chocolate We all love a bit of chocolate from now and then, but you don't have to break the bank buying your favourite bar. Consumer reporter Sam Walker reveals how to cut costs... Go own brand - if you're not too fussed about flavour and just want to supplant your chocolate cravings, you'll save by going for the supermarket's own brand bars. Shop around - if you've spotted your favourite variety at the supermarket, make sure you check if it's cheaper elsewhere. Websites like let you compare prices on products across all the major chains to see if you're getting the best deal. Look out for yellow stickers - supermarket staff put yellow, and sometimes orange and red, stickers on to products to show they've been reduced. They usually do this if the product is coming to the end of its best-before date or the packaging is slightly damaged. Buy bigger bars - most of the time, but not always, chocolate is cheaper per 100g the larger the bar. So if you've got the appetite, and you were going to buy a hefty amount of chocolate anyway, you might as well go bigger. 2


Top Gear
an hour ago
- Top Gear
BYD Dolphin Surf Review 2025
One of the cheapest electric superminis. And for buyers coming out of a three year old Skoda Fabia, the equipment list will feel like science fiction. It's kitted out with a full suite of connectivity and driver assist. You can unlock and drive it from your smartwatch, and send a link to a friend so they can do it too. External power means you could run a small cook stove in the wild. All of which is right there with the £18,650 base model. Advertisement - Page continues below It comes from BYD, a brand with mushrooming sales and a colossal footprint. Shortly after launch, manufacture of the Dolphin Surf moves to a vast brand-new plant in Hungary. You could accuse BYD of bait and switch with that entry price. It's for a relatively small battery car with just 137 miles of range. Fine as a commuter car, but you'd soon tire of motorway work: call it half an hour of charging for every hour at 70mph. So you're nudged into the middle Boost trim, which ups the electric range to 200 miles. But it costs another £3,300. That said, we suspect BYD knows this is the one you want, so at launch there's a deposit contribution bringing the Boost as close as £10 a month more on PCP than the small-battery Active. Rivals begin with the Dacia Spring and Leapmotor T03 at the bottom end. Although they're cheaper, they're smaller. Heartland rivals are the Stellantis pair, the Fiat Grande Panda and Citroën ë-C3. At the top of the Dolphin Surf range you draw level with the base Renault 5. Which is a problem for BYD. Advertisement - Page continues below How big is it? It's not quite a supermini because it's narrow, so fits only two abreast in the back. Same as the Hyundai Inster. And it's tall, so on its little wheels it looks a bit gawky. It's 4.0 metres in length, a squeak longer than a Toyota Yaris. EV-native underfloor design and the tall roof help with interior space. There's plenty of legroom in the back, and a deep boot. But a 'city car' is the bus. Surely this needs to be more than an urban runabout? Fair point. And to look at the spec, you might think the bigger-battery version will tackle proper journeys. First, its space means no-one is going to get cramp or face a Ryanair-style baggage policy. The seats are comfy and the stereo is fine. But the screen system will drive you bananas. Not least because unless you use Spotify (no other music source) you can't have any kind of navigation indication displayed at the same time as the music track name. So we were endlessly swiping and jabbing between the two display modes. More fundamentally, the ride isn't great, with turbulent low-speed bounce giving way to a float on faster bumps. On a motorway you're assailed by tiring wind noise. The ADAS features aren't much help. And unless you've bought the relatively expensive Comfort spec, which has more power, you'll be mashing the accelerator to accelerate up a slip road. On the bright side, this meek performance is a key to its real-world efficiency. Numbers then? The Active spec has a 30kWh battery giving 137 miles WLTP. Its 89bhp motor manages 0-62mh in 11.1 seconds. Boost ups the battery size to 43.2kWh, and range is now 200 miles. Same motor as before. But performance dips a little because of extra weight and perhaps its larger tyres (on 16s not 15s) gearing it up. It's 12.1s 0-62mph. Sorry, but it feels slower than that. For extra poke, get the Comfort, which has the Boost's battery but a usefully spicier 156bhp, cutting the 0-62mph to 9.1s. Range drops marginally to 193 miles WLTP. On a motorway the real drop will be more, unless you can resist using the extra power to hit the overtaking lane. That bigger battery charges at 85kW peak, for a half-hour 10-80 per cent top-up. Both batteries are BYD's robust and cost-efficient LFP chemistry, so you won't harm them by frequently discharging going close to flat and back to 100 per cent. Use the capacity you pay for. Our choice from the range BYD 65kW Boost 43kWh 5dr Auto £21,885 See prices and specs What's the verdict? ' Truth be told we found much of the Dolphin Surf's fancy tech – the display system and driver assists – annoying rather than helpful ' Can a million drivers be wrong? In China and South America, total sales of this car – known as the Seagull and Dolphin Mini – have already sold that number. But BYD took a while to intro it here, to revise the structure and safety systems in pursuit of all five EuroNCAP stars (the actual test isn't published as we write), and improve the sense of quality. Both those things are admirable. The cabin space and seat comfort are excellent. People are going to look at the rest of the equipment and wonder why the Citroen and Fiat rivals are so sparse. But truth be told we found much of the Dolphin Surf's fancy tech – the display system and driver assists – annoying rather than helpful. We'd likely soon default to phone mirroring and, y'know, driving. And when driving we'd notice the lack of polish and engagement. Small cars should be cheeky fun. This is off-target.


