Owning a home in Beijing should have been a profitable investment for Zhang, a 32-year-old consultant. But the Chinese property market’s years-long collapse has meant he is “definitely losing money”. Asked if this week’s bumper stimulus measures would restore his faith in the Chinese economy, he was clear: “Absolutely not.”
The package — Beijing’s biggest since the pandemic — includes billions of dollars from the central bank to support the stock market, policy rate cuts, measures to boost bank liquidity and efforts to stabilise China’s prolonged property crisis, including a 50-basis point interest rate cut for mortgage holders such as Zhang.
This was followed by one of the most forceful statements on Thursday from China’s politburo, which held what analysts called an “emergency” meeting on the economy and announced that it would intensify fiscal spending to support growth.
“We were . . . surprised by the pace of the policy shift,” said Robin Xing, Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia economist, who anticipated this would be the first in a long cycle of policies to reflate the economy.
But the plight of people such as Zhang shows the scale of Beijing’s challenge as it seeks to reignite consumer confidence in the world’s second-largest economy.
The three-year housing slump, triggered by a crackdown by Beijing on real estate leverage and accompanied by other crackdowns on industries ranging from ecommerce to online education and finance, has hit household confidence. Combined with industrial oversupply and soaring debt levels, analysts warn China risks descending into a deflationary spiral.
Despite China’s booming exports, which are helping to sustain GDP growth, industrial profits for large companies fell nearly 18 per cent year on year in August. This was partly because of “insufficient effective market demand”, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Friday.
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In the domestic economy, the lack of confidence is evident everywhere. Retail sales are up less than 1 per cent since the start of the year in seasonally adjusted terms, research group Gavekal estimated, while consumer prices are flirting with deflation, youth unemployment is up and tax revenue and expenditure fell in August.
The monetary policy package, which was announced by central bank governor Pan Gongsheng on Tuesday flanked by financial sector regulators, contained powerful support for the stock market, including swaps to help brokers, funds and insurance companies increase their stock market holdings and funds for companies to undertake share buybacks.
The central bank also cut the benchmark short-term rate by 20 basis points and slashed the level of reserves that banks must hold, freeing up about Rmb1tn ($143bn) for lending.
The easing signals sent global markets higher and cheered trading partners. “We are very pleased to see these additional steps,” said Australian treasurer Jim Chalmers during a visit to Beijing on Friday. He pointed to Australian treasury forecasts that China, Australia’s largest trading partner, was facing its weakest three years of growth since the 1970s. Shares in Australia’s Fortescue, the iron ore miner, gained 5 per cent, while BHP and Rio Tinto rose 3 per cent on Friday.
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“[Weak] growth in the Chinese economy has been a key contributor to weakness in the global economy,” he said.
But economists were concerned that, with the exception of the mortgage rate cut, there was not enough help for households. Cuts to bank deposit rates will hit broader household incomes.
“Probably Beijing will need to deliver some more concrete programmes over the next few weeks to reassure the market that there is more money being put to use to help consumers maintain their spending power,” said Fred Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC. “You need to have monetary easing, but you also need to provide a demand boost by fiscal means.”
“These monetary policies themselves are not going to change the game,” said Andrew Tilton, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Goldman Sachs. “But they send a message that the top leadership is looking to stabilise things.”
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President Xi Jinping sought to strengthen that message through the politburo meeting statement, which tempered the government’s usual optimism on the economy with a more solemn tone.
“Some new situations and problems have emerged in the current economic operation,” the statement said. “We must . . . face up to difficulties.”
Economists believe a pledge in the statement to intensify “countercyclical adjustment of fiscal and monetary policies” through the issue of long-term special treasury bonds and local government special bonds could mean more fiscal stimulus is on the way, with some going to consumers.
Goldman Sachs said this could take the form of an extra Rmb1tn-Rmb2tn in ultra-long central government sovereign bond issues.
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Morgan Stanley’s Xing agreed that the government might widen its budget deficit this year by up to Rmb2tn to fuel social welfare spending or debt reduction.
But this would still be short of the Rmb10tn in fiscal stimulus Xing and other economists believe will be needed over two years to fully reflate the economy. “We’re not there yet,” Xing said.
For China’s long-suffering homeowners, help cannot come soon enough.
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“I don’t feel optimistic,” said another Beijing homeowner who asked not to be identified. “Prices are dropping, so no one is buying or selling. I don’t know how they [the government] can solve this problem.”
Additional reporting by Nian Liu in Beijing and Nic Fildes in Sydney
Technological advances always raise questions: about their benefits, costs, risks and ethics. And they require detailed, well-explained answers from the people behind them. It was for this reason that we launched our series of monthly Tech Exchange dialogues in February 2022.
Now, 18 months on, it has become clear that advances in one area of technology are raising more questions, and concerns, than any other: artificial intelligence. There are ever more people — scientists, software developers, policymakers, regulators — attempting answers.
