The business model of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta empire has been dealt a blow following a ruling that its legal justification for targeting users with personalised ads broke EU data laws.

Campaigners said the move could force the Facebook and Instagram owner to ask users to “opt in” to having their data used for targeted ads.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Meta a total of €390m (£343m), after the EU’s data authority rejected the company’s argument that users agree to receive ads based on their personal data when they enter into a “contract” with its social media platforms via the terms and conditions they sign.

A core part of the Facebook and Instagram business model is compiling profiles of users from their online activity, which enables advertisers to target people based on details such as their hobbies, consumer behaviour and location.

The DPC had initially backed Meta’s legal argument that the “contract” approach did not breach the EU’s general data protection regulation (GDPR), but it said on Wednesday it had to follow the binding recommendations of the bloc’s European Data Protection Board, which is comprised of all EU privacy regulators.

However, the DPC, which has regulatory power over Meta because the company’s EU base is in Dublin, added that it was seeking a court ruling against a further EDPB demand that it investigate all of Facebook and Instagram’s data processing operations.

The privacy campaign group Noyb, which triggered the decision after lodging complaints against Meta, said the outcome was a “huge” financial blow to the company, which relied on advertising for 98% of its $118bn (£98bn) turnover in 2021. Max Schrems, the honorary chair of Noyb, said Facebook and Instagram users in the EU would now need to be asked whether they wanted their data to be used for ads.

“This is a huge blow to Meta’s profits in the EU,” he said. “People now need to be asked if they want their data to be used for ads or not. They must have a ‘yes or no’ option and can change their mind at any time. The decision also ensures a level playing field with other advertisers that also need to get opt-in consent.”

The DPC has given Meta three months to bring its data processing operations into compliance with the decision, which imposed a fine of €210m for the Facebook GDPR breach and €180m for Instagram. It did not give details of how Meta should comply with the decision.

Meta said in a statement it would appeal against the decision and that it was “incorrect” that personalised ads could no longer be offered without users’ consent following the DPC announcement.

“These decisions do not prevent targeted or personalised advertising on our platform,” said Meta. “The decisions relate only to which legal basis Meta uses when offering certain advertising. Advertisers can continue to use our platforms to reach potential customers, grow their business and create new markets.”

Meta’s advertising-based business model is already under pressure after Apple introduced a privacy change that required app developers to seek user permission to track their online activity in order to serve them personalised ads.

The company’s shares slumped in October last year after a grim earnings report in which it flagged an advertising slowdown. It is also struggling to convince investors about its multibillion-dollar investment in the metaverse, a concept where the physical and digital worlds combine via virtual and augmented reality.

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hen corporate executives start discussing their efforts to influence company culture, a healthy amount of scepticism is advisable. But Murray Lambell, the UK boss of US online retail giant eBay, can draw on personal experience of the importance of how a business cares for staff. For many years he hid his sexuality from colleagues in a culture that was “more stifled and stuffy internally”.

“It was probably my own baggage,” he says. “I was not comfortable to be out at work … A lot of the leadership was white, middle-aged, from a very specific demographic and academic background, which didn’t all resonate with me. I didn’t feel comfortable to be a complete person at work and then that limits you.”

So what emboldened him? Until now, Lambell has been speaking briskly, beneath vivid images from graphic designer Alba Blázquez in the bright surroundings of eBay’s UK headquarters in west London. He takes a deep breath, visibly emotional. “I was married and my partner died. I had to come into work for the first time and tell my boss: ‘Oh, by the way I’m gay and my partner is actually in hospital right now.’

“I was thinking: ‘I shouldn’t be dealing with this issue right now, when I’m trying to deal with an existential crisis.’ I was having to deal with too many things in one go. I realised there was probably nothing to be fearful of.”

Lambell says his bosses at the time, in 2014, were “horrified” that he hadn’t felt comfortable discussing his sexuality earlier and the experience has emboldened him to treat employee inclusivity as a “moral obligation”. (The board is now more diverse and he’s taking a Yale University course on the subject.)

CV

Age 46

Family He has a partner, Robin.

