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India will radically reform regulations and invite foreign oil majors to explore both onshore and offshore as it races to extract as much oil as possible while there remains a market for crude, the country’s oil and gas minister has said.

“I was with Exxon yesterday. I was with BP a few days earlier. I have had meetings with Chevron [ . . .] I went to Brazil and had a discussion with Petrobras,” Hardeep Singh Puri told the Financial Times’ Energy Transition Summit India in Delhi.

“I said you come, join Oil India prospecting off the Andaman waters. Don’t make any investment, just come in. We will incentivise them. And if you strike oil and you are a partner, you will have first right of refusal,” Puri added. 

The minister said India had “several” oilfields the size of ExxonMobil’s 11bn barrel discovery in Guyana waiting to be found and that the country needed to move quickly to tap them before the world switched to other forms of energy in order to hit net zero climate targets.

“At the end of the day it’s a race,” he said. “If it remains there unexploited, when the [energy] transition becomes total, there is a philosophical debate on that. I keep telling Guyana, you got a big find, but by the time the oil starts coming into the market, the transition already would be in a pretty advanced stage.”

The Indian minister’s remarks appear to signal that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government intends to make up for lost time in offshore oil exploration and production, where some investment has been deterred by fluctuating regulations and persistent red tape.

Estimates of India’s potential oil wealth differ hugely. S&P Global Commodity Insights believes there may be as much as 22bn barrels of oil in unexplored basins. Rystad, an energy consultancy, puts the figure at just under 8bn.

Meanwhile, analysts at the International Energy Agency are pessimistic about the chances of a significant increase in the country’s 700,000 barrels per day of production.

“In part, the absence of international companies may be due to lacklustre discoveries since the turn of the century,” they wrote, in their annual Indian Oil Market outlook. Over the past 23 years, 2bn barrels of oil have been discovered in India, compared with 10bn in each of Angola, Norway and Guyana and 40bn in Brazil.

“Against the backdrop of capital discipline, major players may be waiting on the sidelines for a world-class find before establishing operations in the country,” they added.

Puri, who promised in July more than $100bn of investment opportunities in the sector by 2030, is trying to reduce India’s overwhelming dependence on imported oil. 

“We just took our eye off the ball. There was neglect,” he said. Only 10 per cent of India’s potentially oil-producing basins were being explored, while the country imported 85 per cent to 88 per cent of its oil and spent $150bn a year on foreign energy resources, Puri said.  

To trigger more oil exploration, he said he would radically change India’s legal framework. “We sat down with the majors and said: ‘Look, guys, tell us which are the areas where you want tweaking in policy?’ In the next session (of parliament), which will be fully next month, I will get that bill passed and it will be enacted into law,” he said. 

The proposed legislation reforms regulation of oilfield development to protect companies against sudden windfall taxes and gives them the right to arbitrate any disputes outside India, among other changes.

Puri said India had also opened more than a million square kilometres that were previously “no-go areas” because of military or other restrictions, and had put “all the data which people require” on a repository at the University of Texas in Houston. 

BP, Reliance and Vedanta were among the companies that submitted bids this year in India’s ninth licensing round, for nine onshore blocks, eight shallow-water blocks and 11 ultra-deepwater blocks. Puri said 38 per cent of the bids were for areas that were previously restricted. 

Foreign oil companies are hoping India’s status as one of the world’s fastest-growing big economies will underpin future demand for crude. “India is growing and looks very, very healthy,” said Darren Woods, chief executive of ExxonMobil, at the company’s last results call.

“India is where the real growth is going to come, so it has an underlying advantage,” said Puri. He promised that a 10th auction round for licences would swiftly follow once parliament has passed his legislation. 

BRITAIN’S “strictest landlord” has defended his decision to charge customers extra for not finishing their meals.

Mark Graham, 62, has owned and run The Star Inn pub in the tiny hamlet of Vogue, Cornwall, for the last 27 years.

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He hit back at a customer who tried to shame him online after they were charged an extra £2.40 because they piled their plates high at the £12 all-you-can-eat carvery – but ate barely any.

Verity Farmer, who shared her experience on Facebook, said: “Just been for a Sunday carvery at The Star Inn, Vogue, St Day.

“We paid for our meal at £12 each, and when we got our bill it had got an extra £4.80 added.

“When questioned about it they said it was a charge for not eating all our meal. I’ve never heard anything like that before.”

