I’m at Castle Craig, a rehab clinic about an hour’s drive from Edinburgh, where gambling and cryptocurrency addicts come to seek help and share their stories in a group led by Tony Marini, a therapist and former gambling addict.

Karim*, who has spent a month at Castle Craig, became addicted to trading cryptocurrencies. He said he had lost about £1.5 million making speculative bets on the price of cryptocurrencies — last year his marriage ended after he took money from his wife’s bank account to fuel his addiction.

• Cryptocurrencies are digital encrypted currencies that can be used to make payments. There are thousands of them. • They are managed using a digital record known as a blockchain, which acts as a public ledger confirming ownership. • Bitcoin was the world’s first cryptocurrency, launched in 2009, and remains the largest.

“I felt I had money problems and the way to solve it was with crypto. I never thought it was an addiction,” said Karim, 35, who has travelled from Istanbul for treatment. “If I had money I would spend it on trading, and when I didn’t have the means to do it I borrowed from other people. It led me to do a lot of bad things.”

Patients who go to Castle Craig for help with an addiction to crypto trading are treated in the same way as gambling addicts and take part in a 12-step programme, a form of therapy where patients are given clear stages to work through towards recovery. The residential treatment costs from about £3,800 a week. About 37 per cent of patients pay for treatment themselves, about 42 per cent are funded by private health insurance, and 21 per cent have their treatment funded by the NHS.

About 5.36 million people in the UK own or have bought crypto assets, government figures show. One in ten people who invested in crypto said it had become a “problem” for them, according to a YouGov survey of more than 5,000 adults in February commissioned by the charity GamCare, which offers support to gambling addicts and runs the National Gambling Helpline. Of those who had invested in crypto, 13 per cent said they wanted to stop.

In 2022 about 76 per cent of people who owned crypto were under the age of 45, and 69 per cent were men, according to HM Revenue & Customs. Of those who owned crypto, 53 per cent had a holding worth less than £1,000, but 7 per cent owned assets worth more than £5,000.

Investors in the UK bought or were sent a total of $252 billion of crypto assets in the year to June 2023, according to the research firm Chainalysis, the third highest of the countries included in its data. The US ranked highest with more than £1 trillion of crypto assets.

• My son got obsessed with crypto trading. Here’s what happened

An investment or a gamble?

The government has promised to turn the UK into a “global hub” for crypto firms. It has announced plans to integrate stablecoins — a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the value of government-issued currencies such as sterling — into the country’s payment network.

In January financial regulators in the US approved the sale of exchange-traded funds (ETF) that track the price of bitcoin. An ETF is a type of fund that is traded on a stock exchange in its own right and aims to replicate the performance of an index or asset, such as the FTSE 100 or gold. About$15.5 billion has poured into bitcoin ETFs since January, according to the investment firm CoinShares.

But there is a dark side, which is on stark display at Castle Craig. This is the second time I have visited the centre, which started treating patients addicted to crypto in 2016. When I came here two years ago the clinic had treated about 120 patients from across the world. That figure is now more than 300.

Last month Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of the NHS, said increasing numbers of crypto addicts were attending gambling clinics and warned that the NHS was being left to “pick up the pieces”. Last year MPs on the Treasury select committee said that crypto trading “more closely resembles gambling than it does a financial service”. It said cryptocurrency should be regulated in the same way as gambling.

Lisa Marie-Patton from GamCare said those asking for help with an addiction to crypto trading were typically men aged 24 to 35. “We see it more in younger men who think crypto is a way to solve their financial problems. It’s getting really serious — I’ve seen parents have to bail their children out and people are losing their homes. You can gamble on crypto prices 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from your mobile phone.”

A key reason that crypto is thought to be addictive is its price volatility. “Because it’s going up and down so quickly, people feel like they need to look at it constantly. Gamblers love that high and low. The mind becomes obsessed and enough is never enough,” Marini said.

• Germany sells off ‘Saxon treasure’ of confiscated bitcoin

‘I get a kick from losing money’

The price of bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, has gone up 690 per cent since the start of 2020 and traded at about $57,900 (£44,570) on Friday. It was worth about $69,000 in November 2021 but fell to about $16,000 a year later after the high-profile collapse of the crypto exchange FTX. It hit a record price of more than $73,000 in March this year.

There are thousands of different cryptocurrencies and the price swings of the smaller ones can be even more dramatic.

The Covid-19 pandemic is believed to have fuelled the boom, when many people found themselves bored at home with spare cash to play with. In May 2022 some 29 per cent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 had some kind of investment, according to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) the City watchdog, up from 19 per cent in 2020. About 46 per cent of those people held cryptocurrency.

Doctors at Castle Craig say that about 90 per cent of the patients they treat for crypto addiction are men; most are middle-class and under the age of 40. “But we’ve had labourers come in for treatment and we’ve had billionaires,” Marini said.

Chris* started gambling after he began taking cocaine, he tells the group. “I never really chased the jackpot, I get a bigger kick when I lose money.” It is a recurring theme across the 40-minute session. “I got a thrill from winning, but I also revelled in losing,” says another member of the circle.

Karim, who works for a healthcare company, started betting on the outcome of sports fixtures and investing money that he made in the stock market while he was at university. In 2017 he put about $3,000 into small cryptocurrencies such as Dogecoin and Solana. Four years later his stake was worth about $150,000. “In the beginning I was quite good at it and kept winning,” Karim said.

As his confidence grew he began making leveraged trades — a risky strategy where investors typically borrow money from an exchange or trading platform to make an investment. Leveraged trades magnify your returns if they go well, but increase your losses if they do not. Traders normally have to pay a deposit which can be lost if their trade goes awry, and they can end up owing large amounts to the lender.

Over three years Karim has lost about £1.16 million that he borrowed from his friends and family, some of whom asked him to invest on their behalf. He also thinks he also lost about £386,000 of his own income and savings.

“It was a big losing streak,” he said. “I couldn’t tell anyone. I kept trying to make the money back. I could open multiple investment positions on my mobile phone. I wasn’t sleeping during the night because I was checking prices. I put my wife in a miserable position.”

Karim felt driven to get treatment because he wants to have a good relationship with his two-year-old daughter. He said stopping all types of investment is an important part of his recovery. “I have run out of money and need to earn it back. I’m trying to maintain a healthy routine and meditating and trying to do regular exercise,” he said.