Hence, the FT is launching AI Exchange, a new spin-off series of long-form dialogues.
Over the coming months, FT journalists will conduct in-depth interviews with those at the forefront of designing and safeguarding this rapidly evolving technology, to assess how the power of AI will affect our lives.
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To give a flavour of what to expect, and the topics and arguments that will be covered, below we provide a selection of the most insightful AI discussions to date, from the original (and ongoing) Tech Exchange series.
They feature Aidan Gomez, co-founder of Cohere; Arvind Krishna, chief executive of IBM; Adam Selipsky, former head of Amazon Web Services; Andrew Ng, computer scientist and co-founder of Google Brain; and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Board.
From October, AI Exchange will bring you the views of industry executives, investors, senior officials in government and regulatory authorities, as well as other specialists, to help assess what the future will hold.
If AI can replace labour, it’s a good thing
Arvind Krishna, chief executive IBM, and Richard Waters, west coast editor
Richard Waters: When you talk to businesses and CEOs and they ask ‘What do we do with this AI thing?’ What do you say to them?
Arvind Krishna: I always point to two or three areas, initially. One is anything around customer care, answering questions from people . . . it is a really important area where I believe we can have a much better answer at maybe around half the current cost. Over time, it can get even lower than half but it can take half out pretty quickly.
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A second one is around internal processes. For example, every company of any size worries about promoting people, hiring people, moving people, and these have to be reasonably fair processes. But 90 per cent of the work involved in this is getting the information together. I think AI can do that and then a human can make the final decision. There are hundreds of such processes inside every enterprise, so I do think clerical white collar work is going to be able to be replaced by this.
If you think about most of the use cases I pointed out, they’re all about improving the productivity of an enterprise
Then, I think of regulatory work, whether it’s in the financial sector with audits, whether it’s in the healthcare sector. A big chunk of that could get automated using these techniques. Then I think there are the other use cases but they’re probably harder and a bit further out . . . things like drug discovery or in trying to finish up chemistry.
We do have a shortage of labour in the real world and that’s because of a demographic issue that the world is facing. So we have to have technologies that help . . . the United States is now sitting at 3.4 per cent unemployment, the lowest in 60 years. So maybe we can find tools that replace some portions of labour, and it’s a good thing this time.
RW: Do you think that we’re going to see winners and losers? And, if so, what’s going to distinguish the winners from the losers?
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AK: There’s two spaces. There is business to consumer . . . then there are enterprises who are going to use these technologies. If you think about most of the use cases I pointed out, they’re all about improving the productivity of an enterprise. And the thing about improving productivity [is that enterprises] are left with more investment dollars for how they really advantage their products. Is it more R&D? is it better marketing? Is it better sales? Is it acquiring other things? . . . There’s lot of places to go spend that spare cash flow.
AI threat to human existence is ‘absurd’ distraction from real risks
Aidan Gomez, co-founder of Cohere, and George Hammond, venture capital correspondent
George Hammond: [We’re now at] the sharp end of the conversation around regulation in AI, so I’m interested in your view on whether there is a case — as [Elon] Musk and others have advocated — for stopping things for six months and trying to get a handle on it.
Aidan Gomez: I think the six-month pause letter is absurd. It is just categorically absurd . . . How would you implement a six-month clause practically? Who is pausing? And how do you enforce that? And how do we co-ordinate that globally? It makes no sense. The request is not plausibly implementable. So, that’s the first issue with it.
The second issue is the premise: there’s a lot of language in there talking about a superintelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI) emerging that can take over and render our species extinct; eliminate all humans. I think that’s a super-dangerous narrative. I think it’s irresponsible.
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Debating whether our species is going to go extinct because of a takeover by a superintelligent AGI is an absurd use of our time
That’s really reckless and harmful and it preys on the general public’s fears because, for the better part of half a century, we’ve been creating media sci-fi around how AI could go wrong: Terminator-style bots and all these fears. So, we’re really preying on their fear.
GH: Are there any grounds for that fear? When we’re talking about . . . the development of AGI and a potential singularity moment, is it a technically feasible thing to happen, albeit improbable?
AG: I think it’s so exceptionally improbable. There are real risks with this technology. There are reasons to fear this technology, and who uses it, and how. So, to spend all of our time debating whether our species is going to go extinct because of a takeover by a superintelligent AGI is an absurd use of our time and the public’s mindspace.
We can now flood social media with accounts that are truly indistinguishable from a human, so extremely scalable bot farms can pump out a particular narrative. We need mitigation strategies for that. One of those is human verification — so we know which accounts are tied to an actual, living human being so that we can filter our feeds to only include the legitimate human beings who are participating in the conversation.
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There are other major risks. We shouldn’t have reckless deployment of end-to-end medical advice coming from a bot without a doctor’s oversight. That should not happen.
