A member of cyber attack-hit Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) supply chain has told Sky News the government must act to safeguard the sector as it has seen no financial relief to date.

Mike Beese, who owns Walsall-based Genex UK, was speaking as an industry body complained that support revealed by the government last week was failing to reach suppliers.

While unveiling a £1.5bn loan guarantee to JLR last Saturday, Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle said it would “help support the supply chain and protect skilled jobs in the West Midlands, Merseyside and throughout the UK.”

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Many interpreted the liquidity offer as a bailout, of sorts, that JLR would draw down on and distribute to ease pressure on direct and indirect suppliers.

Businesses affected by the production shutdown are now arguing they need the support they thought they were being promised by the Secretary of State.

It is unclear how Mr Kyle’s department and the chancellor saw the loan guarantee working in practice.

JLR is understood to have not seen a need to draw on any such arrangement to date as its direct suppliers – the companies it deals with – have continued to be paid through existing funds.

It expects that money to trickle down to lower tiers of that supply chain.

The production shutdown has entered a second month and there is no visibility on when factories will get back to full speed.

Mr Beese said it was for this reason that the government had to intervene, potentially through a loan scheme for suppliers. “We need certainty”, he declared.

He said of his own customers: “We need that money to come in so we can pay our suppliers. “That money needs to cascade down the tiers,” he added [but] “it’s not going to be enough and you’ve got to make that up at some point.

Mr Breese, who employs 17 people and provides parts for several major JLR suppliers, said he attached no blame to JLR, which has been losing at least £50m a week since the attack in late August.

He also laid no fault at the door of the companies he supplied. “Only the government” could bring the relief the industry needed, he argued, while explaining that terms from lenders were out of reach given the scale of the uncertainty.

Commenting on the toll the crisis was taking, Mr Beese added: “It’s very stressful… people in the same boat are ringing me to be paid. “My staff all need certainty as well… these people aren’t just a number, they have families”, he said.

The president of the Confederation of British Metalforming (CBM), Stephen Morley, said: “We need to find a way to get money quickly to where it is needed most, to prevent the supply chain from completely collapsing and that could be an additional type of loan.

“JLR is rightly focused on getting payments through to their first-tier suppliers, and it’s best we allow them to complete that process.

“Our focus now must be on ensuring that second tier and smaller suppliers in the chain are supported, so the whole framework is in place when production restarts.”

JLR revealed earlier this week that it planned to resume limited production “in the coming days” as it continues efforts to restart key IT systems.

No firm date has sine been announced.

A spokesperson for JLR said: “As the controlled, phased restart of our operations continues, we are delivering solutions to support our suppliers through the period of disruption caused by the cyber incident.

“This includes establishing a supplier help desk with additional resources, putting in place a manual payment system to clear down outstanding invoices, and working to re-establish the automated supplier payment systems.

“We would like to thank everyone connected with JLR for their continued patience, understanding and support. We know there is much more to do but the foundational work of our recovery is firmly underway, and we will continue to provide updates as we progress.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Business and Trade said: “We acted swiftly to protect JLR, recognising the importance of the tens of thousands of people they employ directly and indirectly and to provide the company with liquidity at a key time.

“We continue to work with JLR and suppliers directly to understand the impact of the cyber attack – including on tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers – and how the support put in place is helping them.”

The UK’s most popular supermarket has said it is to introduce “strong deals” over the next three months as it prepares for Christmas.

It’s being done as Tesco chief executive Ken Murphy said he expected people to spread Christmas spending over a wider period to be more manageable and affordable.

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The supermarket price war, spurred by grocers competing to lower costs and win customers, “could be even more intensive” over the next months, Mr Murphy said.

Tesco, which is the UK’s number one supermarket by market share, has been successful in this fight, saying it was “continuing to win with customers”.

Defending higher profits

As a result, it said on Thursday that it expected annual profit to be higher than first thought, in the region of £2.9bn to £3.1bn.

It’s attracted criticism from the union Unite, whose general secretary Sharon Graham said Tesco “has profited from the cost-of-living crisis, making a fortune through unfairly inflating grocery prices”.

But Tesco’s chief financial officer Imran Nawaz defended the company’s profits, saying its investment to bring costs down “worked better than we thought”.

“When you sell more, you make more.”

This was the biggest contributor to the higher profit outlook, he added.

‘Enough is enough’

A lot of the overall price rises in the UK, however, are due to policy measures, Mr Murphy said, referring to a new plastic packaging tax and higher employers’ national insurance contributions.

When asked what the chain hoped to see in the upcoming 26 November budget, Mr Murphy said he didn’t want it to be “harder for the industry to deliver great value for customers”.