Despite the risks, many investors still consider cryptocurrency a valuable part of their investment portfolio. The bitcoin investor and podcaster Peter McCormack, who bought the football club Bedford FC in 2021, said: “I have bitcoin in my portfolio to protect my money against inflation. The government is never going to stop increasing the supply of money. Bitcoin has a fixed supply and there is a similar incentive to holding it as there is for gold.”

Benjamin Dean from the investment firm WisdomTree, which runs a bitcoin ETF, said: “The first reason you might include crypto in your portfolio is diversification. Crypto has low correlation against other asset classes. There are also only a few asset classes historically where returns from your investment can increase by multiples of the original amount.”

However, for the most part, crypto is not regulated in the UK and the FCA has repeatedly said those who invest should be prepared to lose all their money.

At Castle Craig, the session draws to a close with a prayer. Standing in a circle, the group chant: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” They file out of the room chatting happily.

About 63 per cent of patients who were treated for an addiction at Castle Craig last year have not yet relapsed.If you are looking for support for yourself, a friend or a family member with a gambling problem, GamCare can help.

Do’s and don’ts

DO think carefully before you buy crypto. If you are investing just because the price has gone up, or because a friend or someone on social media claims to have made a packet, then you need to find a better reason to part with your money.

DO research the platform you are using to buy crypto. Consider charges and safety. Regulation of the sector is not as stringent as for other investments and the FTX collapse shows how you can lose your money.

DO consider investing in shares instead. They don’t have the highs and lows of crypto, but over time will usually be a better way to build your wealth, and definitely carry less risk.

DON’T invest more than you can afford to lose. A total wipeout is plausible if crypto ultimately fails to become widely accepted.

DON’T be tempted by newly created crypto coins or those that do not have much money invested in them. At best they have a low chance of long-term survival, and at worst are just scams.

DON’T think you won’t have to pay tax on gains. The authorities are getting more interested in cracking down on tax avoidance in the crypto sphere.

*Names have been changed

Then last Christmas I decided to give it a go. And like all serious switchers, I lured my partner into it too. She was reluctant at first, unwilling to go through the upheaval just for a few pounds off the painful monthly cost of having two children in nursery in London. But with some gentle persuasion — “think of something you would never usually buy yourself and we will use the money for that” — she was on board.

The Current Account Switch Service guarantees to do all the hard work for you in as little as seven days. Then, if you fancy, you can do it again to get even more money. I figured that if we made five switches, we could pocket more than £800 each. I would use my half to join a tennis club and she would fly her mum over from Canada. We were sold.

I set up a second account. To qualify for a switching bonus you have to move a current account, usually one that you pay a certain amount into each month and from which you pay at least a few direct debits. I set up a “ghost” current account that would meet these requirements but kept another that I would not move as a back-up. This meant that most of my payments and day-to-day banking would not change. I was in the game!

We each moved two direct debits (for the gym and the lottery) to the ghost accounts and set about completing our first switch. Nationwide offered £200. To qualify you had to close your old account and make sure its direct debits were active, then the bonus would appear after 10 days. Setting up the app and account needed some biometric security checks, which took about two hours, after sifting through the post for passcodes. Not too bad, as far as admin goes. At least not so far.

I was conscious that switching banks could affect my credit score. When you open an account, your new account holder will perform a credit check and too many credit checks can show up on your score. An application for an overdraft, for example, will leave a hard credit check on any report.

• Best bank account switch offers in the UK

A low credit score can affect how much you can borrow, so if you are about to mortgage or remortgage it is best not to move your bank in the months before. We had no big purchases to make, however, so I decided not to worry.

After our success with Nationwide, the switches continued. Slowly we worked our way through the big names from NatWest to Santander to Barclays. I started looking at which tennis club I might join.

But the hoops we had to jump through were getting tougher. NatWest required me to pay £1,300 and leave it in the account for a night, or was it two? Santander wanted the account to be open for 60 days before the bonus was paid. Although when it eventually showed up on the crisp red Santander app, I began to think how much better looking this user experience was than many of the others I had flirted with. Maybe I should forget the plan and stick with one bank?

But I carried on with a switch to Barclays, which demanded a monthly fee for its blue rewards scheme. Banks had begun tagging on separate conditions for users to get the bonus, often away from the main account. I was even offered a free streaming pass so that I could watch Major League Soccer in North America. But I didn’t want football, I wanted tennis.

Some 30 days went by when a text arrived: “Hi Rick, good news. You’ll get your £175 bonus in the next ten days”. My birthday passed. My wife’s mother was still on the other side of the Atlantic and my tennis racket remained in the cupboard.

The list of conditions kept growing. Lloyds wanted at least three direct debits set up. TSB needed you to spend money using the account at least five times in the first month to qualify for £100, then make at least 20 more purchases in each of the first six months to qualify for an extra £15 a month cashback.

Of course, you could just go and buy 20 bananas individually on the first of the month, but that seemed a lot of hassle. This was not the stress-free switching experience I had signed up for. The banks were getting wiser.

Switching incentives are pulling in more people than ever. In the past 12 months the switch service transferred 1.4 million accounts, up 10 per cent on the year before. It said that 99.7 per cent were completed within seven working days, but we found that the bonuses can take much longer to arrive.

We eventually reached our target in nine months, earning £825 each from five switches. Mum made it over from Canada, never realising that her trip had been paid for by a personal banking experiment.

Each switch took an average of less than two hours. But this was not including the waiting, the checking, the activating and spending requirements. The exercise required a diary full of calendar reminders to meet conditions and deadlines and by the end we had run out of offers — most banks say you cannot get the rewards again if you have previously held an account in the past three years.

Was it worth it? Probably.

But it was a lot of hassle and I am not sure I would do it again. Perhaps my new friends at the tennis club will have some better ideas for our next money-making game.

How to be a successful switcher

• Find an account. Comparison sites can help you find an account offering a switching bonus. Read reviews of the bank involved and consider other factors such as customer service and how easy the app is to use. • Check the terms. To qualify for a switching bonus you usually have to pay in a minimum monthly amount and have a certain number of direct debits. You might not get the cash if you have been a customer of the bank before. Check before you start.• Make an application. Contact the new bank to apply for your account. You will need to provide some personal information such as your name, age and address. Be sure to tell them you are switching and give your old account details.• Start the switch. Once your application is approved you can pick a switching date. This is when your new account will be activated and old direct debits and payments will be moved across to it from your previous account. This can take as little as seven days.• Wait for your bonus. Your new bank should stipulate how long it will take to receive your switching bonus. Make sure you check whether there are ongoing terms to claim the bonus, such as spending a certain amount each month.