Her post prompted nearly 400 comments in less than 24 hours, with The Star Inn’s social media page among those replying.

It said: “We just try and make sure there is enough food for everyone.

“I’m sure if you were a customer later on in the day and I had to tell you I had no food left for your booking because it had all been wasted and gone in the bin you would not be very happy and would have made another social media post too.”

Now Mark – a former tin miner who also served in the Royal Navy – has defended the policy, which is outlined in notices inside the eatery.

He says it is the first time in 20 years he has enforced the rule – and only did so after the two diners told him they had enjoyed the meal.

Mark shared a photo of the leftover food on social media and insisted the nominal charge would only cover the raw ingredients they left but not the equipment, staff or energy.

He said: “I’m not strict but I’m a straight talking Cornish landlord. Ask anybody who comes in for a meal, I’m an easy-going Cornish boy. I tell people ‘fill your boots, have as much as you like, as long as you eat it’.

“When young children come in with their parents we say don’t buy them a meal, we give them an empty plate and say share some of yours and come up if you want more, as long as you eat it.

“We keep it at £12 for a large or £8 for a small because we are a local village pub trying to help the community, we use a local butcher and greengrocer.

“We do as much as we can to keep our prices down but if everybody behaved like these ladies I’d have to put the prices up.

“I think the ladies wanted to shame me because they have been charged, to be honest I think they are just entitled people who believed they would get all the support.

“They tried to say they had only left a few potatoes so they weren’t completely truthful.

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“People on Facebook were saying why not just put the prices up and let people leave what they want, well I keep the price down low for everybody and I’m not going to change that for a few idiots.”

Mark said the pub has deep ties with the local area, hosting the community library, installing floodlights in his field so the village football team can train for free, and hosting 20 different groups from a knitting circle to a motorcycle club.

He said: “We’re a little family run village pub and we want to keep everybody happy, the pub is the hub of this community.

“It’s hugely frustrating because it’s all you can eat, with a normal meal we’ll give you boxes and doggy bags because it’s your food, you’ve paid for it and you can take it away.

“With all you can eat the margins are very fine, if everybody piled two meals on a plate and threw one away by the time the later people came in all the food is in the bin because it’s been wasted, it all goes downhill from there.”

Mark was also backed by locals including pensioner John Tozer, 79, who has been a regular at the pub for 40 years.

He said: “He’s a brilliant landlord, I think he was absolutely in the right to charge those ladies.

“You see people pile up their plates like Mount Everest then they can’t eat it, then at the end of the day people come in and there isn’t any left because of other people’s greed. It bloody annoys me.”

Mark and his pub have previously hit the headlines after fashion giant Vogue threatened to sue him.

Condé Nast, the owner of Vogue magazine, sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter ordering him to stop using the name ‘Vogue’ as it is their name – even though the pub is more than 200 years old and the village is older still.

The publishing giant later backed down and apologised, admitting it didn’t do its homework.

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Russian spies are on a “mission to generate mayhem on British . . . streets” while Iran has been fomenting lethal plots against the UK at “an unprecedented pace and scale”, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service has warned.

Instances of spying against the UK by other states rose by half over the past year, MI5 director-general Ken McCallum said on Tuesday, with the range of threats facing the UK “the most complex and interconnected . . . we’ve ever seen”.

The number of aggressive state actions investigated by MI5 had “shot up” by 48 per cent in the previous 12 months, he said, and the agency had responded to 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots since January 2022.

“MI5 has one hell of a job on its hands,” McCallum said in his annual threat assessment. Alongside its counterterrorism work, which has continued at a more or less steady level for the past five years, MI5 was having to confront “state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European war”, he added.

McCallum said MI5 had so far not seen the rising conflict in the Middle East lead directly to increased terrorism incidents in the UK.

“We are powerfully alive to the risk that events in the Middle East trigger terrorist action in the UK,” but “we haven’t — yet — seen this translate at scale into terrorist violence”, he said.

Nonetheless, radicalisation stemming from recent events in the Middle East was a “slow burn” process, McCallum cautioned, adding that established groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda had “resumed efforts to export terrorism”.

McCallum said the return of these groups was the “terrorist trend that concerns me most”. Over the past month, more than a third of MI5’s highest-priority investigations were linked to organised overseas terrorist groups.

