BORIS JOHNSON TO FACE COVID INQUIRY TODAY

Boris Johnson will explain how his government responded to Covid-19 when he appears before the UK’s official inquiry into the pandemic today (Financial Times). 

Johnson is expected to admit his government made mistakes and will apologise to victims, according to a person familiar with the evidence (BBC News). 

LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE SUFFERS TRADING OUTAGE 

The London Stock Exchange suffered its third outage in a few months as trading in about 2,000 smaller shares was halted yesterday (Bloomberg). Trading in affected stocks was interrupted twice yesterday morning with both episodes lasting about an hour.  

According to an update from the exchange, the outage was caused by faulty technology which prevented the matching of buyers and sellers and the processing of trades (The Times).

NEWS IN BRIEF

Landlords are selling more properties than they are buying for the eighth year straight, according to Hamptons (Bloomberg). 

The government is not adequately prepared for climate disasters, a report by the National Audit Office has found (The Guardian). 

Amazon and Google have told the Competition and Markets Authority that Microsoft engages in practices that restrict customer choice in the cloud computing market (The Times). 

Nearly one in five council leaders believe it is “fairly or very likely” that they will go bust in the next 15 months as funding fails to keep pace with increasing costs and demand for services, according to a Local Government Association survey (The Guardian).