“Outside of engineering, we’ve slowed down hiring across the board, because AI allows us to create efficiencies,” Martin Elwin, the financial technology group’s head of AI, said. “We still have high growth ambitions and previously it would have meant growing the organisation a lot faster as well. But now we don’t need to do it.”

This year Klarna said that its virtual assistant tool had replaced 700 of 3,000 customer service jobs, which would save the business $40 million a year. Government departments in Westminster and a leading airline have been among those approaching Klarna to find out how it is deploying the technology.

Elwin said Klarna was not anticipating more job cuts, but added that it was changing its attitude to hiring: “As we are putting these AI solutions in place, what is actually needed might shift a little bit. And if someone leaves the company, we need to think is it really necessary to replace them immediately? We can be a little bit more careful and mindful there. Many things just can be automated, can be simplified, without having to invest a lot of engineering hours.”

At Klarna, the average customer support waiting time has dropped from 3min to 7sec and the average time to resolve a problem has gone from 11min to 3min, while customer satisfaction has remained the same.

Klarna was an early partner of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and as a result tests the latter’s latest models and how the technology works in the sensitive world of finance. Although it is looking at other generative AI businesses, such as Anthropic and Mistral, OpenAI’s models were said by Elwin to be “hard to beat”.

The business does not yet use generative AI as part of its credit checks, because of fears about the technology’s reliability. There have been warnings over AI reinforcing stereotypes or “hallucinating” and seeing misleading patterns.

Elwin said: “It’s obviously something that we’re exploring. Can we use these technologies for things like making a credit decision more fair? Maybe we can consider new information sources with these models that we haven’t been able to consider previously. But, as it is now, there is a need for more predictability, more determinism in that, in that process.”

In an interview with Rishi Sunak last year, Elon Musk, the Tesla boss who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, said that the rapid advance of AI technology would “eliminate” the need for jobs entirely, with people working only for “personal satisfaction”.

The cost of sending a child to day school for their entire school life from this year could come to about £350,000 by the time they are 18, according to the private bank Weatherbys. That is 80 per cent higher than the £194,000 it would have cost for someone who started school in 2010 and finished their A-levels this summer.

Maxwell Marlow from the Adam Smith Institute, an economic think tank, said: “This is a stark increase and we could see private schools become more elitist. My concern is that those on lower incomes and those who haven’t been able to save as much will be priced out.”

Private school costs will rise when the government adds 20 per cent VAT to school fees from January. Some schools do not intend to pass all the VAT cost on to parents because they expect to be able to reclaim it on some expenses and to cut running costs. The Girls’ Day School Trust, which represents 23 private schools in England, told parents this week that fees would go up 12 per cent in January.

But other schools will pass on the full VAT cost. Eton has told parents they will have to pay the 20 per cent increase when VAT is added in January which would mean the boarding school fees rise to £63,000 a year. It said pupils who are funded by bursaries would not be affected and urged parents struggling to cover the cost increase to contact the school. In 2015, Eton’s annual fees were £34,000.

• Two Scottish private schools close citing Labour VAT plan

The government also plans to scrap business rate relief for private schools. Some 7 per cent of pupils in Britain, about 570,000, are educated at private schools.

“Some schools will be able to absorb part of the extra cost, but others will have no choice but to pass on the full 20 per cent increase to parents,” said Julie Robinson, from the Independent Schools Council. “We are already hearing stories of parents facing the prospect of moving their children mid-year, not being able to find local state provision or relying on loans to mitigate the effects of VAT on their fees.”

• Parents scramble to find state school places to avoid VAT on fees

Sending a child to boarding school could come to £694,400, Weatherbys said, up from £392,300 for someone who finished their A-levels this year. Weatherbys assumed that the child was a day school pupil from five, started boarding at seven and left school at eighteen and that inflation would be 2 per cent a year. It factored in the full cost 20 per cent VAT increase from January. The calculations do not include the extra cost of uniforms, sports kits, school trips abroad and music lessons, which can come to thousands of pounds.

“The dream of private education is slipping further out of reach for many families,” said Megan Rimmer from the wealth management firm Quilter Cheviot. “Wage growth has lagged behind inflation, which means school fees and the cost of living has risen more rapidly than many salaries. Some families are relying on grandparents to help, raiding their savings or are pulling their children out of private education.”

The costs

Average boarding school fees are £14,153 a term for boarders and £7,975 a term for day pupils, according to the Independent Schools Council. Private day schools charge an average of £6,021 a term.

But there is a vast gulf between the cheapest and most expensive private schools.

Pupils who board at Eton will pay £17,583 this term. Those at Harrow will pay £17,850 and final year sixth form pupils at Brighton College will pay £18,490. Fees for day pupils at St George’s School in Edgbaston, Birmingham, are between £1,960 and £3,950 this term depending on their year. King of Kings, a Christian school in Salford, costs £1,500, while the Cambridge Street School, which is an Islamic faith school for boys aged 11 to 16 in Batley, West Yorkshire, is £700.

The salary

Quilter found that a couple would need to earn at least £102,000 a year to be able to send two children to a private day school, assuming that fees go up 20 per cent in January.

The calculations assumed that two parents earning £51,000 a year each would be left with a total of £76,500 after tax and a 5 per cent pension contribution, which would allow them to pay £43,350 a year in private day school fees; spend £15,100 a year on their mortgage; and about £18,000 on other living costs such as groceries, eating out and holidays. Many parents will, however, have higher mortgage costs.

Parents would need to earn £208,000 between them to pay the £102,000 average annual cost of sending two children to boarding school. This was 80 per cent higher than the £116,000 they would have needed 14 years ago, Quilter said.

A sole earner would need a salary of £245,000 to send two children to boarding school and cover costs, Quilter said. They would need more because they would lose more of their income to tax.

Carl Green from the wealth management firm Evelyn Partners said: “Almost every client I have who has young children and is considering private school is a lawyer, banker or in private equity. Parents who don’t fall into those categories and send children to private school are being helped by grandparents. There’s no way they could afford it on their own.”

More families could be pushed out of private education as a result of the mounting costs. About 7 per cent of pupils in Britain, about 570,000, are educated at private schools. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimated that if schools passed on a fee increase of 15 per cent to parents when VAT was applied, pupil numbers would drop between 3 and 7 per cent within ten years.

Luke Sibieta from the IFS said: “It’s likely that most families won’t change their minds about sending children to private school if they are already there, but will try to cut back on expenditure elsewhere. We are likely to see more parents not sending children to private school in the first place.”