Education BA in French and history at Exeter University and master of business administration at London Business School.

Pay Undisclosed. “More than I ever expected to earn, less than you might think.”

Last holiday Elie in Fife, Scotland.

Best advice he’s been given “Deliver, deliver, deliver,” from the former eBay chief customer officer Wendy Jones.

Phrase he overuses “History doesn’t predict the outcome.”

How he relaxes Other than running – “To show my 25-year-old
nephew who is fastest” – he is trying to learn new languages. “Currently doing well at Spanish and OK at Farsi!”

***

Not that eBay’s recent culture has been beyond reproach. Last week two former executives in the US were jailed for their part in a harassment campaign against a couple who published a newsletter critical of the company.

Five other employees, who have also all since left, pleaded guilty for their roles in the bizarre scheme, which included sending live cockroaches, a funeral wreath and books about surviving the loss of a spouse to the couple’s home. “That’s not something I recognise about our business and what we represent,” Lambell says, speaking before the sentencing, but adds that there is “still work to do”.

We meet as eBay faces two tumultuous global headwinds: the brutal sell-off of US tech stocks and the impact of a protracted cost of living crisis on discretionary spending. Both require the Californian company to draw on the resilience that enabled it to create the first big online marketplace and sustain it for 27 years while its web 1.0 peers crumbled.

Not that its UK home in a cobbled square beside the Thames in well-to-do Richmond recalls Silicon Valley. A lonely-looking table-football unit is the only nod to tech work culture, and each meeting room has a pointedly British name and theme (we sit in Bond, a silhouette of 007 etched into the glass).

The stock sell-off has proved painful for eBay. The pandemic shift to online buying pushed shares to all-time highs above $80 last October but they have since fallen by 46% as restrictions have eased, valuing it at just over $20bn.

In August it reported that gross merchandise volume – the value of all the goods it sold – fell for the fifth consecutive quarter, down 18% at $18.6bn. Active buyers were down 12%, to a still respectable 138 million.

Lambell is unshaken: “This is a long-term play. So the pandemic [drove a different] category mix – we’ve now got economic pressures. Supply chains are going to have to adapt to move. Consumers will want to buy things on a trusted, reliable platform and we provide that.”

We’ve had two years of utter disruption – people are still going to splurge at Christmas but I think they’re being a lot more planned about it

He admits some categories such as home and garden products “are going through a total hangover” after a pandemic boom. Meanwhile, discounted and refurbished goods are selling well.

So should we expect squeezed Britons to seek a secondhand Christmas? “We’ve had two years of utter disruption – people are still going to splurge but I think they’re being a lot more planned about it. They will prepare and split their spend over months.”

Lambell’s job is also to encourage and promote sellers of products that “hit the zeitgeist”, such as heavily searched solar panels and air fryers during the energy crisis.

That hunt for the next trend led eBay to acquire Manchester-based non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace KnownOrigin in the summer. Lambell says the deal brings “our web 1.0 with this web 3.0 world together”. He envisages eBay’s army of collectors photographing their sought-after treasures – such as artworks – and selling NFTs of them. “Clearly the market has a long way to evolve – it’s very early days.”

Part of Lambell’s strategy is to convince high-end fashion brands to list ex-display and imperfect stock instead of ditching or, previously, burning unwanted items to avoid devaluing the product. “For years, eBay was seen as the pariah of those brands. They hated the fact that their stuff was being resold … and you saw [that] type of awful behaviour,” he says, adding that conversations are now at “varied levels of maturity” with brands looking to sell off their inventories in carefully curated parts of his site.

The company’s high-end business has also grown through its authentication service, launched last year for watches, handbags and trainers,which has seen it physically handle products in warehouses for the first time. Growing consumer concerns about waste should drive sellers and buyers to eBay, he adds.

Lambell’s own recent eBay search history points to his early career – a former Swissair drinks trolley he spotted on a recent trip to Switzerland sent him down an online rabbit hole, reliving his postgraduate years with British Airways. He left his corporate role at the airline after witnessing strike action that caused passenger fury in Heathrow’s Terminal 4. “It was almost a riot,” he recalls.