So, I think there are real risks and there’s real room for regulation. I’m not anti-regulation, I’m actually quite in favour of it. But I would really hope that the public knows some of the more fantastical stories about risk [are unfounded]. They’re distractions from the conversations that should be going on.
There will not be one generative AI model to rule them all
Adam Selipsky, former head of Amazon Web Services, and Richard Waters, west coast editor
Richard Waters: What can you tell us about your own work on [generative AI and] large language models? How long have you been at it?
Adam Selipsky: We’re maybe three steps into a 10K race, and the question should not be, ‘Which runner is ahead three steps into the race?’, but ‘What does the course look like? What are the rules of the race going to be? Where are we trying to get to in this race?’
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If you and I were sitting around in 1996 and one of us asked, ‘Who’s the internet company going to be?’, it would be a silly question. But that’s what you hear . . . ‘Who’s the winner going to be in this [AI] space?’
Generative AI is going to be a foundational set of technologies for years, maybe decades to come. And nobody knows if the winning technologies have even been invented yet, or if the winning companies have even been formed yet.
Generative AI is going to be a foundational set of technologies for years, maybe decades to come. And nobody knows if the winning technologies have even been invented yet
So what customers need is choice. They need to be able to experiment. There will not be one model to rule them all. That is a preposterous proposition.
Companies will figure out that, for this use case, this model’s best; for that use case, another model’s best . . . That choice is going to be incredibly important.
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The second concept that’s critically important in this middle layer is security and privacy . . . A lot of the initial efforts out there launched without this concept of security and privacy. As a result, I’ve talked to at least 10 Fortune 1000 CIOs who have banned ChatGPT from their enterprises because they’re so scared about their company data going out over the internet and becoming public — or improving the models of their competitors.
RW: I remember, in the early days of search engines, when there was a prediction we’d get many specialised search engines . . . for different purposes, but it ended up that one search engine ruled them all. So, might we end up with two or three big [large language] models?
AS: The most likely scenario — given that there are thousands or maybe tens of thousands of different applications and use cases for generative AI — is that there will be multiple winners. Again, if you think of the internet, there’s not one winner in the internet.
Do we think the world is better off with more or less intelligence?
Andrew Ng, computer scientist and co-founder of Google Brain, and Ryan McMorrow, deputy Beijing bureau chief
Ryan McMorrow: In October [2023], the White House issued an executive order intended to increase government oversight of AI. Has it gone too far?
Andrew Ng: I think that we’ve taken a dangerous step . . . With various government agencies tasked with dreaming up additional hurdles for AI development, I think we’re on the path to stifling innovation and putting in place very anti-competitive regulations.
Having more intelligence in the world, be it human or artificial, will help all of us better solve problems
We know that today’s supercomputer is tomorrow’s smartwatch, so as start-ups scale and as more compute [processing power] becomes pervasive, we’ll see more and more organisations run up against this threshold. Setting a compute threshold makes as much sense to me as saying that a device that uses more than 50 watts is systematically more dangerous than a device that uses only 10W: while it may be true, it is a very naive way to measure risk.
RM: What would be a better way to measure risk? If we’re not using compute as the threshold?
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Throwing up regulatory barriers against the rise of intelligence, just because it could be used for some nefarious purposes . . . would set back society
AN: When we look at applications, we can understand what it means for something to be safe or dangerous and can regulate it properly there. The problem with regulating the technology layer is that, because the technology is used for so many things, regulating it just slows down technological progress.
At the heart of it is this question: do we think the world is better off with more or less intelligence? And it is true that intelligence now comprises both human intelligence and artificial intelligence. And it is absolutely true that intelligence can be used for nefarious purposes.
But over many centuries, society has developed as humans have become better educated and smarter. I think that having more intelligence in the world, be it human or artificial, will help all of us better solve problems. So throwing up regulatory barriers against the rise of intelligence, just because it could be used for some nefarious purposes, I think would set back society.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Board, and Murad Ahmed, technology news editor
Murad Ahmed: This is the year of elections. More than half of the world has gone to, or is going to, the polls. You’ve helped raise the alarm that this could also be the year that misinformation, particularly AI-generated deepfakes, could fracture democracy. We’re midway through the year. Have you seen that prophecy come to pass?
Helle Thorning-Schmidt: If you look at different countries, I think you’ll see a very mixed bag. What we’re seeing in India, for example, is that AI [deepfakes are] very widespread. Also in Pakistan it has been very widespread. [The technology is] being used to make people say something, even though they are dead. It’s making people speak, when they are in prison. It’s also making famous people back parties that they might not be backing . . . [But] If we look at the European elections, which, obviously, is something I observed very deeply, it doesn’t look like AI is distorting the elections.
