Householders should prepare for hefty’ increases in water bills the industry regulator said yesterday

Householders should prepare for “hefty”‘ increases in water bills, the industry regulator said yesterday after suppliers submitted proposals for a 30 per cent increase in charges.
The increases, which the water companies claim are needed to fund a £20bn programme of environmental improvements, would lift the average domestic water bill from £234 next year to £307 by 2009/10.In some cases bills would rise by substantially more. An exit tax for companies converting to a Reit structure would benefit state coffers straight away.The UK’s unfavourable tax regime is blamed for the large discounts property shares typically trade at, compared with the net value of a company’s assets.. However, the industry has told officials that the UK listed sector is disappearing and that much real estate is now held offshore, for tax reasons.Property leaders say that, with a higher tax rate on dividends, the introduction of Reits would maintain or even increase the tax take.The industry also says Reits would benefit equity investment in property. Treasury mandarins visited the Netherlands over the summer and visits to the US are planned.The structure would enable property companies to avoid double taxation – paid on profits and by investors on dividends. With Reits, tax would only be payable on dividends.The Treasury has resisted the idea in the past, because it feared a loss of tax revenues. If the idea is attractive, the Treasury is expected to launch a formal consultation next year and the measure could be included in the April 2005 Budget.Reits are available to property companies in the US and on the Continent. The Treasury has appointed an official to investigate the introduction of Real Estate Investment Trusts, in a possible precursor to full-scale government consultation on the move.
The official is understood to be “fact-finding” on the trusts, whose structure offers major tax advantages.

The shares were unchanged at 9.25p, compared with 5p this time last year.. The Blades Enterprise Centre, which houses small businesses, is 95 per cent occupied. The building of a football academy was completed during the year.The company raised £3.8m in an open offer in May, mainly to reduce debt It moved its quotation to AIM to save money. That translated into an operating profit of £500,000, before amortising the value of players, compared with a £900,000 loss last time.The club was also successful off the pitch. But its success in the FA Cup and Carling Cup – it reached the semi-finals in both – brought in cup income of £1.5m Gate receipts also rose and commercial sales almost doubled.

Sheffield United, the current leader of the First Division, has slashed its losses thanks to last season’s cup campaigns. “I can’t tell you about the weight they give to any single statistic in a given quarter,” he said.The changes to GDP figures were due to a massive revision to estimates of construction by the Department of Trade and Industry. Bell plays a flute, plays a guitar, plays a Korg keyboard but makes it sound more like a vintage Farfisa, wears a tweed coat of the kind The Supremes’ Mary Wilson used to wear (oblivious to the heat, because style is more important than comfort), and never smiles Every boy in the room is falling in love with her. All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey. And The Essex Green have come to paint London a deep, deep blue. The bleak midwinter may not be quite the most auspicious season to be hearing something as autumnal as the mellow mood music made by this Brooklyn band, but that’s perhaps as it should be.

The Essex Green are a band out of time (they evoke the late 1960s/ early 1970s) and, if their apparently Anglophile name is any guide, a band out of place too: The Essex Green possess an elegance, and a mastery of poignancy, of which you might, quite understandably, have concluded that the present generation of American bands is utterly incapable

All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey. “We’re a bit stumped.”The unexpectedness of the failure is perhaps the moral. The heavy dependency on computers in modern cars carries its own risks. A bug in the system could be this century’s broken fan-belt..