Hobbs owner TFG appoints new chief product officer
Sally Ambrose will now be joining TFG with immediate effect, reporting to chief executive officer Justin Hampshire. In her new role, Ambrose has been tasked with overseeing all aspects of TFG's product and brands, including strategy, planning and execution. She will also be responsible for driving product development at Hobbs, Whistles and Phase Eight.
In a statement, Hampshire said Ambrose's appointment marks 'an exciting new chapter for TFG', with her 'deep understanding of our brands, customer-first mindset and proven ability to lead with creativity' making her the 'ideal person to shape the next stage of our product journey'.
Ambrose had been serving as product director for Hobbs for six years, where she was credited with delivering 'successful growth of the brand both in the UK and internationally'. Prior to Hobbs, she had held the role of head of buying for women's clothing and childrenswear at The White Company and had worked in a variety of buying-focused roles at Marks & Spencer.
In her own statement, Ambrose said she was thrilled to be stepping in as CPO, calling it a 'privilege to lead the exceptional teams' across the group's portfolio. She added: 'I am excited to build on the strong foundations to further grow our brands through distinctive, innovative, customer-focused product strategies.'
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Times
2 hours ago
- Times
HMRC made a mistake — but won't give us our £15k back
My mother died last year and I have been settling her estate with help from my brother-in-law. It was relatively simple: she had some investments and a mortgage-free house. But it has been time-consuming. Filling in all the paperwork took us an entire day, and we are professionals (he is an accountant and I am a retired judge). Even then we had problems because HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) gave us different information about what tax we should pay. After probate was granted in October, we spoke to two estate agents who estimated that the house was worth £550,000. We told HMRC this was the probate value and we also put it up for sale at that price. Several months later we ended up selling the house for £627,000. We sent a form to HMRC to correct the probate value to the sold price. We then calculated the inheritance tax (IHT) due as roughly £27,800 and immediately paid HMRC to avoid any interest charges. But then HMRC wrote to us to say that we should pay capital gains tax (CGT) instead. We were convinced that this advice was wrong, so we each called HMRC separately, but were both told that we should pay CGT. HMRC then sent a CGT calculation saying we owed £14,965, which we paid. We then asked HMRC to return the IHT payment. Twice we were told that the refund was in progress but that was weeks ago and we still don't have it. After chasing HMRC for a third time we were told that we should have paid IHT after all. It said an IHT calculation would be sent, but we are still waiting for that. We are so confused. We just want to pay the correct tax and get a refund on the other and address supplied I was so sorry to hear how painstaking the probate process had been for your family. It sounded emotionally and practically difficult enough without HMRC adding to your burden by giving you conflicting information. An estate is exempt from IHT on the first £325,000, which increases to £500,000 if the person who has died passes on their main home to children or grandchildren. Married couples and civil partners can leave assets to each other free of tax, and also inherit each other's tax-free allowances. Your father died in March 1990 when the IHT allowance was £118,000. But he had left this amount to you and your sisters on his death, which meant that his tax-free allowance had already been used up and could not be inherited by your mother. The good news is that even though he died before the residence allowance was introduced in 2017, your family could claim this extra £175,000 allowance from his estate because his wife had died after this date (yet another example of how complex the rules are). This meant that up to £675,000 of your mother's estate was free of tax. When her house was sold for £627,000 and combined with other taxable assets in her estate of nearly £117,000, she was put over the tax-free threshold by more than £69,000. IHT is charged at a rate of up to 40 per cent, leaving £27,800 to pay. If a property is sold for a lot more than the estimated value when you inherited it, HMRC might ask questions and expect you to pay extra tax. I spoke to Stefanie Tremain from the accountancy firm Blick Rothenberg who said that HMRC will usually get the district valuer, which is a government service, to review property valuations in an IHT return. • Will my partner pay tax on the property he inherits from me? Tremain said: 'If the value in the IHT return is accepted, a future sale value should not be queried or cause HMRC to revise the probate value.' But you had applied for a correction, essentially changing the estimated valuation to the price that the property was actually sold for. This meant that technically there had been no increase in the value of the property since you inherited it because you had corrected the value that should be used for the IHT calculation. CGT is charged if you make a profit when you sell a property that isn't your main home. When you inherit a property there is no CGT to pay. It is only when you sell the property at a later date, and it has increased in value since you inherited it, that CGT would be owed. When you changed the value of the property, HMRC was under the impression that the property had increased in value by £77,000 between you inheriting and selling it. After the tax-free allowance of £3,000 and other exemptions, such as estate agent and solicitor fees to sell the property, were deducted, CGT was charged at a rate of 24 per cent on the rest of the gain. Tremain said: 'If you have corrected the IHT return to increase the probate value of the house then you have increased the estate's IHT liability. 