What we suggested to Meta is . . . they need to look at the harm and not just take something down because it is created by AI
What we suggested to Meta is . . . they need to look at the harm and not just take something down because it is created by AI. What we’ve also suggested to them is that they modernise their whole community standards on moderated content, and label AI-generated content so that people can see what they’re dealing with. That’s what we’ve been suggesting to Meta.
I do think we will change how Meta operates in this space. I think we will end up, after a couple of years, with Meta labelling AI content and also being better at finding signals of consent that they need to remove from the platforms, and doing it much faster. This is very difficult, of course, but they need a very good system. They also need human moderators with cultural knowledge who can help them do this. [Note: Meta started labelling content as “Made with AI” in May.]
MANCHESTER United ace Harry Maguire stunned holidaymakers last month, when he showed up for a family break at a Haven holiday park in North Wales.
Despite being on £190,000 a week, he shunned the typical footie holidays of Dubai and Ibiza for Presthaven Beach Resort near Prestatyn – where 4-night holidays cost from £49.
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I tried the same Haven holiday as a famous footballerCredit: Rebecca Tidy
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Harry Maguire was recently spotted at a Haven holiday parkCredit: PA
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The Diamond Lodge costs £495 for four nightsCredit: Rebecca Tidy
Harry, 31, and his family, including wife Fern, stayed in a plush Diamond Lodge, costing from £495 for four nights, and enjoyed an action-packed few days doing things like swimming, roller skating and a high ropes course.
Like most other Brits, I was surprised to hear that a well-paid footie star stayed at a Haven holiday park, and couldn’t resist going down to copy his holiday – so last weekend my six-year-old daughter Mabel and I holidayed exactly like Harry Maguire.
Not only did we stay in a Diamond Lodge like the Man United star and his family, but we signed up for the same activities he did.
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The caravan was definitely celeb-worthy. There was a huge marble kitchen with all the mod cons, as well as a matching bathroom and en-suite.
With hipster lighting, floor-to-ceiling windows and a 40-inch TV, it was nothing like the caravans of my childhood. I was shocked that you could even fit a giant corner sofa and eight-seater dining table inside.
And I felt a bit like a WAG doing my make-up over the matching his ‘n’ hers sinks in the chic en-suite the next morning.
Our first stop on Saturday was the Make-A-Bear class where a friendly instructor taught the kids how to create their own cuddly animal from Haven’s Seaside Squad.
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Mabel excitedly picked Annie the Elephant, then stuffed her tummy with foam, popped a pink heart inside and permanently fastened her zip.
It was a really cute session with games, singing and dancing.
Afterwards, we wandered up to the Creative Studio to paint a ceramic cup and a unicorn. They’re fired in the hot kiln each weekend and cooled just in time to be picked up on Monday morning.
Inside the stunning Gold Caravan at Haven Kent Coast including ensuite bathroom and walk-in wardrobe
You could spend days trying all of the activities in the studio from slime-making to sand art.
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There are even Christmas-themed sessions where you can make a cuddly reindeer or decorate a festive plate.
My little one’s favourite craft was foam clay modeling. She loved covering a ceramic animal with brightly-coloured, sticky beads.
We refuelled with a quick chow mein lunch at Chopstix and to Mabel’s delight, we grabbed ice cream and candy floss from the neighbouring Seaside Shack for pudding.
Guests can use facilities like the soft play, fun pool, mini-golf and parks for free, while activities with specialist equipment like bikes and roller skates come with a small fee.
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We hired a two-person bike and had great fun exploring the site and cycling down to the wide, sandy beach.
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The rooms were the perfect base for a long weekendCredit: Rebecca Tidy
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There is so much for kids to do at the parkCredit: Rebecca Tidy
While she still had plenty of energy afterwards, I’m not a match-fit footie player, so she ran around in the soft play, while I sat and watched with a cuppa from Costa.
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There’s a full schedule of evening entertainment with family-friendly pantomimes, discos and games – and harry Maguire joined his family for an evening of bingo.
But my little one was finally shattered from her action-packed day of activities, so we switched the electric fire in our lodge on and cosied up on the sofa in our PJs.
We ordered meals including a Papa John’s pizza using the Haven app, which delivers anywhere on-site for no extra charge.
There were plenty of eateries to choose from including Burger King, a traditional fish and chip shop and a family-style pub.
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On Sunday, we joined an aqua jetting class where you grab onto a handheld jet and whizz across the water.
It looks really tricky, but Mabel, who was the smallest child in the group, was happily zooming around the pool with everyone in minutes.
In each session across the weekend, I noticed that the staff took care to ensure quieter kids felt included.
Haven Holiday Costs
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IF you were thinking about going to Haven this summer, here’s a helpful breakdown of the costs.