The Canterbury native’s worldview has also been shaped by his parents’ struggles in the latter days of running their transportation business. “It was very emotional watching what they went through – these big partners were basically putting so much pressure on them in terms of cost that they couldn’t deliver the service they were proud to deliver.”

Does he keep that in mind when dealing with thousands of small firms? “Yeah, [although] I’d never say that with the businesses directly. I think they would say: ‘That sounds like spin.’”

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The multibillionaire boss of gambling company Bet365 has collected annual pay and dividends of more than £260m – one of the world’s biggest-ever pay awards but less than the record-breaking £471m she collected in 2020.

Denise Coates, who set up Bet365 in a portable building in Stoke-on-Trent in 2000, was paid a salary of £213m in the year to March 2022, according to the company’s latest accounts published on Friday. As the company’s controlling shareholder she is also entitled to at least 50% of the £100m in dividend paid for the year.

While her £263m pay is huge – and works out at just over £1m for every working day of the year – it is 12% less than the £300m she collected in 2021, as the company paid out less profit while spending millions on international expansion plans.

It takes the total paid to Coates since 2016 to almost £1.5bn.

Her extraordinary pay package regularly ranks among the highest in Britain and will maintain her status as the world’s best paid woman at a time when many in the UK and across the globe are struggling to cope with the rising cost of living.

Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Centre, which campaigns for restraint in excessive executive pay, said it was “hopelessly inefficient for such a huge amount of income to accrue to one individual” when so many people in Britain were “going through such hardship”.

He added: “A payment this size is obviously vastly more than necessary to encourage or reward success. Even the best business leaders depend on things beyond their control like an educated workforce, affluent customers and a stable economy. There really is no moral or economic justification for such extreme payouts and the inequality and division that they create.”

Coates built Bet365 into one of the biggest online gambling companies from her father Peter’s Stoke-on-Trent bookmaking business. It has propelled her, her father and her brother, John, into the ranks of the UK’s richest people, with a combined fortune of £8.6bn according to the Sunday Times Rich List, which featured her on the cover of the latest edition.

In the latest financial year, Bet365’s profits dropped significantly. It made a pre-tax profit of £49.8m for the year (after a £26.2m loss from its ownership of Stoke City Football Club). That was significantly less than the £469m profit reported in the previous year.

Gambling revenues increased by 2% during the year to £2.85bn. Sports betting revenues fell by 2% but its online games revenues jumped by 25% during the year to make up the lost ground.

The drop in profits was largely driven by £320m in extra “administration expenses” that included advertising in new markets and spending on extra computers for expansion. It reported launches in Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, the Netherlands, and in Colorado and Ontario in North America.

Bet365’s staff numbers rose to almost 6,100, up from 5,400 the year before.

The company did not respond to requests for comment.

After graduating with a first-class degree in econometrics – the application of statistical methods to economic data – from the University of Sheffield, Coates expanded the family’s Provincial Racing chain to nearly 50 betting shops.

As the millennium approached, she decided the future of betting was online and bought the Bet365.com domain on eBay for $25,000 (£19,000), a move that helped catapult her and her family up the UK wealth league.

Coates was awarded a CBE in 2012 for services to the community and business, and has become known as the “patron of the Potteries” for her decision to continue to base Bet365 in Stoke, where it is the largest private sector employer.

“We mortgaged the betting shops and put it all into online,” she said at the time. “We knew the industry required big startup costs but we gambled everything on it.”

The revelation of her latest mega payday came just days after research showed the bosses of Britain’s biggest companies made more money in 2023 by Thursday afternoon than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year.

Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, the unions’ umbrella body, called on the government to intervene to “bring back some fairness on pay” as many lower-paid workers struggle with swingeing real-term cuts to their income.

“Everyone deserves a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. But while working people are told not to ask for more, top pay is soaring,” he said. “We need government action to bring back some fairness on pay. Workers should have seats on executive pay committees to bring some common sense to top pay. And ministers must set out plans for fair pay for everyone, starting by agreeing to pay negotiations in the public sector.”