Private schools have been trying to attract more students from abroad as they prepare for the fee increases. Only 4.7 per cent of pupils at private schools in the UK are not British and have parents living in another country, according to the Independent Schools Council, up marginally from 4.5 per cent in 2010.

Charles Bonas from Next Step Education, which runs boarding school shows in London, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, Geneva and Monaco, said that more schools were trying to attract international pupils through school fairs and agents. He added: “Many young people from the UK who have been privately educated have not got on to the property ladder and now don’t have sufficient wealth to send their own children.”

The alternative

Krisha Davies and her husband, Ryan, say they have been priced out of private education. She has happy memories of her private school but will not be sending her two children. “I had great friends, great teachers and I enjoyed learning. We had sports fields, music rooms, lunchtime clubs and after-school clubs like dancing and choir,” said Davies, 38, who runs a maternity wear business called Super Mumma. “I can’t afford to send my kids to private school. We wouldn’t do it for one if we couldn’t do it for both.”

The couple have daughters aged nine and six. “We are really lucky to have an amazing state primary school near where we live,” she said. Her mother was a nurse and her father was the chief executive of a charity. “They had to budget to allow me to go to private school. We didn’t go on holidays abroad,” Krisha said.

The action plan

Parents wanting to send their children to private school may be wise to start saving early. You can save up to £20,000 a year into a cash or stocks and shares Isa where any growth will be tax-free.

Weatherbys said that investing £1,666 a month (£20,000 a year) in an Isa for the five years before a child starts school could give a fund worth about £109,920. It assumed your investments would grow 5 per cent a year after fees. Setting aside £1,666 a month for ten years before a child started school could give £242,050, it said.

Going private for part of a child’s education could also make a big difference. Weatherbys estimated that it would cost £306,297 to send a pupil to a private boarding school between years 7 and 11. It would cost £149,048 if you sent them to a private day school.

Green said grandparents often set up bare trusts for their grandchildren because this can be a tax efficient way to help cover the cost of their school fees.

Unlike with other trusts, the beneficiary of a bare trust (the grandchild) has an automatic right to what is held in the trust. They would not be able to access the assets in the trust until they turned 18, but money could be withdrawn on their behalf by a trustee to cover school fees. Anything withdrawn from the trust is taxed as if the child owned it, so their capital gains tax and income tax allowances could be used to save tax. Different rules apply if a parent sets up a bare trust for their child, so experts normally recommend that a grandparent does it.

Many schools allow parents to pay fees years in advance, which means they could lock in lower fees. This won’t help them to avoid a VAT increase, though — Labour had said that the VAT charge would also apply to prepayments made after July 29 this year.

The sacrifices

Ndah Mbawa, from Northampton, has been cutting back on family holidays abroad, takeaways and the cost of her weekly grocery shop so that she can afford the rising costs of private school.

“It’s so difficult financially. It’s tough paying the bills and the mortgage and we had the cost of living crisis on top of that. The VAT increase isn’t going to break the bank but it’s a tough ride,” said Mbawa, who runs Happier Every Chapter, an independent bookshop and subscription service.

Mbawa and her husband, Valentine, both 46, plan to send their three daughters to private school for part of their education. Kirsten, 16, has just finished her GCSEs at a private school she went to for five years; Aiyven, 15, is at the same private school; and Kaitlyn, nine, is at a local state school. Kirsten has a partial scholarship to go to a private sixth form and this term’s fees will be £3,600. The plan is to send Kaitlyn to private school when she turns 12.

Aiyven’s school is part of the Girls’ Day School Trust and its fees will go up 12 per cent in January, from £5,976 a term to £6,693. “The school is planning to absorb some of the charges when the VAT increase comes in, but it is still a substantial hike,” Mbawa said.

“My husband and I both went to private school in Cameroon. There is a lot that comes with a private school education. The exposure is great for the children, the trips they go on, the sports they do, smaller class sizes and academic standards are really high,” Mbawa said. “They say it takes a village to raise a child and for me the teachers and the school are part of that village.”

Go-Ahead Group, the former FTSE 250 company that runs Southern, Thameslink, Great Northern and Gatwick Express services, has paid £58 million to its shareholders in Spain and Australia, corporate filings reveal. A further £26 million has been paid to joint venture partner Keolis, a subsidiary of the French state operator SNCF.

Go-Ahead, also one of Britain’s biggest bus operators, was acquired by Australian firm Kinetic and Spanish infrastructure investor Globalvia in the second half of 2022 for £650 million.

Rail operator dividend payments were halted during the pandemic as the government stepped in with £15 billion of taxpayer aid to keep services running. Southern, Thameslink and Great Northern received a total of £2.1 billion — although most of this was received prior to Go-Ahead being taken private.

Bus operators also received a series of bailouts during the pandemic and continue to receive taxpayer aid through the government’s capping of single fares at £2 outside London. Any price charged by a bus company above £2 is picked up by the exchequer. The scheme began at the start of 2023 and is scheduled to end in December this year. It is estimated to have cost the public purse hundreds of millions of pounds.

Go-Ahead posted a £6 million pre-tax profit on £3.8 billion of revenue during the 18-month period to December 2023.

Recently filed accounts also show that Go-Ahead has restructured its debts, increasing its “core facilities” from £560 million when it was a listed company to more than £1 billion post-takeover. Net debt stands at £780 million, however.

The Southern, Thameslink, Great Northern and Gatwick Express rail lines — collectively known as Govia Thameslink — are among the first that will be nationalised by the government under Sir Keir Starmer’s flagship policy to bring Britain’s trains under public ownership. The Govia Thameslink contract expires in April 2025.

Miguel Parras, Go-Ahead’s chief executive, said: “In 2023 we grew significantly, with several strategic UK acquisitions and tender wins, and invested over £200 million in replacing our diesel fleet with cleaner, greener buses, as part of our EV transition leadership. A further £290 million of investment in our fleet is already committed over the next two years.”

Separately, the government has come under fire for launching a £1.2 billion private sector train deal after coming to power promising nationalisation.

The Department for Transport has published a tender document inviting applications from privately owned “rolling stock companies” to bankroll new trains for the TransPennine Express, which runs east-west across northern England from Hull to Liverpool.

Labour had previously said it would carve out the multibillion-pound rolling stock sector from its rail nationalisation plans. Nevertheless, Conservative MP Helen Whately, shadow transport secretary, said: “Labour have spent the last few years telling everyone that private investment in our rail network is a bad thing. But here they are in government opening a new tender.

