Millions of people in Britain risk falling off a financial cliff edge when they retire, the Pensions Commission has warned. At least 15 million people are not saving enough for post-work life – and new research has found that fewer than one in ten Brits will be able to afford a “comfortable” retirement.

How bad is the problem?
A “minimum retirement lifestyle” now costs £13,900 a year for a single person or £22,500 for a couple, according to latest calculations by Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Social Policy. A “moderate” lifestyle costs £32,700 or £45,400, and a “comfortable” lifestyle requires £45,400 or £62,700.

The state pension is roughly £12,550 a year, and about 82% of the current working population are putting aside enough to be able to reach the minimum retirement lifestyle. But only 23% will reach the moderate level, and 9% will enjoy a comfortable retirement. There is also a significant gender difference in private pension savings.

Why aren’t we better prepared?
Many people have a bad case of “present bias”: retirement is decades away but current expenses are immediate, so they prioritise today’s bills. Many don’t have the means to save into a private pension, and some find the whole system confusing. Automatic workplace pension enrolment became mandatory in 2018 but often excludes gig workers or those on lower wages. Just 4% of self-employed workers are saving for retirement, according to the Pensions Commission.

What can be done?
The government has faced calls to raise the legal minimum that employers must put into staff pensions under automatic enrolment. The statutory minimum workplace pension contribution is 8%, with 5% coming from the employee, and 3% from the employer.

The Pensions Commission will be making its recommendations early next year. But the independent body has already flagged that, to address the pensions gender gap, reforms to pensions policy and the labour market are needed, including improving access to childcare, an issue that disproportionately impacts mothers’ ability to work and save.

The billionaire owner of West Ham United has resigned as the football club’s co-chair to fight accusations by seven women of “sexually exploitative and predatory behaviour”. A joint investigation by The Times and the BBC’s “Panorama” uncovered claims that women were offered spots as “regular girls” in tabloid newspapers owned by David Sullivan (pictured above) if they agreed to have sex with him.

Sullivan “made a fortune from selling sex in the pre-internet world of adult magazines, films, telephone chat lines and newspapers filled with topless glamour models and teenage girls”, said the BBC, and became known as the “king of porn”.

In a statement released by West Ham following the investigation reports, the 77-year-old said he “categorically” denies all the allegations, which he characterised as “decades-old”, “factually incorrect and entirely false”.

‘Immoral earnings’
Sullivan grew up in South Wales, Essex and Hertfordshire, before being sent to boarding school aged 11. He was “short and shy”, said The Times, and “experimented” with business from an early age, selling football memorabilia to students. “I stopped being shy when I was 22 and started to earn money,” he later said. “Money gives you confidence.”

After studying economics at Queen Mary College in east London, and a short period working in advertising, he began selling “glossy prints” of topless models with university friend Bernard Hardingham. In 1973, both were charged with conspiring to publish and post obscene materials and fined £50.

“By 25, Sullivan was a millionaire, and decided to branch into films,” said The Guardian. “Come Play With Me” was the “first, and most successful”. In 1982, Sullivan was convicted of “living off the immoral earnings of prostitution from massage parlours” and was jailed for nine months, although he spent only 71 days in prison following an appeal. He has always maintained his innocence.

‘Mainstream’ success
Sullivan then turned to more “mainstream” publishing, founding the Sunday Sport in 1986, and then the Daily Sport five years later, said the BBC. His titles ran a “mixture of bizarre, lurid and salacious stories with a steady diet of topless glamour models on many pages”.

In 1993, Sullivan acquired a majority stake in Birmingham City, which was in administration, for £700,000. In 2010, having sold that stake, he bought West Ham, alongside David and Ralph Gold, who ran the Ann Summers sex toys and lingerie empire. He retains a 38.8% stake in West Ham, making him the club’s largest shareholder. 

In his resignation statement, he said he wanted to focus his “full energy and attention on fighting these false allegations”.

Crowds cheer Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping at the end of the Chinese president’s two-day state visit to North Korea, in a photo released by the state-run North Korean Central News Agency. The two leaders hailed their nations’ “unbreakable” bond during the rare summit.

KCNA / EPA / Shutterstock

Low-budget horror movie “Backrooms” has been generating “considerable buzz”, said Wallpaper. The unsettling directorial debut from 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons is based on a viral web series that he made as a teenager. The film earned $81 million (£60 million) in North America on its opening weekend, a new record for an original horror film. But it’s just the latest success in the genre of liminal horror, based on the unsettling feeling of “in-between” spaces.

The Shining, 1980
“One of the great classics of liminal horror”, this iconic film is “arguably one of the scariest” movies of all time, said SlashFilm. Much of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece centres on the “eerie emptiness” of the sprawling hotel that Jack (Jack Nicholson) and his family are looking after for the winter. The long, deserted corridors leading nowhere helped introduce the idea that emptiness “can, in itself, be a character”.

The Blair Witch Project, 1999
Possibly still the “greatest found-footage horror movie”, this low-budget film is another “excellent” example of liminal horror, said ScreenRant. The action follows three students who set out into the woods to document the mythical Blair Witch. Space stretches and the “never-ending woods that loop constantly create a suffocating atmosphere”.

Exit 8, 2025
Genki Kawamura’s liminal horror is based on a Japanese video game of the same name, said Dread Central. Set in the Tokyo subway, the busy commuter hub is transformed into an “endless purgatory” for the “perilous protagonist”. Brilliantly immersive and filled with a gnawing sense of dread, Kawamura’s film expertly makes the “innocuous subway tunnel feel like a layer of hell”. 

Justice is blind, but she is human. That’s why AI can never replace judges
Jonathan Sumption in The Telegraph
Judges will be piloting the use of AI but only “in the preparation of cases”, apparently, writes former senior judge Jonathan Sumption. Yet “where are we heading”? “Because it is useful”, AI’s “dangers and limitations” are “easy to overlook”. It doesn’t “have emotions” or a “moral conscience”, so lacks “one of the most basic qualities of a good judge: an ability to empathise with” people’s aspirations, failings and follies. The “work of a judge” is “an inherently human business”.

What Diana told me when Charles ‘arranged psychiatric help for her’
Jennie Bond in The i Paper
Newly released letters from Prince Diana to “her handsome actor friend” Terence Stamp capture her “funny, mischievous, complex and troubled personality”, writes former royal correspondent Jennie Bond. She was full of “light and laughter” but could be “incredibly frank” too. “Indignant” about rumours that she’d been sent to a psychiatrist, she once told me she was just “too sane” for royal life. “It was, I thought, a particularly astute comment. Life behind palace walls must often seem totally bonkers.”

The Book of JO’B
Michael Murphy in The Critic
“Radio pugilist” James O’Brien mistakes “journalism for exhibitionist incredulity at anything deviating from the liberal consensus”, writes Michael Murphy. JO’B enjoys “deploying abrasive sophistry” to make callers to his show “feel stupid”; it’s “the intellectual equivalent” of “masturbating in the mirror”. He’s “built a reputation, and career, on sucker punching amateurs”, but “history is already sitting in judgement on the liberal, multicultural, high immigration model of Britain” that he champions. He’s “becoming an anachronism in real time”.