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Initial signs were good: a number two placing among Netflix’s English language titles in its first three weeks, and talk of a further two series mapped out by its creators. Then, suddenly, the chop came – both a bizarrely rash decision and a fitting coda. In 2022, it felt like years of rampant speculation, growth and churned-outcontent had come back to bite the industry. Here are a few of the worrying signs of a streaming universe dangerously in flux.

Finished shows aren’t making it on to screens

In these strange times for streaming, even shows and films that are already “in the can” aren’t making it on to screens. You’ll no doubt remember the kerfuffle around HBO Max’s Batgirl film, discarded as a “content write-off” while it was in post-production, but TV has taken a bigger hit. Minx, HBO Max’s well-received feminist porn comedy, had its second season shelved despite filming being nearly completed (it’s thankfully been saved by Starz), while troubled network AMC (home to the Walking Dead universe among others) has shelved a number of returning and new shows that either had completed or were close to completing production. There seems to be a range of reasons for this spate of premature axings, but the big one is the dreaded tax write-off, with HBO Max’s parent company, the recently merged Warner Bros Discovery, scrambling to reduce an estimated $50m of debt.

… and existing shows are being removed from them

The promise of the streaming age was having every show and film ever made at your fingertips. And for much of the last decade, that has been the dream of the streamers themselves, who were busy amassing vast content libraries to lure in subscribers. Things are more complicated now. As part of the Warner Bros/Discovery restructuring bonfire, HBO Max have removed a ton of shows from their platform, including the one-time HBO crown jewel Westworld, and a chunk of its classic Looney Tunes shorts. It’s hoped that these shows might resurface elsewhere, but it does underline the ephemeral nature of content in the digital age; where once consumers would permanently own their own copy of a show, film or album, now they are effectively watching them through the living room window of the streaming services, who can switch them off on a whim.

Netflix has become more ruthless

When Netflix swaggered on to the streaming scene in the early 2010s, it was seen as a boon for creators. Here was a company willing to let talented people run their imaginations, doling out multiple series of sometimes very costly shows, and rarely intruding on the creators’ vision. Indulging these creatives was a smart move at the time for a company that needed a library of great content, fast – but things are different now. Today, Netflix is a more ruthless company, willing to cancel shows that aren’t performing to their expectations rather than let them find an audience. 1899, The Midnight Club and Archive 81 all fell at the first season hurdle, while shows that you once would have expected to run for as long as their creators felt necessary are bowing out after two – or at most three – seasons.

In fairness, Netflix were always going to have to remodel their business at some point, and the company have had to weather a challenging 2022, but the sheer savagery with which they have been cancelling shows could turn off both talent and viewers. As this Forbes article put it, “Netflix is becoming a graveyard stacked with dead series with unfinished conclusions.”

599 scripted TV shows were released in the US in 2022, an increase of 50 on the year before, and close to three times the number released in 2009, back before the streaming revolution properly began. Barely a week goes by without a handful of very good shows receiving next to no attention: for example in the last seven days, Netflix have released new series by two revered film-makers, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn and Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda, and there has barely been a peep about them.

Clearly all this is unsustainable both culturally and financially, and it does seem like we might have just passed the peak of “peak TV”, with predictions of fewer releases next year – not to mention the prospect of a writers strike potentially shutting down production on scripted TV too. Just as unsustainable is the sheer number of platforms airing all these shows – just how many of them can viewers afford to subscribe to at once? It’s not hard to imagine a major streaming platform being forced to shut down in the coming years.

There are causes for optimism

For all the gloom, there’s plenty to be cheerful about. Less TV would, you hope, afford networks and streamers the opportunity to run existing shows for longer, rather than abruptly cancelling them. The deep-pocketed likes of Apple and Amazon continue to give creators space to money to make ambitious series (even if it’s unclear how many people are watching them). Despite wider issues at Disney, their streaming service Disney+ has experienced enormous growth, and looks set to continue to invest in high-quality shows, particularly from its subsidiary FX. In the UK, canny co-productions with US networks have allowed the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky to continue make high-quality TV without breaking the bank. And it’s impossible to deny that the streaming age is pumping out some seriously good TV … as long as streamers are willing to keep making it, of course.