Accommodation
Standard Caravan: £150-£300 per week (off-peak) / £400-£700 per week (peak season)
Luxury Caravan/Lodge: £400-£600 per week (off-peak) / £800-£1,200 per week (peak season)
Food and Drink
Self-Catering:
Groceries: £50-£100 per week (depending on family size and preferences)
Eating Out:
On-site Restaurants: £10-£20 per meal per person
Local Restaurants/Pubs: £15-£25 per meal per person
Activities and Entertainment
On-site Activities:
Swimming Pool: Free (included in holiday cost)
Kids’ Clubs: Free (included in holiday cost)
Evening Entertainment: Free (included in holiday cost)
Paid Activities (e.g., mini-golf, bike hire): £5-£20 per activity
Transportation
Driving:
Fuel: £30-£60 (depending on distance)
Public Transport:
Train/Bus: £20-£100 per person (depending on distance and time of booking)
Please note that these are approximate costs and can vary based on specific locations, personal preferences, and time of booking. Always check the latest prices and offers directly with Haven or through a travel agent.
Haven has clearly put huge consideration into designing activities that kids love and that’s why, for us, this trip was better than any fancy cruise or all-inclusive holiday abroad.
And thanks to our stylish caravan, we didn’t even need to miss out on that luxury vibe.
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Good morning. Labour’s difficult start to life in office has rightly taken the headlines, as the government’s actions a) have real world consequences and b) will have a bigger impact on the next election in four to five years than anything the Conservative party does.
But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that despite Labour’s difficulties, no poll has yet shown a significant shift in the balance of political forces. Some thoughts about how voters see both Labour and the Tories ahead of the latter’s first conference in opposition since 2009.
Here are the overall scores on the door from the latest Ipsos poll.
Now, some of these matter rather more than others. Some have tended to be more predictive since Ipsos first started polling the UK.
Here’s one that, throughout the time Ipsos has asked it, has been incredibly predictive: which party is seen as more “extreme”. This has been true regardless of whether the winning party was seen as moderate or not. People were not telling Ipsos (or RSL as it then was) that Margaret Thatcher was “moderate”. They did, however, consistently find her to be less extreme than Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock.
We can see a couple of things here. The first is how much harm that Liz Truss’s 49 day premiership and the “Let Rishi be Rishi” strategy (the ill-fated plan at last year’s party conference to pitch the former prime minister as a break with consensus) did to the Conservative party. The last election was not particularly hard to understand: the Conservatives moved away from the ground they fought and won the 2019 election on, Labour moved towards it. As a result, we now have a Labour government.
It should also worry Labour that it is slipping and cheer Conservatives that the Tory party shows signs of recovery on this metric. This stuff does really matter — look, for instance, at the Ipsos “out of date” tracker, usually a pretty good sign of whether people think that a government is getting tired.
As I said, my theory of elections is pretty basic: they are a contest between whether or not the government of the day has managed to make itself seem worth re-electing and if people feel the opposition isn’t a scary prospect. The story of the 2017 to 2020 period is that people often felt like a change, but they looked at the opposition and went, “hmm, not so sure about that change”.
So it matters a lot that in spite of Labour’s recent difficulties, the Conservatives still trail badly on “fit to govern”.
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So, that’s the challenge facing the Conservatives as they meet for the next stage of their protracted leadership election: to find a leader who can turn around perceptions that the party is not fit to govern, is not clapped out and behind the times. At the same time, the candidate must not undo the party’s recent progress when it comes to not being seen as more “extreme” than Labour. Oh, and it would be a good idea if they picked someone capable of putting this usually predictive finding into reverse, too:
A tall order for all four candidates as the party gathers in Birmingham for its annual conference.
Now try this
I’m indebted to the Centre of European Reform’s Charles Grant for the suggestion that I give the music of composer Michael Tippett a go and have spent much of my time since the Labour party conference devouring whatever recordings of his I can find. I particularly enjoyed this recording of the Corelli Fantasia, in part because it is very good, but also because it follows three of my favourite pieces by some of Tippett’s contemporaries — Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Unfortunately I cannot seem to find it on Spotify, in part because that website continues to be pretty dreadful at finding classical music and jazz. (Far and away the best value streaming service for me is Apple Classical.) However, this very good recording of A Child of Our Time is on Spotify. I will be listening to a great deal more Tippett as I board the train to the Conservative party conference in Birmingham.
To be eligible for this year’s payment, you must have an active claim for the benefits mentioned above during the “qualifying week,” which runs from 16 to 22 September (this week).
Most households automatically receive the winter fuel payment, including those on pension credit.
However, 800,000 households are thought to be missing out on pension credit, which unlocks their eligibility for this year’s winter fuel payment.
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As new claims for pension credit can be backdated by up to three months, you can still apply now and qualify for this year’s winter fuel payment.
The absolute deadline to claim the benefit and qualify is December 21.
Pension credit tops up your weekly income to £218.15 if you are single or to £332.95 if you have a partner.
This is known as “guarantee credit”.