“Their big idea to fix our railways is to put politicians in charge of the controls. But deep down they know that private investment improves services for passengers and reduces the burden on taxpayers.”

A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “Our plans for public ownership of passenger rail will put passengers first. As part of this, we intend for rolling stock companies to continue to lease rolling stock, working with Great British Railways to make it easier to share trains across the rail network.

“The competition for new rolling stock for the TransPennine upgrade began before the transport secretary was in place.”

“It is not our fault that the app took so long to download and register. I worry about older people or those without a mobile phone who struggle to pay, if they can pay at all,” said Embley, 60, a retired accountant.

There are now about thirty different apps that drivers can use to pay for parking on land owned by private firms and local authorities, with rates varying hugely, from about 70p an hour to almost £14.

Drivers are paying almost £5.5 million a day — £1.93 billion a year — to park on public roads and in council bays, according to government figures. This is up from £1.66 billion in 2017-18 and does not include the revenues made by private parking firms.

On top of the basic parking charges, the apps we are all forced to download now come with many different layers of fees; from green levies, “convenience” and “service” charges, to parking insurance and costs for getting a text ­message to confirm your parking.

Some firms make extra revenue from commercial tie-ins, with one, bizarrely, advertising counselling services to users. Profits at the biggest parking app firms have soared, with bosses making millions in pay and dividends.

How the fees stack up

There is normally a base cost for parking, set by the car park owner or local authority. This is the rate you pay using cash or card, but if you pay via an app there are often other charges. These depend on the commercial agreements the apps have with the car park owners.

One of the cheapest places to park is Bradford city centre, where rates can be about 70p an hour using the RingGo app. The most expensive areas are in London, where you may pay more than £13 an hour for the most polluting vehicles.

This is because some local authorities apply fuel surcharges via parking apps to encourage greener vehicles. This could add 40 per cent to your bill if you have a more polluting vehicle.

For example, parking an old Land Rover that emits more than 256 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre in the London borough of Westminster for one hour would have a base cost of £6.60 if you paid by cash. If you used the RingGo app the cost would be £9.24. There may be a 50 per cent further surcharge on some pre-2015 diesel vehicles, taking the hourly total to £13.86 — more than double the base rate.

The apps know what emissions your car has because you have to enter your registration number and the app is linked with the DVLA database.

Then there are the extra charges. Some apps have a “convenience fee” of 20p to cover the cost of the app. Others may apply a service or transaction fee of up to £2.49, covering essentially the same thing. Local authorities used to absorb some of these costs but some now allow app firms to pass them on.

Many apps also offer a mobile phone text message service to alert you that your parking is coming to an end. This typically costs 10p to 20p. Companies such as YourParkingSpace offer a text message confirmation, reminder, and expiry alert, for 20p each, making the total cost for all three 60p.

Rather than paying for a period of parking in advance, some apps require you to cancel your session when you leave, similar to the way you pay for your parking at a machine when you leave some car parks. But it is easy to forget to do this on an app, so drivers risk running up a hefty charge.

RingGo, the biggest firm with 19 million users, said its “start/stop” parking feature was in operation in Northern ­Ireland, parts of Salford, Greater Manchester, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, Wandsworth, East Devon and Torbay. It said that all start/stop locations had a maximum stay. In West Street car park in Axminster, Devon, for example, the most you will be charged is £3 for 24 hours, even if you forget to cancel your session.

• Fake parking QR codes trick drivers into paying conmen

Helen Thompson overpaid for her parking because she had not opted into text reminders. Thompson, 47, used the RingGo app to park in Wandsworth, in southwest London. She stayed about an hour, which should have cost £3.40, but after forgetting to end her session until later ended up with a total parking bill of £7.24.

“I had already paid a convenience fee of 18p and for text confirmations which cost 50p, surely that should also include a reminder to end the parking session?” she said. “When you have the kids with you and you are rushing about it is too easy to forget. I would much prefer to pay with a card or cash.”

RingGo said that it does not pocket any of the fees from the parking charges applied via its app but charges councils a transaction fee, which they can choose to pass on to drivers as a “convenience fee”. RingGo does pocket the fee for the text message reminders.

YourParkingSpace, another app, said its “service fee” of up to £2.49 helped to cover “the costs of running the platform and providing related services”. It said its text message confirmation, reminder and expiry alert was an optional extra and was not hidden.

JustPark said its transaction fees on local authority contracts ranged from 5p to 20p. A receipt via text message costs 20p, adding insurance to your parking session is 29p an hour and the text message reminder adds another 20p.

Flogging insurance

Those apps, such as JustPark, that offer insurance can add more than 50 per cent to your costs.

The PayByPhone app now has an “add insurance” option to cover you if your vehicle is broken into while it is parked. A 24-hour stay in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, could cost you £8.80 without insurance but £13.64 with cover.

However, exclusions could render this insurance worthless. You are not covered for a damaged windscreen or internal and external fittings. A police report must also demonstrate that there was forced entry into the vehicle.

Your car or home insurance policy may already cover you, so always check because you will not be able to claim on two policies at the same time.

Jonny Combe, the chief executive of PayByPhone, said: “We emphasise that this insurance coverage is entirely optional. They can, of course, use their existing car or home insurance policies to file a claim, if their policies provide cover. There is no excess with PayByPhone Protect and it is ideal for motorists who have built up a healthy no-claims bonus on their motor cover but do not want to risk losing it.”

PayByPhone users are also being shown ads for other services, including counselling sessions. A message on the payment page reads “Begin your wellness journey today”. It offers therapy for stress and depression by connecting customers to a licensed counsellor online.

“We have started a pilot programme to provide promotional offers on products and services after a parking session has been purchased,” Combe said. “These offers are totally optional and range from groceries and meal deals to mental health counselling.”

How parking apps took over

Parking apps began more than two decades ago in Europe, with start-ups such as Vipnet in Zagreb, Croatia. The first UK app service was introduced in about 2009 by RingGo.

Anthony Eskinazi, the chief executive of JustPark, said that traditional pay and display machines could be all but extinct within a decade. Last year he said he could not envisage any local authorities buying traditional meters “past 2025”.

There are no official figures for the number of parking spaces that require an app service, but in August 2023, in a submission to MPs, RingGo said there were about 250 million cashless parking transactions across the UK each year.

There are plans to introduce a national parking platform this autumn, which would allow drivers access to all parking firms through a single app, but no date has been set.