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It is generally regarded as being well-managed, at least since chief executive Alex Baldock arrived in 2018, and there is no problem with the balance sheet. Yet the stock market capitalisation is just £700m. Even in a low-margin game like consumer electricals, being valued at less than one-tenth of revenues is a shocker.

The main frustration for the past half-decade has been the fact that Baldock’s predecessors had the terrible idea of merging with Carphone Warehouse in 2014, one of the worst deals in modern retailing history. The mobile phone market shifted and all the standalone phone shops were closed in 2020. Even now, echoes are heard in the £511m non-cash impairment charge in Thursday’s half-year numbers.

Now comes a fresh disappointment. Just as Baldock’s restructuring treatment seems to have fixed the UK and delivered the desired “omnichannel” capabilities, the corporate crown jewels – operations in the wealthy markets of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland – have lost their sparkle. After a Covid whoosh, rivals piled up with stock only to run into weakening demand. The result is a price war fierce enough to cause Currys, the group, to knock £25m off its full-year profit forecast; the new estimate is £100m-£125m.

The Scando discounting isn’t “permanent or structural” and competitors can’t sustain “current levels of desperate and unprofitable pricing”, says Baldock. No doubt he’s right, but he was vague about timing. A target for a group-wide operating margin of 3% has been pushed out to the 2025 financial year.

The stars will align eventually for Currys, one still suspects, because the operational strategy seems spot-on and recessions don’t last forever. But you also see why the shares, down 6% to 61.5p, seem stuck at the lowly rating. Nothing is ever straightforward with this company.

Drax plays it modest

A third profits upgrade this year delivered only a modest boost to Drax’s share price because the potentially market-moving event lies ahead. It is how the government fine-tunes the windfall tax on electricity generators as it applies to biomass plants. A decision has to be made soon because the levy kicks in at new year.

Thus Drax was at pains to point out that its upwards tickle to top-line earnings for 2022 (now to be “slightly above” previous City forecasts of up to £681m) was mostly due to outperformance by its hydro operations. Fair enough. Hydro, as a source of power that can be turned on and off quickly, is playing an increasingly critical role in balancing the electricity network.

By contrast, you’d almost believe the biomass business was a tale of woe. The cost of wood pellets in the European spot market “has increased significantly” with higher energy and transport prices, said Drax. Cargoes are “trading at over three times their historic average”. Add in the windfall tax and generation could become “less economic” at times and “restrict the group’s purchase of additional biomass cargoes at spot prices”. Translation: please don’t hit us too hard with the levy.

Since the design of the levy allows adjustment for increases in generators’ costs, Drax will probably get something from its negotiation with government as long as it can show the workings behind its calculation that the “all-in contracted costs” for biomass for UK generation will be over £100 a megawatt hour in 2023 (which almost makes nuclear look cheap).

But ministers would be wise to inspect the details. Drax’s top-line earnings last year were £398m and it now expects to achieve close to £700m in 2022. The company is not doing badly amid energy volatility.

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Mudryk has been Mikel Arteta’s top winter target but negotiations with the Ukrainian champions, who drive a notoriously hard bargain, have not been straightforward. Nor are they complete, with the nature of add-ons and terms of payment understood to be the biggest remaining sticking points, but the sides are within touching distance of a final fee.

It is likely Arsenal will get their man before the transfer window ends. They would pay an up-front sum of more than £50m for the 22-year-old forward, who has become one of Europe’s most sought-after players over the past year. Brentford were willing to break their transfer record to sign him last summer but could not reach an agreement and his performances for Shakhtar in the Champions League during the autumn pushed his value well out of their reach.

Shakhtar’s stance has hardened further because they are in a three-way fight with Dnipro-1 and Dynamo Kyiv to win Ukraine’s Premier League and are aware of Mudryk’s value as a player who can help regain their place at Europe’s lucrative top table. But Arsenal’s persistence is close to paying off and Mudryk, who has made no secret of his desire for the move, would add significant competition across Arteta’s front line. Chelsea have shown interest in Mudryk but the player’s wish to join Arsenal has been an inhibiting factor.

