English rugby union’s top teams and the sport’s private equity backer are in advanced talks to fund a multimillion pound loan to Newcastle Falcons to help it meet financial criteria allowing it to play next season.

Sky News has learnt that the nine other Gallagher Premiership Rugby sides, which include current league leaders Bath, Saracens and Harlequins, and CVC Capital Partners are drawing up plans for a loan worth about £4m to the north-east club.

The Falcons, who are propping up the Premiership table with just two wins from 11 matches, are said to need the additional funding in order to meet the tests applied by the league’s recently created Financial Monitoring Panel.

Newcastle’s plight comes two years after Worcester, Wasps and London Irish all went out of business, leaving the Premiership with just ten teams.

A further loan, which could be finalised within weeks, would require approval by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), according to insiders.

The exact size of the loan has yet to be determined but one source said it could be worth between £4m and £5m.

Premiership clubs are said to be keen to ensure that any new funding they provide ranks on at least equal terms to emergency loans provided to the sport by the government during the pandemic.

In 2021, the then culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, signed off an £88m support package to the top flight of English rugby to ensure the league’s survival.

Much of that funding has yet to be repaid.

CVC, which bought into Premiership Rugby in 2019, owns a 27% stake in the league.

Under its stewardship, broadcast audiences and attendances have turned a corner, with total TV audiences up 40% this year – partly as a result of an increase in the number of games being shown.

Sponsorship revenues are said to have nearly doubled since CVC’s initial investment, with fan interest among the crucial 18-34 age demographic rising by 30% during the last year, according to insiders.

The Newcastle loan talks come amid negotiations over a new broadcast rights deal for Premiership Rugby, with sources suggesting this weekend that TNT Sports, the incumbent rights-holder, was expected to agree to a renewal at a premium to the current sum in the coming weeks.

One insider said the sport’s improving commercial backdrop meant it made sense for Newcastle’s nine fellow Premiership clubs and CVC to support the bottom side financially.

It emerged last November that Semore Kurdi, who has backed Newcastle Falcons for more than a decade, had put the club up for sale.

Rugby executives said this weekend that a number of family offices were among the parties which had expressed an interest in buying the Falcons.

It was unclear, however, whether any form of deal was imminent.

A takeover would include the club’s 30-acre Kingston Park stadium site.

The Falcons have been lossmaking for some time, despite Mr Kurdi’s moves to cut costs, with Newcastle Falcons spending millions of pounds less on wages than it is permitted to under the sport’s salary cap.

Of the clubs which collapsed, London Irish has been acquired by a consortium fronted by Eddie Jordan, the former Formula One team-owner, while Wasps said in November that it had secured land in the south-wast to build a new stadium as part of its revival plans.

Worcester Warriors said this month it had submitted an application to the Rugby Football Union to enable it to compete again from next season.

CVC, Newcastle Falcons and the DCMS all declined to comment.

The last thing I was expecting to discover on the doorstep of a Falkirk house was a 70-year-old woman crying at the near 16% council tax rise she and tens of thousands of others face next month.

Falkirk is bracing for the UK’s biggest hike in bills as the local authority faces a crisis of costs.

One councillor responsible for the increases has called in the police after receiving beheading taunts and threats of violence.

The area is facing its most difficult period in its 30-year history, while residents feel fragile and fobbed off.

Councils oversee the running of schools and social care, maintaining roads and collecting bins. They take charge of housing, swimming pools and libraries. The list is endless.

But Britain’s local authorities are cash-strapped and there are questions about how they should be funded in the long term.

Sky News went inside one Falkirk street to get a snapshot of the mood – and it was bleak.

We went door to door on Wilson Road and first stumbled across 70-year-old Catherine Mochar.

The unpaid carer was seemingly unaware of the upcoming changes to her bill and became visibly upset at the prospect of scraping together more cash in her already extremely stretched household budget.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” she said as her voice cracked.

Ms Mochar looks after her elderly sister and says her care package was revoked as the pensioner was deemed suitable to deal with the situation herself.

She says she is not entitled to a council tax exemption and worries about finding an extra 15.6%.

She said: “I am a pensioner. I don’t know where I am going to get it [the money] from. It is quite scary the thought of it.”

Round the corner from Catherine’s house, we meet a family who feel like they are paying more and getting less.