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If your income is lower than this, you’re very likely to be eligible for the benefit.
Could you be eligible for Pension Credit?
What if my income is higher?
If your income is slightly higher than the following rates, you might still be eligible for pension credit:
Single: £218 a week
Couple: £333 a week
For example, single applicants might still be eligible if their weekly income is under £235.
And those in couples may still get it if they earn under £350 a week.
Those with disabilities, who care for someone, or who get help with their housing costs could still qualify.
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For example, if you claim attendance allowance, the threshold at which you can qualify for pension credit rises by £82 a week.
The benefit is open to people over state pension age who need help with personal care due to a physical or mental disability.
The income you receive through attendance allowance is not counted towards your eligibility for pension credit.
ATTENDANCE ALLOWANCE
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ATTENDANCE allowance offers cash support to those over the state pension age who need help with personal care due to a physical or mental disability.
It’s paid at two different rates and how much you get depends on the level of care that you need because of your disability.
Those on the lower rate receive £72.65 per week, while those with more serious illnesses can get £108.55 per week.
This works out as £434 a month or £5,208 a year.
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It’s thought that up to 1.1million state pensioners are missing out on this support.
To apply, you’ll need to download the attendance allowance claims form by visiting gov.uk/attendance-allowance/how-to-claim.
If you claim carer’s allowance, the threshold at which you can qualify for pension credit also rises by £46 a week.
Those who receive help with their housing costs could also still be eligible for pension credit even if they breach the earnings thresholds.
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For example, you could get an extra amount to cover your housing costs, such as:
Ground rent if your property is a leasehold
Some service charges
Charges for tents and site rents
The exact amount you could get depends on your housing costs.
However, if you’re found to be eligible for pension credit, it could unlock your ability to qualify for the following extra support:
Council tax reduction
Housing benefit if you rent the property you live in
Support for mortgage interest if you own the property you live in
What about savings?
If you have £10,000 or less in savings and investments, this will not affect your eligibility for pension credit.
If you have more than £10,000, every £500 over £10,000 counts as £1 income a week.
For example, if you have £11,000 in savings, this counts as £2 income a week.
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APPLY FOR PENSION CREDIT
PENSION credit tops up your weekly income to £218.15 if you are single or to £332.95 if you have a partner.
This is known as “guarantee credit”.
If your income is lower than this, you’re very likely to be eligible for the benefit.
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However, if your income is slightly higher, you might still be eligible for pension credit if you have a disability, you care for someone, you have savings or you have housing costs.
Pension credit opens the door to other support, including housing benefits, cost of living payments, council tax reductions, the winter fuel payment and the Warm Home Discount.
You can start your application up to four months before you reach state pension age.
You can apply any time after you reach state pension age but your application can only be backdated by three months.
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This means you can get up to three months of pension credit in your first payment if you were eligible during that time.
To apply, you’ll need the following information about you and your partner if you have one:
National Insurance number
Information about any income, savings and investments you have
Information about your income, savings and investments on the date you want to backdate your application to
You’ll also need your bank account details. Depending on how you apply, you may also be asked for your bank or building society name, sort code and account number.
Applications can be made online by visiting gov.uk/pension-credit/how-to-claim.
If you’d prefer to apply over the phone, you can do so by calling the pension credit claim line on 0800 99 1234.
If you are meeting Rebecca Hall for the first time at her 1840s farmhouse about two hours north of New York City, you may accidentally wander into the English-American actor and filmmaker’s overgrown vegetable garden. This is upstate New York, where the sprawling farms are dotted with solar-powered sheds and other oddball additions, so you would be forgiven for mistaking her home for the shed on her property, or even her two-storey artist’s studio, which is not a home but certainly the size of one. She waves me over from the front yard, where she’s been puttering around her six-year-old daughter’s raised flower garden, with her Ridgeback puppy, Stella, trailing closely behind.
“I thought I’d be isolated and never see anyone,” she says. “But our friends come up every weekend, like, constantly.” There’s an open-door policy; parties are always happening. Her mother-in-law lives in a barn next door. “She’s like: ‘This place is ridiculous. You’ve got to work out a system with sheets and towels, and make people wash them, because it’s a hotel.’”
Hall has a way of holding your gaze when she speaks – and she speaks exceedingly well. Her beauty is hard to ignore, yet barefaced, wearing a cap inscribed with the title of the Robert Altman movie, 3 Women, she exudes domestic ordinariness. A self-described eccentric, the 42-year-old star of this year’s blockbuster Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire insists you’ll just have to deal with “whatever batty version of me it is today”.
Performance has shaped her identity. Her late father, theatre director Sir Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company; her mother, Maria Ewing, was a gifted opera singer who performed at the Metropolitan Opera. “She had a tremendous joy of life,” says Hall in a crisp London accent shaped by years of shuttling between her father’s home in London and her mother’s house in East Sussex. They separated when she was five. “There was no one more fun to be around than her.”