• Cheaper parking at hospitals after HMRC loses battle over VAT

In a survey of 1,900 drivers last year by the motoring group RAC, some 19 per cent said their local authority had either scrapped cash or debit card parking payment machines or was consulting on doing it, forcing drivers to use mobile phones to pay instead. In London 44 per cent of those questioned said this was the case.

The parking apps have revenue sharing agreements with cash-strapped local authorities. The income councils raked in from parking surged to almost £962.3 million in the 2022-23 financial year, up from £317.6 million the year before, according to analysis by the AA.

Hourly daytime parking rates have gone up 11 per cent in two years as councils try to balance their books, according to the insurer Churchill.

Jack Cousens from the AA said: “With local budgets stretched, drivers are the cash cow when it comes to revenue ­raising. More councils are investing in apps in an effort to ease the management of their car parks.”

Parking apps are not regulated, but many are members of an accredited trade association, such as the British Parking Association or the International Parking Community. They must also adhere to a code of practice to get access to DVLA data about drivers and vehicles so that they can levy fines.

The parking ombudsman, Parking on Private Land Appeals, said it had 84,474 complaints made to it from drivers in 2022, up 53 per cent from the year before.

The firms behind the apps

RingGo operates in 17,000 locations and has local authority contracts in London, Leeds and Nottingham.

At the heart of RingGo is Peter O’Driscoll, the managing director since 2009, who has spearheaded the company’s extraordinary growth. He was head of sales at National Car Parks Limited, one of Britain’s largest private car park businesses, where he developed cashless parking solutions for fleet cars.

O’Driscoll has described RingGo as the “Airbnb of parking” because it doesn’t own any assets, but allows landowners and local authorities to take payments for use of their space.

RingGo said: “Peter’s involvement in parking began 20 years ago when cash was the only way to pay and sometimes people didn’t have the right change — the industry was looking to modernise. At RingGo he spearheaded an automated payment technology, which evolved into him developing the UK’s first parking app in late 2009.”

RingGo’s revenues hit £25.8 million in 2022, according to its latest accounts, up from £17.8 million in 2021. Profits reached £5.1 million, up from a £11,282 loss in 2021 after Covid lockdowns.

PayByPhone has 50 million customers in America and Europe, and is the UK’s second biggest parking app. Its UK accounts show a revenue of £6.2 million in 2022, up from £4.2 million the year before, while operating profits increased to £277,635 from £184,007.

The JustPark app company had revenues of £12 million in 2023 and operating (before tax) profits of £87,000.

YourParkingSpace is too small to file detailed accounts.

Elsewhere in the “forever fund”, shares in a Great British healthcare technology business have spiked 11 per cent higher since Swedish investors announced their stake. Oh, and last Monday a Danish brewer topped up its £3.3 billion knockout bid to buy the Hemel Hempstead-based soft drinks specialist, Britvic (stock market ticker: BVIC), putting some fizz back into Fever-Tree (FEVR), the London tonic-maker that served up the biggest cash profit I ever pocketed.

Phew! British funds and shares are going cheap and foreign buyers are snapping them up with both hands. What about you?

Abu Dhabi backing for an increased £5.4 billion bid to buy Hargreaves Lansdown (HL) has caused the investment platform’s share price to surge 54 per cent higher since the start of this year. Our outgoing Conservative government blocked a UAE bid to buy the Daily Telegraph but it would be ironic if an incoming Labour administration allowed free market forces to follow their own course.

As I no longer have any stake in either of these takeover targets I make no comment, other than to wish both businesses the best of luck continuing to provide services that many customers value. Closer to home, this small shareholder is delighted to report how the Hull-based artificial hip-maker, Smith & Nephew (SN), and the London-listed warehouse investment trust, Tritax Eurobox (EBOX), have attracted the attention of foreign bargain-hunters.

The Swedish investment firm Cevian Capital, which is backed by the billionaire corporate raider, Carl Icahn, revealed that it had built a 5 per cent stake in Smith & Nephew this month. Sad to say, the Yorkshire orthopaedics specialist has been hobbling along for years, suffering a rapid succession of chief executives. Some shareholders might welcome the chance to throw away our crutches and dance again.

Shares I bought for £7.99 in November 2013, aiming to gain from grey pounds grappling with the frailties of old age, peaked at £19.90 five years ago. Then Covid caused many folk to cancel non-urgent hospital operations and the shares slipped to £9 last year before Icahn’s intervention got them back on their feet and trading at £11 on Friday.

• The six energy shares I’m investing in

Gravity remains an implacable foe for many wrinklies, so there might be further to go, said the old fool who broke his leg running in the snow not so long ago. Smith & Nephew enjoys a gross profit margin of 69 per cent but you can see this business has problems with a net margin below 5 per cent and a return on investment of less than 4 per cent, according to the independent statisticians Refinitiv. Even so, dividend income of 2.9 per cent, albeit advancing painfully slowly by an annual average of 1.85 per cent over the last five years, pays me to be patient.

Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management (BAM), which claims to have US $925 billion assets and is led by the former Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, came to the rescue of Tritax Eurobox. Higher risk-free interest rates available elsewhere had hurt these shares, pushing the price down to 45p last October before Brookfield expressed an interest, boosting them to 67p on Friday.

The original takeover code deadline to put up or shut up by July 1 was extended by mutual consent to the end of this month. Now Tritax claims that other bidders might be interested and I am happy to have popped these shares in my Isa, where we await events while pocketing 6.4 per cent tax-free income.

What about opportunities elsewhere? Shrewd observer Richard Hunter, the head of markets at the wealth manager Interactive Investor, told me: “The e-commerce logistics specialist Ocado (OCDO) is a ‘jam tomorrow’ stock with a 43 per cent share price decline over the last year. A prospective buyer with more sanguine views on growth prospects would hardly come as a surprise.”

Pooled funds — such as unit or investment trusts — offer a lower-risk way to gain exposure to takeover targets because they hold dozens of UK shares. Jason Hollands from the investment firm Bestinvest said: “Options to consider include the investment trusts Fidelity Special Values which is priced 7 per cent below its net asset value (NAV), mid and small-cap focused Mercantile, which is trading at a 10 per cent discount to NAV, and Henderson Smaller Companies on an 11 per cent discount.”

As mentioned earlier, Britain’s biggest investment platform is itself up for grabs. Darius McDermott, the managing director of rival firm Chelsea Financial Services, said: “The bid for Hargreaves Lansdown is a prime example of how the UK wealth management sector’s recurring revenues and strong client retention do not align with low stock market valuations. Hargreaves is a top ten holding within the unit trust Liontrust Special Situations.”

