Afternoon.

It’s Wednesday 30th September: energy bills could be heading for their biggest rise in four years, the government wants to change how pensions increase to help fund free social care and the economy has turned out to be doing slightly better than we thought.

Kettle on.

📅 On this day: In 1967, BBC Radio 1 went on air for the first time. Tony Blackburn hosted the opening show at 7am, with Flowers in the Rain by The Move becoming the first record played on the station.

Household energy bills could rise by another £276 a year in January, with the typical annual bill in Great Britain forecast to reach £1,999.

Energy consultancy Cornwall Insight expects the price cap to rise by around 16%, largely because the conflict in the Middle East has pushed up wholesale gas and electricity prices. The price cap limits how much suppliers can charge households on standard tariffs for each unit of energy. It doesn't cap your total bill, so use more and you still pay more.

The important caveat: £1,999 is a forecast, not a confirmed price. Ofgem won't announce the January cap until November, and wholesale prices can move considerably before then. But households don't have to wait until January for higher bills. The cap is already rising by 4% from tomorrow, meaning another increase could arrive just as households are using the most energy.

The government wants to make personal social care free for older people in England. To help pay for it, it's proposing a significant change to the pension triple lock.

Under the new proposal, a National Care Service would be introduced during the next Parliament, providing personal care based on need rather than someone's ability to pay. That could include help with things like washing, dressing and eating at home.

The existing triple lock guarantees that the state pension rises each year by whichever is highest: inflation, average earnings growth or 2.5%. The government says that system will remain until April 2030.

After that, pensions would still rise by whichever is higher out of inflation or 2.5%. The guarantee of matching earnings growth every year would go, although a new mechanism would ensure pensions keep pace with wages over the longer term. 

The government says the savings would help fund free personal care, with the new service introduced gradually as the savings grow and the care system expands. Baroness Casey, who is leading an independent review of social care, is due to recommend the details next summer.

So free social care isn't arriving tomorrow, and the state pension would still be guaranteed to rise every year. But it is a proposal to redirect some future pension spending towards fixing a social-care system governments have been promising to fix for quite a long time.

The UK economy performed slightly better this spring than first thought. New figures from the Office for National Statistics show GDP, the total value of everything produced in the economy, grew by 0.5% between April and June. The original estimate was 0.4%.

That 0.1 percentage-point revision might not sound like much, but it means Britain was the fastest-growing G7 economy across the first half of 2026. Compared with the same period last year, the economy was 1.4% larger.

There were also some encouraging details underneath the headline number. Manufacturing, construction and services all grew, while GDP per person increased by 1.1% over the first half of the year.

That doesn't mean households suddenly feel 1.1% richer. Higher energy prices, borrowing costs and inflation are still squeezing households, and economists expect growth to become harder to maintain later this year. Still, economic figures are revised down often enough. We may as well enjoy one going the other way.

Police have submitted all their investigation files into the Grenfell Tower fire to the Crown Prosecution Service, which will now decide whether anyone should be charged.

The files relate to 54 individuals and 20 companies or organisations identified by police as suspects, with police asking prosecutors to consider charges including corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, fraud, health and safety offences and misconduct in public office. Nobody has been charged at this stage. The CPS says it intends to make its decisions before the tenth anniversary of the fire in June 2027.

Greggs is consulting on plans to close four manufacturing sites over the next two and a half years, potentially affecting around 740 jobs. The closures aren't the result of falling sales, though. Sales have improved and Greggs has actually raised its profit outlook for the year.

The company says reorganising its factories will make the business more efficient as it continues expanding its network of shops. It currently has almost 2,800 of them, which is quite a lot of places to accidentally leave with a sausage roll.

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey says society needs to retain the ability to intervene as increasingly powerful AI systems develop. In a new intervention on frontier AI, the most advanced general-purpose models, Bailey argues that governments shouldn't necessarily start by writing lots of new regulations. Instead, he wants rigorous testing so authorities understand how systems behave and where they could step in if necessary.

And why is the Bank of England worrying about AI? Among other things, Bailey says more capable models could make cyberattacks on banks, payment systems and other financial infrastructure considerably more sophisticated.

A Huel advert has been banned after the Advertising Standards Authority decided it could encourage people to replace conventional food entirely with the company's meal-replacement products.

The advert described an ultramarathon runner who apparently ate only Huel and then won a 260km race. The watchdog said viewers could take that as suggesting an all-Huel diet was both nutritionally appropriate and compatible with very high physical performance.

Huel disagreed with that interpretation and said it doesn't position its products as a complete replacement for a normal diet. The advert can't run again in the same form.

Up to half a million trees are to be planted across England under a new £79m government package for nature and climate adaptation.

Of the new funding, £53m will go towards planting trees in streets, parks and rural areas between 2027 and 2030. Another £26m will go to local authorities for projects such as restoring wetlands, improving rivers and protecting communities from flooding and extreme heat.

Some supplements marketed specifically at women going through the menopause can cost almost £500 a year despite offering little obvious advantage over much cheaper alternatives, according to Which?. The consumer group reviewed 26 products and found many were essentially multivitamins with additional plant extracts, sometimes at doses below those used in research.

That doesn't mean supplements themselves are pointless. Calcium and vitamin D can be particularly important around and after menopause. The point is that putting ‘menopause’ on the packet doesn't necessarily make a supplement more useful.

An exhibition opening in Exeter this week is exploring fungi through art, science and, naturally, a spot of mushroom music. For Living Labyrinths at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, musician Jason Singh attached biofeedback sensors to fungi in Devon woodlands, recorded changes in their electrical activity and turned the signals into sound.

The exhibition also includes Beatrix Potter's studies of fungi. Long before Peter Rabbit started causing problems for Mr McGregor, Potter was a keen mycologist and produced hundreds of detailed drawings of mushrooms and other fungi.

So can a mushroom actually make music? Not quite. But providing the electrical signals is still a respectable effort for something normally found next to the onions.

Have a great day.

See you tomorrow.

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