Times
an hour ago
- Times
Reform's Zia Yusuf: My Doge-like mission on behalf of the taxpayer
Asylum seekers have been taken trampolining, bowling, to the cinema and on shopping sprees, including to a store selling luxury hair extensions, according to Reform's anti-waste council team. Auditors styled on Elon Musk's Doge (Department of Government Efficiency) said the trips out and other spending at JD Sports and PC World cost taxpayers more than £24,000 between April 2022 and December. The claims were made about Kent county council as part of Reform UK's drive to inspect accounts at ten local authorities of which it won control in May. Zia Yusuf, who is running Reform's Doge unit, said he was concerned that some local authority bosses were treating taxpayers as 'their own personal piggy bank'. He signalled a crackdown on spending on LGBT Pride events set to take place in June and vowed to make payments to contractors for filling potholes. A team of 15 auditors has been assembled by Reform, all working nearly full-time for free. After meetings began with the council earlier in June, Yusuf said his unit had uncovered 'profligate' spending. Up to 3,000 staff at the council can work from home, Yusuf said, but his questions about how laptops were monitored to ensure productivity were met with 'filibustering'. An initial trawl of documents showed that 'civil servants are spending taxpayer money like it's their own personal piggy bank', Yusuf said. Transport for children with special educational needs (Sen) was also identified by Yusuf as an inefficient system. Councils must provide payments for taxis or bus services if the child lives more than a set distance from their nearest suitable school. Costs have risen significantly for local authorities — the County Councils Network estimates that the number of children requiring transport funding has risen by a quarter since 2019. Yusuf said: 'I've been doing some analysis already with some of the team on looking at these contracts and zooming in on how much it is costing per mile to take these kids to school. In most cases, it's somewhere between seven and 15 times the cost of an Uber ride.' Yusuf said he wanted to 'really fight for the taxpayer here and say 'it doesn't make sense, the taxpayer shouldn't be paying seven to 12 times more'. ' He said some councils could save 'tens of millions of pounds'. Yusuf said he recently met a mother whose three children all have Sen and go to the same school but are taken in three cars. 'She just thinks it's really wasteful,' he said. He stressed that 'if you're a parent with a child with Sen, then you've got nothing to fear from a Reform council', adding it was an example of how he wanted to 'deliver better services for lower marginal costs'. Action on 'vanity projects' was also signalled by Yusuf. When asked whether councils should spend money organising Pride events, he said it was up to elected representatives where to spend money — but added: 'Speaking to our councillors, I think you're going to see a lot of those things either reduced materially or cut completely … The bar for spending taxpayers' money should be ridiculously high. And those are essentially vanity projects.' Auditors have started to ask councils for full lists of staff job titles in an attempt to avoid them 'hiding' diversity, equity and inclusion roles, Yusuf said. Whistleblowers have also come forward to reveal spending Yusuf deemed wasteful. They included council workers who told him that when their laptop screen broke, they were told to have it repaired, which cost double that of buying a new one. Contract competitiveness was highlighted by Yusuf as another area of concern. He said Reform's auditors were using artificial intelligence to comb through thousands of pages of successful tenders. Too often only one firm bids and therefore automatically wins the contract, providing little in the way of competition and value for money, he said. Terms can also last for more than 20 years. 'When Nasa awarded SpaceX its space exploration contract, that was six years because you want to create accountability,' Yusuf said. 'If you give someone a 25-year contract, there's no accountability. And then you wonder why our roads are so undriveable and potholes never get repaired.' While Yusuf admitted that some of the spending criticised by Reform's Doge team was 'relatively small' in the grand scheme of council budgets, he said it was still 'egregious' and had caused the social contract to start 'fraying at the edges'. A pothole-filling pilot scheme will be set up at several councils. Yusuf said contracted firms were often paid a day rate with 'no specific deadline' and used 'Iron Age' pickaxes that delayed completion. 'We're going to run pilots and demonstrate we can massively reduce the marginal cost of repairing potholes, and then provide that as a blueprint for everybody,' he said. Audits of council finances will be replicated at the national level if Reform wins the Welsh or Scottish parliament elections next year. 'We're going to bring that to every corridor of power that Reform wins,' Yusuf said. Reform has come under criticism from political rivals for the manner of its audits. Opponents have said Nigel Farage's party will have few areas to make cuts because many council spending commitments are based on statutory requirements to deliver services. There have also been two by-elections announced for Reform councillors elected in May, leading critics to claim they are a waste of taxpayers' money. After a return to Reform last week 48 hours after he resigned as chairman, Yusuf confirmed he was 'very open' to standing as an MP and said being in parliament 'allows you to have greater impact'. He left open the possibility of vying to be Farage's pick for a potential future chancellor and said he would 'leave such decisions to him'. Yusuf was unfazed by the fact that Reform raised less than the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the first quarter of the year. He stressed that much of the party's income was from £25 membership fees and added about some perspective donors: 'Some of them are, I think, a bit deluded in thinking that the cadaver of the Conservative Party might somehow be resuscitated.' Some Tory MPs are in discussion with Reform about potentially defecting, Yusuf said, but he warned that their time was running out. He said the party would need some people with experience of working in government and taking on 'the blob' in Whitehall but 'the bar is extremely high … Why would we want a Johnny-come-lately in 2028-29 when we've got amazing people who are completely new to politics'. Kent county council was contacted for comment.