Bid speculation should never be the main reason for investing because most market chatter proves mistaken. But it is comforting when other investors come round to our view that a business is undervalued — after we own the shares. As always with the stock market, you have to be in it to win it.

• I’m in for the ride, but these investments were three of my worst

Power surge a welcome boost, but I can’t take credit

When I reminded readers last Sunday about the Sheffield-based green hydrogen business, ITM Power (ITM), I scarcely expected the share price to spike 17 per cent higher on Monday.

While it might be flattering to imagine the explosive equity performance of ITM is an example of the power of the press, the truth is more prosaic. This is a future-facing business that is beginning to raise revenues here and now.

ITM makes proton exchange machines that use renewable electricity from wind farms to split hydrogen out of water. It placed a rocket under its share price by agreeing to supply kit with the capacity to produce 500 megawatts (MW) of electricity.

To put that in perspective, its chief executive Dennis Schulz, who came from Linde, the world’s largest industrial gas company by market share and revenue, pointed out: “Following the capacity reservation for 100MW from Shell, this agreement with another large-scale industrial customer is a validation of our technology.”

Serious doubts remain about how cost-effective this process can be, with a great deal depending on electricity and hydrogen prices in future. However, the chancellor Rachel Reeves’s announcement last Wednesday that the new UK Infrastructure Bank aims to invest £7.3 billion in green energy, including hydrogen, might help ITM.

Either way, you can’t call me a short-term speculator. I first invested in this business at 41p per share in January 2010, when the Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg was still at primary school.

I took profits by selling some ITM at £5.39 in January 2021, and the shares traded at 65p on Friday. It just goes to show that, when it comes to investing in scientific innovation, you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Full disclosure: Ian Cowie’s shareholdings

“Finance companies are now paying out millions of pounds on mis-sold car finance claims,” a video on the social media app TikTok that has been viewed more than 3,400 times said. “You can find out for nothing the potential value of your claim in just ten seconds. Just click the link below and enter your registration number and the amount you financed.”

The Meta Ad Library allows you to search for adverts that are live on its social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. On Thursday there were 220 results for the search “mis-sold car finance”. Another advert on Facebook and Instagram said: “Car finance lenders set to refund millions. Ever purchased a car on finance? You may be owed a refund worth £1,000s. Enter your reg plate below to start your claim.”

Experts have warned that customers could lose out if they go to a claims management firm. James Daley from the consumer website Fairer Finance said: “Unfortunately these firms can be like vultures, desperately scrabbling around for the next opportunity. They have a part to play and can help people who may otherwise have been unaware they could claim money, but they are very expensive and there is a good chance that motor finance companies will be forced to make automatic refunds to customers anyway.”

What has happened?

In January the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the City watchdog, said it would investigate car finance loans amid concerns about “widespread” mis-selling.

Most people take out a loan to buy their car. In 2023 about 78 per cent of cars were bought using car finance and customers borrowed £52 billion, according to the Finance & Leasing Association, an industry body.

The FCA is investigating a commission model that was banned in January 2021 that incentivised brokers to sell customers more expensive loans to get more commission. Thousands of customers have complained about how much they were charged before so-called “discretionary commission arrangements’ were banned.

In 2019 the FCA raised concerns that customers were not always told about the way commission was charged on their loans. Since 2014 car dealers have been required to tell borrowers if they get commission for selling them a loan. If customers ask, they are supposed to disclose the amount of commission they receive.

The FCA’s investigation is expected to last until September, at which point it could set up a redress scheme. Some lenders have started setting aside millions of pounds to compensate customers. The investment bank Jefferies estimates that customers could be owed £13 billion in compensation.

• How does car finance work and is it worth it?

The rise of claims firms

Claims firms were widely used in the 2010s amid the payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal, when it emerged that banks and credit card firms had sold unnecessary insurance to customers who were covered under consumer protection laws. Financial firms paid out £38.4 billion in compensation from 2011-19, according to the FCA.

In 2021 the government changed the rules to clamp down on whiplash claims after an “unacceptably” high number were made. It banned firms from offering to settle whiplash claims for customers without first getting medical evidence. About 550,000 whiplash claims were made in 2019.

Claims management firms have been regulated by the FCA since 2019. In 2022 the fees they can charge were capped — for a payout of up to £1,499 firms can charge up to 30 per cent or £420, depending on which figure is lower. The fees decrease gradually to 15 per cent, or £10,000, for payouts of more than £50,000.

Often these firms go through a process on behalf of customers that you could complete yourself free of charge by complaining directly to a company then escalating complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which can award financial compensation.

There are concerns that firms are clogging up the complaints system with spurious claims. Last week the ombudsman said it was considering allowing claims management firms three free cases a year before charging them up to £250 a complaint, with that amount falling to £75 if the complaint was upheld. It said 20 per cent of the complaints it gets come from professional representatives acting on behalf of customers.

How to complain

It is free to make a claim if you think you have been mis-sold car finance. You can complain directly to your lender, and they are usually required to provide a response within eight weeks. However, the FCA has paused the deadline for firms to respond until its review is published in September.

If you are not satisfied with the response you get you can escalate the complaint to the ombudsman. But the ombudsman too has paused dealing with complaints about car finance mis-selling while it awaits the outcome of a number of legal cases.

In April Barclays started legal proceedings after the ombudsman upheld a customer complaint about the commission charged on a car finance loan. The outcome of the case could influence future claims. The Financial Ombudsman Service said: “We have heard from more than 20,000 people with concerns that they were charged too much for their finance.

“It is disappointing that ongoing legal proceedings about motor finance commission have impacted our ability to issue final decisions in some of these cases. However, we’re determined to progress consumers’ complaints as far as we can, and firms should continue to investigate and respond to complaints promptly.”

• Who can claim compensation for car finance?

‘I lost 32% of my PPI compensation to a claims company’

When Telford Payne saw an advert on social media in 2018 about mis-sold PPI policies, he wondered whether he might be eligible for compensation.

He used a claims management firm to lodge a claim against M&S Bank for a Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) policy that came with his credit card.

Payne, 77, a retired business owner from Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire, was one of about 64 million people mis-sold these insurance policies.

Four months after asking a claims firm to investigate his case he heard back — he had won £7,800 in an out of court settlement. But the firm took a 32 per cent cut at £2,500, leaving him with £5,300. “It was a blow losing that much but I knew what the deal was,” Payne said.

“I didn’t want to make the claim myself out of laziness. I had a business at that time, I was very busy, and I wanted someone to get on with it for me.”