Speaking on Friday, Arteta was characteristically tight-lipped about the prospect of imminent additions. “There is some interest in things we’d like to do to improve the team, because we are a bit short in certain areas,” he said.

The Premier League leaders will certainly not have Mudryk in their ranks for Sunday’s derby against Spurs, even if negotiations are completed quickly. Arsenal hope to at least preserve their five-point lead at the top with a first win at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and Arteta said his players were “in a different place” from the costly 3-0 defeat in April that had seismic implications for both teams’ Champions League prospects.

Arteta should be able to select Emile Smith Rowe in a Premier League squad for the first time since 4 September. Smith Rowe returned from injury as a substitute in Monday’s FA Cup win at Oxford and reported no issues. Bukayo Saka is also fit for selection despite appearing to hobble off during the second half of that tie.

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The former French international slumped with his head in his hands as he was cleared unanimously of six counts of rape and one of sexual assault after a five-month trial at Chester crown court.

However, the 28-year-old will face a second trial after the jury was unable to reach verdicts on a charge of raping one woman and attempting to rape another.

Mendy, who appeared close to tears in the court dock, had been accused of being a “predator” who turned the pursuit of women for sex into a game during parties, some held during Covid lockdowns, at his £4.8m home. But he told jurors that the women who accused him of rape had all wanted to have sex with him. He denied groping the woman who claimed he had sexually assaulted her in his kitchen.

In a statement issued by his solicitors after the verdicts, Mendy said he was “delighted” with the acquittals. The footballer “looks forward to clearing his name” on the two remaining counts “so he can start rebuilding his life”, the statement said.

Mendy will go on trial over the two remaining charges on 26 June – two and half years after he was first arrested. The footballer, who joined Manchester City six years ago as the world’s most expensive defender, had been accused of seven counts of rape against four women, one count of attempted rape against a fifth woman and a further charge of sexual assault against a sixth woman after being arrested on 11 November 2020.

Mendy’s co-defendant, Louis Saha Matturie, who had been described as the footballer’s “fixer”, broke down in tears as he was found not guilty of three charges of rape involving two women. The jury was unable to reach verdicts on six other counts against the 41-year-old: four alleged rapes against three women and the alleged sexual assault of two women. He will go on trial for those charges in the week commencing 18 September.

The jury of seven men and four women was discharged on Friday after deliberating for nearly 70 hours over 14 days. One juror had been discharged partway through the trial.

Mendy told his trial it was “normal” for him to sleep with lots of different women, sometimes on the same night as they had had sex with his friends. Being a famous footballer made it “honestly, so easy” to pick up women at nightclubs and take them to his home near the Cheshire village of Prestbury, he said.

The six women had accused him of assaulting them at his gated mansion between October 2018 and August 2021, often at illegal parties held during lockdowns.

The parties were fuelled by alcohol and nitrous oxide balloons and often involved guests stripping down in Mendy’s pool. People would have sex in rooms all over the house, sometimes swapping partners, the court heard.

One woman was only 17 when she claimed she was raped on the same night by Mendy and Matturie, known as Saha. The men were cleared of four counts of rape relating to her. The prosecution said it was Matturie’s job to “procure” attractive young women for Mendy and to bring them back to his home, called The Spinney.

Several weeks into the trial, the judge ordered the jury to find both Mendy and Matturie not guilty of raping a 19-year-old woman, after a video emerged showing her having “enthusiastic and obviously consensual sex” with Matturie. Mendy’s defence team used this dropped charge to plant doubt in the jury’s mind, suggesting that if one woman had lied, could the others not also have made up their allegations?

“What you have actually seen with your own eyes in this case is – I hesitate to use the word – a real-life liar,” said Eleanor Laws KC in her closing speech to the jury. “Someone who has made serious criminal allegations against two men. And you have watched it play out, unusually, in front of your eyes. Because when ever does a defendant have a film to prove their innocence? Hardly ever.”