Hall made her television debut at the age of 10 in The Camomile Lawn, a hit adaptation of Mary Wesley’s novel. Then, two years into a three-year degree studying English literature at Cambridge, she dropped out. An acclaimed production of As You Like It, directed by her father, followed at 21. Her breakout moment came in 2008, when she played the conventional Vicky to Scarlett Johansson’s impetuous Cristina in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Hollywood felt daunting, initially. But “it felt somehow natural to be working in film”, she says. “Eventually, I found myself drawn to it more than anything else.”
“If you look at a film like Christine, that performance is so powerful,” says actor Dan Stevens, her long-time friend and co-star in Godzilla x Kong. “It’s drawing on so much about womanhood and the female condition. Some of that is personal to her, and some of it is more societal angst, but it all comes through in a performance that is so nuanced.”
“I am interested in questions that are so fundamental for all of us,” Hall says of these characters. “Who is to be trusted? What can make someone who is completely together completely disintegrate? What’s the margin that separates a relatively sane person from madness? Any story that engages deeply with these questions is inherently dramatic – and I think oddly contemporary.”
Acting hasn’t proved enough, though. In 2021, Hall exploded the taboo of “passing” for a certain race with her piercing film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, her directorial debut. Starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, the film won many plaudits and was nominated for a slew of big awards, including at the Baftas and the Golden Globes.
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Last year she shared a completely different side to her portfolio, with the revelation of her paintings, a practice she has pursued more privately for many years. Inside her studio, the walls of the airy, light-filled space are covered with canvases of all sizes. A brooding self-portrait rests on the floor. A cluster of snapshots clings to a wall. My eye settles on an impressively detailed painting of two friends laughing. “I’m so not interested in making faces like this any more,” Hall says. “This is kind of where I’m at now.” She nods to a pair of paintings deliciously untethered from reality – theatre audiences racked with emotion. “It’s not realistic any more.”
Art has been an outlet for Hall since her school days; she would draw faces while sitting in the back of the rehearsal room at her father’s theatre. “My dad would give me a choice,” she says. “‘Do you want to be with a babysitter or do you want to come to rehearsal?’ I liked to be able to capture some kind of emotion. And then, when I got older, I found that a really interesting tool for acting.”
Finally, she began sharing her work on Instagram. “There’s an immediacy to her paintings that I’m drawn to,” says her friend, the folk-rock musician and painter Ian Felice. “It’s as if they’ve been conjured out of thin air.” Their success, he says, “often relies on a simplification of form in order to arrive at the deeper meaning of a subject; a lyrical articulation of colour adds intimacy and emotional charge.”
Hall is not yet represented by a gallery. When asked what she loves about the process, she says it’s the “freedom of painting feeling”. Self-expression is what drives her: “I don’t do well unless I’m quiet and in my head and creative in some capacity for a chunk of the day.” When she paints, it’s incredibly solitary. And the process is fluid. “I can be in the space where I just get a canvas out and have some paints left and just paint something,” she says. “If I can’t think of anything, I’ll paint these pod people.”
She and Spector – a star of HBO’s The Gilded Age – have been together nine years. They have worked together four times, most recently in the 2017 play Animal. “We have that conversation of weighing up,” says Hall, describing how they try to balance career and family. But still, “I have a strong sense of: ‘I must give up everything and only be there for my child, and how am I meant to do this? How the hell can you be an artist and be a decent mother? It’s impossible.”
She has been thinking a lot about motherhood recently. Passing positioned her for her next project, Four Days Like Sunday, which she hopes to start shooting next summer. Loosely based on her relationship with her mother, Four Days offered Hall some catharsis when Ewing died in 2022. “She passed away in January, and the script came tumbling out of me some time in July,” she says. “It was my way of writing a love song to certain aspects of my childhood as well as the not-much-loved ones.”
Growing up, Hall often found herself playing the role of her mother’s caretaker. “She had a lot of anxiety, issues with depression, and sometimes the weight of what she did as an artist was too much for her to actually get out of the house.” Attending a “very, very English, very, very posh” all-girls boarding school full-time from the age of 13 offered Hall a slight reprieve, though she was acutely aware of her outsider status among her peers.
“It was like: ‘Who is this girl with this mother, who arrives with her entourage of queer amazing-looking friends, with their floor-length black leather trench coats and sunglasses and red lipstick?’ And everyone else there was driving a Range Rover.”
The revelation of her mother’s true heritage – Hall’s maternal grandfather, who was Black, passed as white – brought her own into focus. “If you come from a white-passing family… unless it’s open and history has kind of processed it, you just inherit shame. The narrative you’re told about your Blackness is that it’s not to be spoken about, you’ve gotten away with it because you look white, so you don’t talk about this, and it’s only shameful. And anything that’s in any way Black, you don’t go there.”