Another development is that one in eight terrorists now being investigated in the UK are minors recruited online. MI5 had seen a “threefold increase” in investigations of under-18s in the past three years, driven by far-right terrorism that skews “heavily towards young people, driven by propaganda that shows a canny understanding of online culture”.

However, it is state threats that have undergone the biggest rise, not least by Russia. Britain’s decision to expel 750 Russian diplomats had “put a big dent” in the Kremlin’s ability to cause damage in the west, as “the great majority of them” were “spies”.

Denying diplomatic visas to new Russian agents by the UK and its western allies was “not flashy, but it works”, he added.

The expulsions forced Russian spies such as its GRU military intelligence unit to use proxies, including private intelligence operatives and criminals.

McCallum said this had reduced the usual professionalism of Russia’s spy services and increased MI5’s “disruptive options”, as the proxies were not covered by diplomatic immunity.

Nevertheless, the UK’s “leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin’s regime”, McCallum said, adding that “we should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home”.

“The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets . . . arson, sabotage and . . . dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness,” he said.

Iran has also stepped up its recruitment of criminals — from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks — to serve as proxies for Tehran’s espionage operations in the UK, mostly against dissidents.

Since January 2022, “we’ve seen plot after plot here in the UK, at unprecedented pace and scale”, said McCallum.

He described the counter-intelligence work of detecting criminals who are recruited online by hostile states, such as Russia or Iran, as being similar to spotting would-be terrorists recruited online by overseas radicalisers.

“It’s a familiar challenge,” he said, and “we’ll keep finding them.”

Nevertheless, the rise in threats facing the UK, which includes confronting technological theft and high-level espionage by China, means that “things are absolutely stretched”, said McCallum.

The decisions MI5 now had to take on how to prioritise its finite resources “are harder than I can recall in my career”, he said. It had also meant that “our lower-level bar has had to rise” — a tacit warning that some potential threats might go uninvestigated.

“We can’t always draw the right conclusions from tiny clues,” said McCallum. 

MCDONALD’S is launching a new lunch and dinnertime meal deal offering customers four menu items for just £5.

Fast food fans will be able to save almost £2.50 when the deal is unveiled in restaurants tomorrow (October 9).

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Customers can choose from two different burgers, a medium drink, fries and four chicken McNuggets normally costing £7.46.

The offer will be available in restaurants from 11am, after the breakfast menu is switched for the main one.

However, fast food fans won’t be able to order from the comfort of their home as the new deal isn’t available for delivery.

Plus, not all restaurants are running the offer so there is no guarantee you’ll be able to snap up the discounted items.

This is the full list of items included in the meal deal and how much they cost individually:

• Cheeseburger – £1.39
• Mayo Chicken – £1.39
• Medium Carbonated Soft Drink – £1.59
• Medium Fries – £1.69
• Four Chicken McNuggets – £2.79 (based on a pro-rata of the price for six Chicken McNuggets)

Bear in mind, the price of all the above items may vary from restaurant to restaurant.

We have also asked McDonald’s if the £5 meal deal is a permanent offer and for the list of restaurants not offering it and will update this story when we have heard back.

How does the £5 meal deal compare to other chains?

McDonald’s latest offer might seem like the perfect way to save a bit of money on your lunch break, but is it the cheapest?

We’ve listed off a few other retailers and fast food chains’ offerings which are actually cheaper.

The below offers aren’t offering the same options as McDonald’s, but do offer some alternatives if you’re looking to spend a bit less.

Tesco‘s meal deal comes with a main, including sandwiches and pasta pots, snack and drink for £4 for regular customers and £3.60 for Clubcard holders.

Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s meal deal costs £3.50 and comes with the same trio of items.

Pharmacy chain Boots‘ meal deal also comes with a main, snack and drink and costs from £3.99. Londoners have to pay £4.99.

In terms of fast food chains, Domino’s launched a £4 lunchtime meal deal in April that’s available seven days a week.

The offer lets customers choose from small pizzas, hot and cheesy wraps and chicken strips.

Greggs also has a meal deal where customers can snap up a pizza slice and regular hot or cold drink for £3.50 before 4pm seven days a week.

After 4pm and the price drops to £2.85 – nearly 20% cheaper.

OTHER MCDONALD’S NEWS

McDonald’s customers are in for a busy October, with the fast food chain already having confirmed a new breakfast item is making its way onto menus.

