Wednesday newspaper round-up: Public sector pay, Lidl, TSB, Wework

Targeted increases in public sector pay are needed to enable the NHS, schools, the armed forces, the police, the civil service and prisons to hold on to and hire workers in the face of competition from the private sector, a thinktank has said. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that after a decade of wage restraint, the government now needed to respond to growing evidence of recruitment difficulties. - Guardian

Lidl is giving its UK staff a pay rise worth £10m with a higher hourly rate likely to propel it to the top of the supermarket pay league table. The retailer said 19,000 employees would get a pay rise in March when its hourly rate would move from £9 to £9.30 outside London and from £10.55 to £10.75 in the capital. The rises match the higher rate announced by the Living Wage Foundation – the charity which sets the voluntary measure – last week. The official minimum wage set by the government for Britons aged over 25 is £8.21. - Guardian

Spotting Eddie Stobart lorries: it’s a quintessentially British pastime. For outsiders, the public’s love of the green and white livery is something of a head scratcher - not unlike the pickle the Aim-quoted company has found itself in. Eddie Stobart Logistics is in a race against time to secure a rescue. A multimillion-pound accounting black hole has opened up. Half-year losses are at least £12m - they could be worse - and it is in dire need of investment. - Telegraph

The management of TSB has been severely criticised in a report into a disastrous attempt last year to switch 5.2 million customers on to a new banking system. The board of the British bank failed to sufficiently challenge the plans of Sabadell, its Spanish owner, to move the customers to a new platform over a single weekend in April and did not understand the scale of the project. - The Times

New York’s top prosecutor is investigating the owner of Wework, the beleaguered office space provider, amid concerns about the business dealings of its former boss. The We Company confirmed that it had been contacted by the office of Letitia James, the attorney-general of New York, but declined to comment about the nature of the investigation. - The Times