Gas crisis forces two UK fertiliser plants to halt work; US retail sales beat forecasts – as it happened

New York-listed fertiliser group CF Industries Holdings halts production at its plants in Billingham in Teesside and Ince in Cheshire, amid gas price surge

• Latest: US retail sales stronger than expected in August
• More UK firms struggle to fill vacancies
• Energy crunch forces two UK fertilizer plants to pause work
• Fertiliser disruption could hit food supplies
• Introduction: Evergrande and energy prices weigh on markets

John Lewis Partnership reduced its losses to 29m in the first half of its financial year, as it benefited from business rates relief, but paid out millions of pounds in redundancy payments and property closure costs.

The group behind John Lewis and Waitrose said it had benefited from 58m of business rates relief and would decide if it would return that to the government by March next year as it faced significant uncertainty" about trading over the important Christmas period.

Traditionally, our profits are skewed to the second half of the year because of the importance of Christmas, especially in John Lewis. As we look ahead, there is significant uncertainty. Like the whole of retail, we are managing global supply chain challenges and labour shortages. We are seeing inflationary pressures, which we expect to persist.

Given the back ended nature of our trading year, we do not generally provide an outlook. And this year we face additional uncertainty. Even with the success of the vaccination programme the course of the pandemic this winter is hard to call.