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You said: 'We never thought the problem was a particularly difficult one, but we were getting nowhere and would no doubt still be in limbo without your help.' • How to gift property — your questions answered In March last year my husband and I went on the holiday of a lifetime to Chile. We booked several internal flights through All was going well until we tried to check in for our flight from Patagonia to Santiago. It looked like our flight didn't exist. After logging into the airline's website, we discovered that the flight had been rescheduled and we had been reallocated to a flight for the previous day, so we had unknowingly missed it. There was no way we could have caught that flight as we had been hiking in a remote location. told me that it had sent me an email about the change but I have searched my inbox, including my junk folder, and I can't find any evidence that it contacted me about this. We were incredibly stressed when we found out. 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2 hours ago
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I'm about to go on an extended holiday – how do I make sure there isn't a mountain of work when I get back
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2 hours ago
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‘I wish I had never bought my Help to Buy flat — it's lost £40k'
If Connie Duxbury could go back in time, she never would have bought her Help to Buy flat. When Duxbury, 30, and her husband, Ollie, 31, were paying £1,500 in rent for a one-bedroom flat in Hammersmith in 2020, the Help to Buy scheme appeared to be a quick way onto the property ladder. It was created in 2013 to help aspiring first-time buyers own a home and allowed borrowers with at least a 5 per cent deposit to take a government loan, interest-free for five years, worth up to 20 per cent of the property's price (40 per cent in London). The idea was that because the government loan was interest-free, it would make owning much cheaper than renting. The scheme, which closed in March 2023, was only available on new-build homes. The Duxburys hoped to buy a flat, then sell after a couple of years and move to somewhere bigger. Instead, they have gone backwards. The two-bedroom flat in Croydon they bought five years ago for £390,000 — helped by a 25 per cent loan from the government — finally found a buyer in March for £352,000, after three years on the market and three price reductions. This came after a six-month delay to it being built, drainage problems that left sewage coming through the wall and cost £5,000 to fix, and two years fighting the block's management company to avoid a £20,000 a year service charge. While what they owe to the government has fallen from £97,500 to £88,000 in line with the fall in the property's value, they also owe £270,000 on their mortgage — almost as much as their original mortgage of £273,000. • Only '1 in 10 people under 44 can afford to buy a first home' They will lose all of the £19,500 deposit they used to buy the flat and, as they are selling for £6,000 less than they owed their mortgage lender and the government, they don't have enough savings left to buy another property — and will be forced back into renting. 'We thought we were doing what you were meant to do, which was save up, buy somewhere, sell it, make a little bit of a profit and move on,' said Duxbury, who works for an energy company. 'I'm actually looking forward to renting again, because I know that if something goes wrong it won't be up to us to pay to fix it. We would only buy somewhere if it was a house — I would never buy a flat again.' The couple will join thousands who used the government's £24.7 billion Help to Buy scheme only to see their flats fall in value. The government loan is at a fixed equity rather than value, meaning that if it lent you 20 per cent you will pay back 20 per cent of the value at the time of repaying, even if that is less money in actual terms because your property has fallen in value. If your property rises in value you will have to pay back more than the original loan. Some 11,452 flat owners in England have repaid their Help to Buy loans at a lower value than they borrowed — that's 35 per cent of the total 32,776 loans repaid between 2013-14 and the end of 2023-24. The figures were obtained in a freedom of information request to Homes England, the government agency that administered Help to Buy. The problem is getting worse. In 2015-16 only 6 per cent of the 716 government loans against flats were paid back at less than someone had borrowed, either when the buyer sold or remortgaged, but by 2024-25 the number had risen to 45 per cent of 5,173 repaid loans. The fall in value has been limited to flats. Over the same timeframe the proportion of Help to Buy houses where the loans were repaid at a lower value fell from 13 per cent to 3 per cent. This is the trend you would expect for houses, given the average UK property price has increased 53 per cent to £268,652 since January 2015. But the flat market has been stagnant over the past ten years, driven largely by the cladding scandal that followed the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 then the pandemic-induced race for space. In May 2017, the average semi-detached house sold for about £196,250 — 15 per cent more than the average flat, which went for about £171,000. By May this year, the average semi-detached house sold for about £270,500 — 36 per cent more than the average flat at about £198,250. Help to Buy flats have fared particularly badly. Some 16 per cent of all flats bought between 2013 and 2023 were sold at a loss, according to the estate