Giving evidence in court, Mendy said that being in prison while on remand had made him “learn lots of things about life”. He said he reflected on his behaviour while sitting in his cell, and realised only then that it was possible to “hurt” women’s feelings even “if we were both OK to have sex”. The way he had sometimes spoken about women was “disrespectful”, he said he had realised.

In a statement, Manchester City said it “notes the verdict” in the trial but said it would not comment further given the second trial.

DCI Kate Tomlinson, of Cheshire constabulary, said the force would continue to support the witnesses in the case.

She added: “We are committed to investigating all allegations of rape and sexual assault – no matter how long ago they took place. If you are a victim of this type of crime, please don’t suffer in silence. Come forward and we will listen to you, we will take action and we will provide you with the support that you need.”

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The average price achieved in recent weeks has been 3% below a seller’s asking price, when for much of 2021 and the first half of this year it matched the asking price, the property website said. Zoopla said it expects discounts to increase further in 2023.

Since the start of September, one in nine homes have had their original asking price reduced by 5% or more, Zoopla said, and a quarter have had the price cut to some degree, according to the index covering the month of October.

Asking price reductions are greatest in southern England, where sales volumes have fallen the most, with almost one in three homes in the south-east and east of England reducing asking prices to attract demand, the report said.

Annual house price growth slowed to 7.8% last month, down from 8.1% in September and the lowest since November 2021, according to Zoopla data. Demand has fallen 44% since September’s disastrous mini-budget, which drove mortgage rates sharply higher and led to hundreds of deals being pulled from the market.

New sales have dropped by up to 50% in previous hotspots and areas where higher mortgage rates will hit buying power hardest – in southern England, east Midlands and Wales. Sales have fallen less in more affordable areas and in London where market conditions have been weaker. Zoopla expects mortgage rates to fall to about 5% at the turn of the year, from about 6% now for two-year and five-year fixed deals.

More homes are coming to the market for sale, with the total stock of homes available up 40% from this time last year – but that’s still almost 20% below pre-pandemic levels.

With the cost of living crisis squeezing people’s budgets, and the Bank of England predicting a prolonged recession, the housing market is forecast to slow further, with prices likely to dip in the first six months of 2023, Zoopla said. It expects property values to drop by up to 5% over the year as a whole, and sales volumes to fall to 1m, from 1.3m this year.

Richard Donnell, executive director at Zoopla, said: “The housing market is adjusting to a reset in the level of mortgage rates but the likelihood of double digit house price falls at a UK level remains low.

“While the outlook for house prices is weak, we see a shift to more needs-driven motivations to move in 2023 and beyond which will support sales volumes. Ongoing pandemic impacts, increased labour market flexibility plus more retirement will continue to encourage moves. Cost of living pressures will compound these trends encouraging homeowners to consider their next move.”

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JD, which owns Size?, Finish Line in the US and Spain’s Sprinter as well as its main retail chain, said the sale of the “non-core” brands would allow it to focus on other priorities, particularly the “international and digital expansion of the group’s core premium sports fashion” retail brands.

The deal will put the brand that Gallagher founded in 2009 in new hands for the second time in three years after Pretty Green fell into administration in 2019 before being rescued by JD. Other labels included in the sale are footwear brand Nicholas Deakins, the casual fashion brand Scotts, Rascal Clothing and Watch Shop.

The deal, which will result in an £100m one-off non-cash writedown in JD’s accounts related to the value of the brands, is a first bold move by new chief executive Régis Schultz who took on the job in September after the departure of the group’s long-term boss Peter Cowgill.

Schultz said: “JD is rightly recognised for its laser focus on the customer and we are convinced that the most significant opportunities lie in the continued international development of the Group’s global sports fashion businesses.”

Ashley’s retail empire has a long history of buying up fashion brands to help bolster profits in its retail empire. Frasers already owns dozens of brands including Everlast, Lonsdale, Karrimor, Agent Provocateur and Firetrap and recently acquired tailoring brand Gieves & Hawkes and online fast fashion specialists Missguided and I Saw it First. It also has large stakes in listed luxury brands Hugo Boss and Mulberry.