From October 16, foodies will be able to get their hands on mini hashbrowns in a portion of five or 15, with prices starting from £1.49.

McDonald’s already sells regular-sized hashbrowns for £1.19 but these are bitesized.

Many customers have already taken to social media saying the product reminds them of Tater Tots – a popular side dish in America.

It is still unclear whether or not the morning snack will become a permanent menu item or will only be available for a limited period.

Meanwhile, the iconic McRib burger is back on menus from the same date after a nearly 10-year hiatus, with reporter Sam Walker getting a try before its launch.

Anyone looking to snap up the returning pork-based burger will have to be quick though as it is back for a limited time only.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

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“The woman who walked into doors” was first introduced in a mid-90s TV show created by the Booker Prize-winning Roddy Doyle, whose subsequent novels developed that woman’s story and the second of which, Paula Spencer, bore her name. The initial response was relentless and polarised, with some critics outraged by his representation of domestic abuse and sceptical that such a grim phenomenon could exist in modern-day Ireland.

The Woman Behind the Door, Doyle’s latest novel, begins in 2021. Paula is 66, many years sober, a widow and mother to adult children. She’s “elated” to receive her first dose of the coronavirus vaccination, though if the person administering it saw “the state of her skin, years ago — but never that long ago — when she was her husband’s beloved punchbag, he wouldn’t have mentioned the sting the needle might give her.”

Paula’s current stability, her close friendships, her part-time job, her sobriety and her chosen solitude have been hard-fought. Now she has a life all her own; it has been decades since her husband Charlo was “shot dead by the Guards”. When she returns from that initial vaccination appointment, though — the first tentative steps towards liberty — there is another woman behind the door, the last person Paula would expect to arrive unannounced. It’s Nicola, her most capable child, Nicola who “had been Paula’s mother for years”, seemingly happily married and a mother herself; “the safest thing in Paula’s life”. Nicola says she isn’t going home or back to her job and the question, then, is why? “Will you let me in?” she asks.

Segments of fleeting narratives show tragic, poverty-stricken lives colliding

Of course Paula does, but Nicola’s presence is both balm and blight: she’s a “teenager in a menopausal body” and this blend of humour and sympathy, the unlikely pairing of the two women under one roof, provides a great deal of comedy. “No one should have to have middle-aged children,” Paula thinks. “Job done, good or bad. Leave your ma alone.” And how, she wonders, “is she supposed to mother the woman who’s been mothering her for thirty years?” When Paula contracts Covid, “breathing like the Irish Sea”, the isolation period sees the pair barricade themselves from the world: it’s within this enforced space that a conversation begins, the first of its kind.

Doyle has long been praised for his use of vernacular, dialect and slang: talk is at the heart of his work and this book is no exception, whether via the interiority of thought or the audible babble of jokes, jeers, recrimination, fury. Paula and Nicola’s quick-fire exchanges become sparring matches that once started can only escalate: Paula is “all set for round two or three”. These cycles mirror the hourglass structure of the plot, from Nicola’s initial arrival in 2021 to 2023 and back again. “The Covid” seems the least frightening virus of all, and the pair’s discussions focus intermittently on such contagions, the dark legacy of misogyny, the guilt and self-hatred that Paula believed, mistakenly, “had skipped a generation”. For Nicola, her mother’s suffering has precluded her own ability to describe the trench-like depth of its impact: “You’ve already more or less told me,” she says, “that you had it worse — because I never bled on top of one of my children.”

This latest instalment forms a trilogy, though a follow-up hasn’t been ruled out. Doyle’s other three-parter is The Last Roundup, where the history of his protagonist, Henry, was charted from the 1916 Easter Rising to life in the US and back to Ireland. In the first of that series, Henry reflects on his surroundings: “It was my world and it could be as big and as small as I wanted it to be. There was a corner and, beyond that, more corners. There were doorways, and more doors inside.”

There is a strong sense in this novel, too, that for each interaction, each passing glance, there are similar portals waiting to be opened. Segments of fleeting narratives show tragic, poverty-stricken lives colliding briefly, from a minor accident with a delivery cyclist to a woman who picks something up in the supermarket before, on seeing its €1.79 price tag, returning it to the shelf.