After last year’s budget delivered “substantial additional operating costs”, he said, “enough is enough”.

The CEO said he had made “no decision” and “can’t speculate” on whether Tesco would close shops if its larger stores are not made exempt from paying business rates.

The company pays more than £700m a year in tax on premises, he added.

Consumer trends

The supermarket chain has also benefited from the trend it observed of people cooking at home and eating in more, it said.

There’s been an uptick in sales of fresh food and a “meaningful increase” in cooking from scratch.

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This could be a hangover from the COVID-19 era, maybe due to the growth of streaming services, or potentially a money-saving exercise, Mr Murphy said.

“It’s hard to put your finger on the single reason, but it’s definitely a trend”.

Similarly, Tesco’s luxury own-brand line continued to grow in popularity with double-digit sales growth for the third year in a row.

Monthly disposable income fell by £40 per person between Boris Johnson’s election victory in December 2019 and Rishi Sunak’s defeat in July 2024.

It is the first time in recorded British history that disposable income has been lower at the end of a parliamentary term than it was at the start, Sky News Data x Forensics analysis reveals.

Disposable income is the money people have left over after paying taxes and receiving benefits (including pensions). Essential expenses like rent or mortgage payments, council tax, food and energy bills all need to be paid from disposable income.

Previously published figures showed a slight improvement between December 2019 and June 2024, but those were updated by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday.

There has been an uplift in the last year, although we’re poorer now than we were at the start of the year, and today we only have £1 more on average to spend or save each month than we did at the end of 2019.

That represents “an unmitigated disaster for living standards”, according to Lalitha Try, economist at independent living standards thinktank the Resolution Foundation.

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Disposable income has increased by £41 per person per month since Labour took office in July 2024. However, that masks a significant deterioration in recent months: it is lower now than it was at the start of 2025.

In the first six months of Labour’s tenure, disposable income rose by £55, a larger increase than under any other government in the same period. In part, this was down to the pay rises for public sector workers that had been agreed under the previous Conservative administration.

But the rise also represents a continuation of the trajectory from the final six months of the outgoing government. Between December 2023 and June 2024, monthly disposable income rose by £46.

That trajectory reversed in the first part of this year, and the average person now has £14 less to spend or save each month than they did at the start of 2025.

Jeremy Hunt, Conservative chancellor from October 2022 until the July 2024 election defeat, told Sky News: “The big picture is that it was the pandemic rather than actions of a government that caused it [the fall in disposable income].

“I clawed some back through (I know I would say this) hard work, and Labour tried to buy an instant boost through massive pay rises. The curious thing is why they have not fed through to the numbers.”

The £40 drop between Mr Johnson’s electoral victory in 2019 and Mr Sunak’s loss in 2024 is roughly the same as the average person spends on food and drink per week.

By comparison, since 1955, when the data dates back to, living standards have improved by an average of £115 per month between parliamentary terms.

Vital services, things like energy, food and housing, that all need to be paid for out of disposable income, have all increased in price at a faster rate than overall inflation since 2019 as well.

This means that the impact on savings and discretionary spending is likely to be more severe for most people, and especially so for lower earners who spend a larger proportion of their money on essentials.

Responding to our analysis, the Resolution Foundation’s Lalitha Try said: “Average household incomes fell marginally during the last parliament – an unmitigated disaster for living standards, as families were hit first by the pandemic and then the highest inflation in a generation.

“We desperately need a catch-up boost to household incomes in the second half of the 2020s, and to achieve that we’ll need a return to wider economic growth.”

Analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which also takes into account housing costs, says that disposable income is projected to be £45 a month lower by September 2029 than it was when Labour took office.

We approached both Labour and the Conservative Party for comment but both failed to respond.

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Labour have made “improving living standards in all parts of the UK” one of their main “missions” to achieve during this parliament.

Sam Ray-Chaudhuri, research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told Sky News: “Labour’s mission to see an increase in living standards over the parliament remains a very unambitious one, given that (now) almost every parliament has seen a growth in disposable income.

“Doing so will represent an improvement compared with the last parliament, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are in a period of real lack of growth over the last few years.”

As well as the living standards pledge, the Sky News Data x Forensics team has been tracking some of the other key promises made by Sir Keir and his party, before and after they got into power, including both economic targets and policy goals.

Use our tracker to see how things like tax, inflation and economic growth has changed since Labour were elected.

The policy areas we have been tracking include immigration, healthcare, house-building, energy and crime. You can see Labour’s performance on each of those here.

Click here to read more information about why we picked these targets and how we’re measuring them.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.