Frasers’ finance director Chris Wootton said last week that investors should “expect more deals to happen” and the group was in talks with a number of potential targets.

However, a deal with JD would have been unlikely under leadership of Cowgill, who had a long history of rivalry with Sports Direct founder Ashley, who once owned shares in JD.

Cowgill had hinted, for example, that the competition regulator’s block on JD’s attempt to buy smaller rival Footasylum had been influenced by the Sports Direct founder.

Cowgill quit JD with immediate effect in May just months after the retailer was fined more than £4m for breaching the competition regulator’s rules with clandestine meetings with a takeover target.

He has since, however, agreed to provide advice to its, new chair, Andy Higginson, and Schultz, for an “expected period” of three years under a £5.5m golden goodbye deal.

His exit was a major blow to the company, where he oversaw a turnaround in fortunes after returning as chair three years after quitting as finance director in 2001.

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In a survey of 1,000 factories in the country producing clothes for UK retailers, 19% of Lidl’s suppliers made the claim, as did 11% of Inditex’s, 9% of H&M’s and 8% of Next’s.

A majority of suppliers of those four brands, and also of Tesco and Aldi, told researchers that almost two years after Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic they were still being paid at the same rate – despite soaring raw material and production costs in the interim.

Almost half of Primark’s suppliers questioned said they did not see an increase in payment rates, with just over a third saying orders had been cancelled, according to the research by the University of Aberdeen and the UK-based fair trade campaign group Transform Trade, formerly known as Traidcraft Exchange.

Their report, which looked at the period from March 2020 to December 2021, found larger brands buying from 15 or more factories were more likely to be engaging in unethical practices, such as delaying payments or cancelling orders, than smaller ones. These bigger operators included members of the UK’s Ethical Trading Initiative, an alliance of companies, NGOs and unions set up to improve relations with suppliers.

Fiona Gooch, a senior policy adviser at Transform Trade, called for a fashion watchdog to regulate UK garment retailers in a similar way to the Grocery Supply Code of Practice, which oversees relations between suppliers and retailers selling more than £1bn of groceries a year.

“This research is a wake-up call,” she said. “We need a fashion watchdog to stop unacceptable purchasing practices of the clothing retailers benefiting from large consumer markets, along the same lines as existing protections for food suppliers.

“Only when suppliers are able to plan ahead, with confidence that they will earn as expected, can they deliver good working conditions for their workers.”

In a response published within the report, Lidl said it had “committed itself to ensuring minimum wages in its supply chain and to ensuring the sustainable pre-planning of the production of textile goods”.

It added: “Lidl takes its responsibility towards workers in Bangladesh, and other countries where our suppliers produce, very seriously and is committed to ensuring that core social standards are complied with throughout the supply chain.”

Next said it “completely refutes the suggestion that its suppliers are being paid the same (or less) than before the pandemic”. The company said it had gone on record about rising supplier costs and its profit margins had remained stable while prices for customers had gone up, indicating it had paid suppliers more.

Inditex said it had participated in global action to support the garment industry including factory workers. It said: “We guaranteed payment for all orders already placed and in process of production and worked with financial institutions to facilitate the provision of loans to suppliers on favourable terms.”

Primark admitted it had been forced to cancel some orders during the pandemic when nearly all its shops had to close for a period of time. However, it said it had tried to support workers: “In April 2020, we established a wages fund in excess of £22m with the aim of supporting suppliers’ ability to pay their workers, and from which Bangladeshi suppliers with garment orders due to be handed over to us within 30 days of the cancellation would have received payment.”

A Tesco spokesperson said: “We are committed to fair and transparent partnerships throughout our supply chain, and we worked closely with our clothing suppliers to support them through the challenges of the pandemic. To ensure that they could continue to pay their workers fairly, we did not cancel any orders, did not penalise late deliveries, and honoured our payment terms in full.”

Aldi said the report had not recognised that the brand was split into two entirely separate businesses – Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud, which includes the UK chain, and so the responses did not give a clear picture of the latter’s behaviour.

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