The owner of this beautiful manor is the Dubai-based businessman Liam Kavanagh. The people who unwittingly financed the £22 million purchase of Kavanagh’s dream home are the unfortunate residents of Thurrock, an Essex borough situated 90 miles away on the Thames Estuary.

Between 2017 and 2020, Thurrock council invested almost £400 million — money it had borrowed from other local authorities — in bonds issued by Kavanagh’s company, Rockfire Capital. The interest was to be paid from the revenues generated by 32 solar farms, owned by Rockfire, dotted around the UK.

Thurrock council alleges that Kavanagh, 47, “misused” about £150 million of its funds for his own benefit. In an extraordinary legal claim filed last month, the council claims that Kavanagh splurged £9.1 million on a Bombardier private jet, £13.7 million on a yacht, £3 million on a property in Mallorca and £2 million on a Bugatti Chiron sports car.

Thurrock’s high-risk gamble has made it the poster child of egregiously incompetent local authorities — one of many, including Croydon, Woking and Slough, which have been driven into financial ruin by foolish bets made with taxpayers’ money.

Papers show that Kavanagh, who strenuously denies the council’s allegations, bought the Ashe Park estate just months after persuading the council to make a £40 million instalment of its investments into his doomed solar scheme.

Now, in further filings also seen by this newspaper, it has emerged that not only did Thurrock fall for the charms of Kavanagh, who dined with councillors at the London celebrity haunt, the May Fair hotel, but that it sunk millions more into another duff investment.

Thurrock lost a further £24.2 million on a separate portfolio of high-interest bonds backed by loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The bonds, issued on behalf of a company called Just Cash Flow, carried an interest rate of 8.5 per cent. As anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of finance should have known, 8.5 per cent was an extremely high level of interest, particularly as the bonds were issued in 2016, at a time when Bank of England interest rates were nearly zero per cent.

High rates indicate high risk, but the 8.5 per cent bond coupon was only the start of it. Legal documents claim that some of the loans to the SMEs that the bonds were funding had an interest rate of 25 per cent, and were unsecured.

The council received £4.7 million in interest on the bonds until they defaulted. When they matured in November 2021, they were not repaid, and a little over a year later Just Cash Flow collapsed into administration. Thurrock has not received a penny since.

The council was advised to invest in the scheme by a company called Bedford Row Capital Advisers, which allegedly rated the bonds as ten out of ten and “A-plus” on its “asset recoverability rating”. The council trusted the firm’s judgment despite it not being regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Bedford Row collapsed and entered voluntary liquidation in May.

At the time of the investments, Thurrock was a Conservative council. A new Labour administration is now suing to try to recoup some of the money lost by its predecessors. It is suing Kavanagh and a regulated financial firm called Laven Advisors, for which Bedford Row acted as an appointed representative. Laven is understood to be taking a dim view of the claim, which it intends to defend.

While the cases trundle through the courts, Thurrock’s residents are left picking up the tab. Since declaring effective bankruptcy in 2022 — largely as a result of losses on its investments with Kavanagh — Thurrock has raised its council tax by almost 20 per cent, slashed services for residents, and started selling off assets. The council-operated Thameside Theatre is in danger of closing.

In the quiet, humdrum town centre of Grays, in the Thurrock borough, disillusionment is not hard to find. Margaret, a pensioner sitting on a bench outside the Greggs bakery, said: “Now we’ve got bin collections every fortnight, when they were every week. With the hot weather, it makes the bins smell and there’s more flies.”

Thurrock is one of several councils that sought to mitigate huge cuts in funding from central government — it fell 55 per cent in real terms between 2010 and 2020 — by making commercial investments using money borrowed from the Treasury or, in Thurrock’s case, from other councils.

But the extent of the risks they were taking seems particularly egregious. It was only in 2008 that 108 councils got lured into depositing more than £1 billion of taxpayers’ cash into Icelandic banks. They, like Just Cash Flow, were offering extremely high interest rates and also ended up collapsing, unable to make their repayments. In that case, most of the money was recovered, but not before causing a big cash squeeze for councils.

Experts say that the sort of financial calamities that are unfolding at Thurrock were allowed to build up out of sight because of the coalition government’s decision to scrap an organisation called the Audit Commission, set up in 1982 to scrutinise local authority initiatives.

Tony Travers, a professor in the department of government at the London School of Economics, said: “Since the commission was abolished, the government has had no capacity to work out what condition the finances of individual local authorities are in, in a system that has been very permissive [for commercial investment].”

The Local Government Association says councils in England are facing a funding gap of £6.2 billion over the next two years. A spokesman for the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government said it was working on addressing the pressures faced by councils and planned to reform the local audit system.

That’s coming too late for the residents of Thurrock. In November 2022, the directors of Kavanagh’s Rockfire, which by this point had been renamed Toucan Energy, called in administrators from Interpath, who sold its solar portfolio to Schroders, the investment manager, for £700 million in January.

Even with its share of the proceeds from the sale, Thurrock council still expects to lose £157 million from its dealings with Kavanagh, excluding the award of any damages.

Thurrock alleges that it was fraudulently induced into investing taxpayers’ money in Kavanagh’s solar project. The council cites emails appearing to show Kavanagh dismissing warnings from colleagues that Rockfire was providing overly optimistic forecasts for the power prices that would be generated from its solar farms.

“Prices go up and down, valuations go up and down,” Kavanagh wrote in an email in January 2020. “This is a very, very long-term play with the council … If in any particular year, due to prices or breakdowns whatever the sun doesn’t shine, it won’t be a problem for them. These funds … will be used to create a new family investment office and to create wealth for years to come, this has always been my plan.”

A spokeswoman for Kavanagh said he was confident that Thurrock’s claim would be thrown out on the basis that it had not been served in a valid way.

“Irrespective of the question of jurisdiction, Mr Kavanagh strenuously denies the allegations. If and when necessary to do so, and should the court permit the claim to proceed, Mr Kavanagh will be putting forward a full defence,” the spokeswoman added.

As lawyers get to work on the case, Thurrock is forced to muddle through. John Kent, the new council leader, said Thurrock was facing a minimum of five years of hardship before its finances are on anything resembling a stable footing.

In Grays, Rachel, 39, said her job at a school in Thurrock was barely bringing in enough to pay her bills, with higher council taxes adding to the pain.

“We’re getting less and paying more — it’s just really hard,” she said, hugging one of her three daughters. “We’re trying to be normal, just to live, but it’s difficult.”