Claire Hamilton and William Reid have a three-year-old son and regularly use the local foodbank to make ends meet.

“It is going to become a choice between heating the house or paying council tax. Or getting food in and paying the council tax,” Claire says.

“It is quite a jump for not a lot in return. The collections on the bins keep getting longer and longer.”

She continues: “You want to do the best by your child and obviously they are not aware of all these stresses going on in the background.”

Council tax differs across UK

A drop in the frequency of bin collections is a moan people across the UK share and feeds into the narrative surrounding local services.

Council tax rates have been frozen or capped for much of the last two decades in Scotland, but this year the Scottish government has granted local leaders the power to go their own way.

In England, a principle exists which usually prevents more than a 5% increase to council tax without a referendum, mostly to protect taxpayers from excessive increases.

It is thought the average increase in England will not surpass last year’s total of 5.1%. There are some exemptions including Bradford which is hiking costs by 10%.

But Falkirk surpasses everyone and is the UK’s most extreme case.

Independent councillor Laura Murtagh initiated the idea of the 15.6% increase which was eventually voted through by most of her colleagues.

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She stresses anything less than the increase she proposed would have resulted in services, including education provision, being slashed.

But it has come at a personal cost.

Ms Murtagh, who stresses she does not want to incite a further pile-on, tells Sky News she has contacted police after threats of violence and taunts online depicting beheadings.

She said: “It has made me not want to go out. It has made me not want to go to events.

“I am having a conversation with the police. They are nasty threats. There are people who have said you could do with a kicking or you could do with more than that.

“People are sharing memes where they are doing beheading memes or whatever.”

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Local leaders say their rates have been much lower than their neighbours for many years which is unsustainable as demand for services soars.

The leader of Falkirk Council, Cecil Meiklejohn, was asked by Sky News if she could justify the 15.6% rise.

She said: “It is quite a hike. We always knew council tax needed to go up.

“We know that we have to continue to deliver good quality services, and we can’t do that without increasing our revenue and the only way we have the opportunity to do that locally is by increasing council tax.”

She concluded: “We will work with people who are going to be impacted by the increase.”

The UK economy shrank at the start of 2025, according to official figures which had been expected to show further meagre growth.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that output declined by 0.1% during the month following the 0.4% growth seen in December.

A growth figure of 0.1% had been tipped by a majority of economists but the ONS noted a slump in manufacturing output.

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Its director of economic statistics, Liz McKeown, said: “The economy shrank a little in January but grew in the latest three months as a whole, with the overall picture continuing to be of weak growth.

“The fall in January was driven by a notable slowdown in manufacturing, with oil and gas extraction and construction also having weak months.

“However, services continued to grow in January led by a strong month for retail, especially food stores, as people ate and drank at home more.”

January’s data marks a fresh blow for the chancellor as the economy faces headwinds on many fronts at a time when her stated priority is securing economic growth.

Looming large for Rachel Reeves is the threat of an adverse business reaction to budget tax hikes she is due to impose from April.

Firms are facing the bulk of the £40bn bill through employer national insurance contributions and are warning of job losses, weaker pay rises and investment, along with possible price hikes, to account for the surge in costs.

Consumer spending power is also set to be tested at the same time as essential bills including those for council tax, water and household energy are due to rise sharply.

Other challenges include the escalating trade war initiated by Donald Trump, which is tipped by economists to dent growth prospects globally.

Ms Reeves is low on ammunition as she prepares a spring statement for MPs later this month, with the welfare bill set to be slashed to avoid breaking her own spending rules.

At the same time, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility is widely expected to downgrade its forecasts for UK growth ahead.

The chancellor said of the ONS data: “The world has changed and across the globe we are feeling the consequences.

“That’s why we are going further and faster to protect our country, reform our public services and kickstart economic growth to deliver on our Plan for Change.

“And why we are launching the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War, fundamentally reshaping the British state to deliver for working people and their families; and taking on the blockers to get Britain building again.”

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Her Conservative counterpart, Mel Stride, urged her to use the spring statement to change course.

“It is no surprise that growth is down again, following near no growth in the last three months of 2024”, he said.

“After consistently talking Britain down, raising taxes to record highs and crushing business with their extreme employment legislation this government is a growth killer.

“Labour inherited the fastest growing economy in the G7 but since they arrived business confidence has collapsed and jobs are being lost.”