The film raised awareness of Nella Larsen and her novel, a story Hall holds up there with The Great Gatsby and the other great works of American literature. Ultimately, however, she was most proud of the fact that it provoked a long overdue conversation within her family. “It meant that this thing, this secret that was kept even until the 2020s, could be released,” she says. “It ended up being very healing, at least for my mother and I.”
Walking back toward her house, I ask Hall whether she ever discussed her desire to direct with her father – the man responsible for bringing the first production of Waiting for Godot to London, whose role in British theatre was so profound that, on his death in 2017, the National Theatre released a statement saying his “influence on the artistic life of Britain in the 20th century was unparalleled”. No, she says wistfully. “I would love to have that conversation with him now.” She has “zero interest” in directing theatre. “For me, the fun of being onstage is being an actor.”
The control freak in her doesn’t like the fact that as a director of a play you’ve got to be able to walk away. “In a film, you’re crafting exactly what anyone is looking at, at any time,” she says. “I think to be able to do that on the stage is a very particular skill. I would rather find the frame, and fill it with the image I know is going to create a kind of feeling.”
Hall also loves fashion, and has become a regular on certain front rows, recently at Loewe’s men’s SS25 shows. She’s experimental on the red carpet: wearing a scarlet bustier gown by Erdem or the beaded Bode bra and trousers she wore to promote Godzilla x Kong earlier this year. The Brooklyn-based fashion stylist Laura Jones has worked closely with Hall since 2014. “She certainly has fun with it,” says Jones. “She has an adaptive approach to clothing, following her creative instincts and where she’s at in her life at that time.”
That ability to follow her instincts is something she hopes to impart to her daughter. “I think that’s a big part of my parenting with her,” says Hall. “That there’s no right answer. She can be whoever she wants to be. We just try and celebrate all the possible eccentric ways there are of being in the world.”
For now, Hall’s world is here in New York: a six-hour flight to California, where Spector grew up, and seven hours to London. When she wakes she often turns on BBC Radio 4 and leaves it on all day. It keeps her company as she writes, paints or gardens with her daughter – and shops compulsively online, she laughs. “My whole life I’ve shifted from one place to the next, and I feel anchored here in a way that I never have in my entire life,” she says. “This is like the dream situation, and I can’t foresee myself ever leaving it. But I don’t know. If it happens, it happens. I’d be all right with it.”
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel “shares the aims” of a US-led proposal for a ceasefire with Hizbollah, after officials in Washington reacted with frustration to his insistence that Israel would continue striking the Lebanese militant group with “full force”.
US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday put forward a proposal for a 21-day ceasefire in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the hostilities between Israel and Hizbollah spiralling into a full-blown war.
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US officials said the call for the ceasefire had been co-ordinated with Israel, and a diplomat said the US had expected Netanyahu to take a positive stance on the deal on his arrival on Thursday in New York, where he is due to address the UN General Assembly later on Friday.
But instead, after a string of far-right members of his government had criticised the proposal, Netanyahu said, after landing, that Israel would continue striking Hizbollah and not “stop until we achieve all our objectives — first and foremost the return of the northern residents to their homes securely”.
In a statement released by his office on Friday morning, Netanyahu said that Israel “shares the aims of the US-led initiative of enabling people along our northern border to return safely and securely to their homes”.
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“Israel appreciates the US efforts in this regard because the US role is indispensable in advancing stability and security in the region,” the statement continued, adding that discussions between US and Israeli officials would continue “in the coming days”.
Israel has stated one of its war aims is to ensure that Israel’s northern border region is safe enough to allow more than 60,000 people displaced by Hizbollah rocket fire to return to their homes.
US officials hope the truce would allow time to negotiate a more durable ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah, and also put pressure on Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas to accept the terms of a ceasefire-for-hostages deal in Gaza.
Two people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times on Thursday that the US was hoping that Netanyahu would use his address to the UN on Friday to announce that Israel’s war in Gaza was moving to a new phase, which might persuade Hizbollah — which has insisted that it will not stop firing at Israel until the offensive against Hamas is over — to agree to a temporary truce.
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But amid a chorus of criticism from Israeli politicians of the plan, Israel continued to strike targets in Lebanon on Thursday, including carrying out a strike in the southern suburb of Dahiyeh that killed the commander of Hizbollah’s aerial operations, Mohammed Srour.
The strike came amid a massive escalation of Israel’s operations against the Iran-backed group, during which it has assassinated a string of commanders, and launched an intense bombing campaign in Lebanon which has killed more than 600 people and displaced 90,000.
The hostilities continued on Friday morning, with the Israeli military saying that Hizbollah had launched 10 rockets in the direction of the northern port city of Haifa.
During the night, the military said that Israel’s Arrow air defence system had intercepted a surface-to-surface missile which had been launched at the country from Yemen.
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