agency Hamptons, less than half the proportion revealed by the Homes England figures. Sebastian O'Kelly from the advice charity the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership said the market for flats had become 'toxic' amid 'shocking revelations post-Grenfell of how badly some of them were built.' He said: 'As well as housebuilders letting down their customers, they have also diddled taxpayers, as we subsidised these purchases through Help to Buy.' • How 300,000 homeowners could cut their mortgage — for a fat fee Help to Buy ran for ten years and was used on 387,195 properties bought for a total of £109.2 billion. The loans were interest-free for the first five years and would be repaid either when a buyer sold, remortgaged or after 25 years. It was designed to encourage housebuilding and lending to first-time buyers with small deposits after the financial crisis. However, it has also been accused of pushing up house prices and enriching developers. According to the government spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, housebuilders built larger homes that they could sell for more because first-time buyers could borrow more money. A 2019 report from the watchdog found that the five largest housebuilders had built 50.4 per cent of all homes sold through Help to Buy. The scheme boosted their sales numbers more than 50 per cent, increasing their profits and share prices. Most homes sold through the scheme were houses, most of which have risen in value, and helped the Treasury turn an overall profit of about £1 billion on repaid loans. But about 80,000 were flats, largely in towns and cities such as Birmingham, Bristol, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Southampton. Across the scheme's duration, the average Help to Buy house owner's property had risen £33,666 (13.3 per cent) in value compared with what they paid for it when they repaid the loan, while the average flat owner made just £7,652 (2.8 per cent). A key factor in the poor market performance of flats is that Help to Buy was only available on new builds. These usually come with a premium of about 20 per cent because they have never been lived in — but the shine quickly wears off. The stagnant market for flats means many have never recovered from that initial dip in value. Worries over fire safety, problems selling and getting a mortgage on flats with cladding issues and expensive service charges have also hit their values. David Fell from Hamptons said: 'First-time buyer-friendly Help to Buy flats were disproportionately in bigger buildings that were more likely to have cladding or service charge issues than, say, a two-storey Victorian maisonette.' When Sam Balsdon bought her one-bedroom flat in Bristol for £158,500 in April 2017, she had no idea fire safety issues would leave her stuck there eight years later. Balsdon, 35, who works in customer services for an insurer, chose Help to Buy as she had few other options as a solo first-time buyer. Her flat wasn't perfect — the block has no parking and poor broadband access — but she loved it. That is until April 2020 when she discovered that the three-storey block of 20 flats had problems with its cavity barriers, a form of fire protection, and she was unable to get the flat valued to remortgage it. She had hoped to pay off her £31,700 Help to Buy loan at the same time as remortgaging. She tried again in April 2022, in the hope things had changed as her Help to Buy interest-free period was coming to an end, but with the same outcome. Even a quick-sale company (which will buy your property at a reduced price if you can't wait to sell) that offered £135,000 pulled out when it learnt it was a Help to Buy flat, as it did not want to deal with Homes England. Help to Buy owners must agree a valuation with Homes England before they can repay their loan or sell. • You can sell your home in days — but at what cost? 'That's when I really felt trapped,' Balsdon said. Since last October, she has rented out the flat for £1,100 a month, which loses her money after tax, mortgage payments and her £306 a month service charge, and has moved into her boyfriend's house until the issues are fixed and she can sell. She said: 'It makes me really sad. It was one of my proudest achievements to buy somewhere on my own, and it's just turned into one of the worst decisions I've ever made.' There tend to be fewer types of buyer for flats. While a house bought through Help to Buy might subsequently be bought by a family looking to upsize, flats tend to be favoured by first-time buyers — but since Help to Buy was only available on new flats, the resale potential was limited. Landlords who may have once been interested are also fewer in number due to tax changes and higher mortgage rates, which have made it harder to turn a profit. A third problem for sellers was that the market had been flooded by new flats over the past few years, according to Fred Jones, the chief executive of the quick-sale company Upstix. Flats bought earlier on in Help to Buy's lifetime, before safety standards were improved, might now be less attractive. Jones said: 'Many of these flats are in large developments where new units continue to come onto the market. This creates a high level of competition, particularly for those who bought a few years ago and are now trying to sell into a much more crowded landscape.' He said there had been a 'steady stream of inquiries' from owners of small flats looking to get rid. Many owners now face the unenviable choice of either being wiped out by selling at a loss, or staying put. The Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government (DHCLG) and the Home Builders Federation, which represents developers, said the figures were down to the performance of the wider housing market. 'There is no evidence that buying a property through Help to Buy has an impact on its overall value,' the DHCLG said.