As with Doyle’s other work, Dublin is the urban life force outside the door. Paula observes the homelessness crisis manifested through tents erected across Henry Street “like two different cities, two different times of the day”. The precariousness of, and danger inherent to that life is subtly compared to Paula and Nicola’s own situation, were Charlo still alive: in Ireland, gardaí reported an increase of 25 per cent in domestic-abuse calls during the pandemic. Paula realises that despite being the site of such brutality, where her husband “battered the mother out of her”, her home and her patient listening can provide the “sanctuary” required.

The Woman Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle Jonathan Cape, £20, 272 pages

Believe it or not, we’ll soon be turning our attention to 2025 – and it might be a year for advisers to take particular notice of.

If estimates from The Centre of Economics and Business Research are correct, women will hold 60% of the UK’s wealth from next year. That’s a hefty amount.

As women’s wealth grows, the hope would be they increasingly look to seek professional advice on how best to manage it.

Of course, some will have been responsible for their own wealth creation and may already be benefitting from the peace of mind that comes with advice.

It probably was never the intention to exclude the client’s wife. But it’s hard to win someone’s trust if they haven’t felt included

These women are on track to achieve their financial goals. They know how to navigate their savings and investments, they adequately contribute to their pension and they are well placed to ensure their money keeps working for them so they can have a fulfilling retirement.

And as long as they feel they can trust their adviser, they probably don’t mind whether that person is a man or a woman.

Let’s face it, as female advisers account for just 16% of the total market, it’s more than likely their adviser is male.

There is a real opportunity to address this gender imbalance and make advice and the wider financial services sector more appealing as career options.

There is already great work being done in this area. Small changes can have a big impact.

While more women will have the money in their hands, others will still be facing a pension shortfall compared to their male counterparts

Wouldn’t it be a great result if having more female advisers leads to more women seeking advice?

For some women, next year may be their first time being fully responsible for their financial situation, especially if control of the money passes to them after the death of a spouse.

This is how a large proportion of wealth is expected to transfer. If the husband had an adviser (and I say ‘if’, as figures suggest only 8% of all UK adults have received financial advice), will the widow decide to continue with the professional relationship?

Much of that is likely to depend on how involved she was in the process previously. If the adviser didn’t do much to actively engage with her before her husband died, she may feel it’s too late now.

If she doesn’t feel comfortable to ask questions without fear of judgement because she hasn’t properly been part of the equation and hasn’t been seen as an individual, it could mean assets walking out the door.

Research from The Lang Cat reveals more women feel greater uncertainty about how and where to find a good adviser

That’s not to say the adviser wouldn’t be perfectly happy to explain things in a clear way with empathy. It probably was never the intention to exclude the client’s wife. But it’s hard to win someone’s trust if they haven’t felt included.

They are also likely to be in a vulnerable position. They might need to take a bit of time to work out what’s best for them and their family.

When it comes to taking advice in the first place, research from The Lang Cat’s Advice Gap 2024 report reveals more women feel greater uncertainty about how and where to find a good adviser.

Could more be done to promote the values of advice? Should firms look at how they market themselves to ensure they are appealing to a wider demographic?

Now, I’ve seen plenty of arguments for and against advice firms having a strategy to attract and retain female clients.

Things are improving but the very fact we still have a gender pay gap and a gender pensions gap shows more still needs to be done

On the one hand, women are no different to male clients, so why would they need to be treated differently? On the other, some may want to feel valued in their own right. Perhaps they consider their situation to require an alternative approach.

Could part of the problem be that, while women may not need to be treated differently as such, they haven’t been treated the same?

While more women will have the money in their hands, others will still be facing a pension shortfall compared to their male counterparts.

Things are improving but the very fact we still have a gender pay gap and a gender pensions gap shows more still needs to be done.

There are also more women than men who have no private pension wealth at all. Indeed, the Financial Conduct Authority’s latest Financial Lives Survey found more women than men are struggling to cope financially.

The under-representation of women in financial services is a cause for concern and the same is true for female investors. If one improves, the other could follow

Elsewhere, studies have suggested women can be more risk adverse when investing. And, on average, with women living longer, there are clearly a few factors at play which puts them in a tricky situation and could see some struggle in retirement.

Some women will undoubtedly feel more inclined to speak to another woman – someone who has shared similar experiences to them.

It’s not necessarily the case women have more empathy. Many advisers are able to support their clients because they use their soft skills alongside their technical knowledge.

But the under-representation of women in financial services is a cause for concern and the same is true for female investors.

If one improves, the other could follow.

Laura Barnes is director of business development at Nucleus