Pets at Home is to spend up to £8 million stockpiling pet food and products as it becomes the latest business to step up plans for a hard Brexit.

In a trading update for the third quarter, the retailer said that, as Britain's EU divorce looms, it is looking at increasing its inventory holding.

"As we approach our financial year end and monitor the Brexit process, we may consider increasing our inventory holding by up to £8m," the company said.

The Herald:

Low-cost airline easyJet has revealed a £15 million hit from the drone chaos at Gatwick Airport last month which affected 82,000 customers.

The group said it booked £10m in extra costs and £5m in lost revenues after more than 400 of its flights were cancelled when the drone sightings brought Gatwick to a standstill just before Christmas.

Chief executive Johan Lundgren said the group "did everything we could to help our customers affected by the incident".

He added: "There has been a one-off cost impact from this incident, but underlying cost progress is in line with expectations.

"I am proud of the way our teams worked around the clock to mitigate the impact of the incident and looked after affected customers."

But Mr Lundgren said the incident was a "wake-up call" for airports.

In its first-quarter update, the group said it was "well prepared" for Brexit and had not seen an impact on passenger bookings ahead of March 29.

Public sector net borrowing, excluding state-owned banks, rose by £300m last month to £3 billion, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

Economists had expected net borrowing of £1.9bn.
The ONS said with the exception of the £2.7bn borrowed in December 2017, last month was the lowest December borrowing for 18 years.

Borrowing in the current financial year-to-date was £35.9bn, £13.1bn less than in the same period in 2017.

This is the lowest year-to-date figure for 16 years.