HOWZAT

Such are the difficulties that some high street stores are experiencing that before very long Mr Weston might have been able to pick up such a portfolio piecemeal rather more cheaply.

But Primark is all about instant gratification: the latest fashions available hot off the catwalks at pocket-money prices.

It seems to be what customers want: sales were up 12 per cent at the half-year. Stuart Rose will not be able to produce numbers to match that tomorrow when he gives his update on trade at Marks & Spencer. With sales continuing to slip, all he can aim to do is to reassure investors that the problems in the group are gradually being brought under control.

Yesterday’s news, however, underlined the problems that he faces in trying to revive a massive retailer targeted at a middle market that seems to be disappearing. While Primark expands, Littlewoods is happy to be rid of its stores to concentrate on the growing home shopping market.

Underlining the delights of not being burdened with expensive high street property, ASOS, the internet retailer, reported that sales in the first quarter of the year were more than double that of a year earlier. With regular e-mails, the company tempts its male and female customers to kit themselves out in cheap copies of the outfits that might be photographed on soap stars as they pose for the tabloids.

It is a niche business, aimed at 18 to 34-year-olds. Its customers might also drop into Primark for a £10 skirt, but they will not be regular visitors to M&S.

Fine tuning

IN HIS review of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), Michael Barnes, its independent assessor, argues that it should be able to impose much bigger awards against erring firms. The £100,000 limit for awards that are binding on firms, but not on claimants, was inherited from earlier schemes and has not risen for ages.

If the Financial Services Authority agrees, however, it will face stiff resistance from advisers and insurers. Jonathan Davies of lawyers Reynolds Porter Chamberlain suggests that indemnity insurers will also set a £100,000 limit on cover.

The worm was turned by a High Court case where IFG Financial Services sought review of an ombudsman’s award. Mr Justice Burnton agreed that the award ran against English law but said this did not matter unless it was perversely unreasonable. In effect, there is no appeal. Like other officials, ombudsmen are not perfect. The FOS had 110,000 complaints last year, has nearly trebled its staff in five years and needs each adjudicator to resolve almost a case a day. Mistakes are inevitable. Giving more power to punish firms without accountability would be perverse.

• SADLY the mobile phone cannot churn out crisp £10 notes but it will soon be performing many of the other functions of the automatic telling machine. A joint venture between the operators of the Link cash machine network and the technology company Morse will bring banking to the handset. For Morse, the deal is seen as something of a triumph over its larger rivals in the field of systems development. It shows how far the company, and the technology, has come since Morse started out in 1983 retailing clunky IBM personal computers.

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