Dear listener,

Christmas is coming but Woolworths is going. And MFI has collapsed – again. Meanwhile shops throughout the land are struggling to reduce all their prices by 2.13% as VAT falls on Monday from 17.5% to 15%. So £14.95 DVDs will be repriced at £14.63, a sandwich and coffee meal deal will fall from £4.95 to £4.84, and that cashmere top which was a bargain at £27.50 will now cost £26.91. But will shops really reprice their goods away from comfortable price points ending in 0, 5, and 9? John Lewis says it will cut prices but take them down further to a price point. While DSG – owners of PC World and Currys – says that it will not reprice anything in the shop but will give a straight discount at the till. But will small retailers – cafés, gift shops, dry cleaners, hairdressers – be able to be as accommodating? Especially as the cost of reprogramming computers, changing prices, and altering cash tills has been estimated by the Treasury to cost British business £300m. Petrol and alcohol will cost the same as the duty is being raised to match the VAT cut. And most food is free of VAT anyway. So all in all, prices are unlikely to plummet on Monday.

*** ON MONEY BOX THIS SATURDAY ***

The chairman of the Financial Services Consumer Panel has resigned after six months in the post. Hear Lord David Lipsey tell us why he felt he had to go after he was refused more resources to protect consumers.

The detail of the Pre-Budget report – how it affects tax, National Insurance, VAT, tax bills, pensions, benefits – will be picked apart by our experts.

All houses and flats on sale in Scotland from Monday will have to have a Home Report – a fuller version of the Home Information Pack which has been compulsory in England and Wales since 2007. Will the new Scottish system avoiding the controversy that has dogged HIPs?

If you have been wondering anxiously when we would have another Pensions Act – it’s a year since the last one – then your wait is over. The Queen has just signed into law the Pensions Act 2008. It is the seventh in eleven years of this Labour government*. The minister in charge will tell us why another was needed.

About 320,000 people with money in Icesave should have got it back – or at least initiated the claims process – by now. But that doesn’t help the thousands with money in Icelandic banks in the Isle of Man or Guernsey who are no closer to getting their cash back. If they ever will.

And the new landscape (as the FSA calls it) of financial advice was set out this week. From the moral high ground of independent advice, down the muddy paths of sales advice and non-advised guided sales, to the plain of money guidance, the FSA’s retail managing director explains why this new terminology will make things clearer and better when it begins in 2012.

All that – but remember the number of items can go down as well as up – in Money Box on BBC Radio 4 Saturday at noon, repeated Sunday at nine. You can listen to all the items on all our programmes through our website. Money Box is available as a podcast you can download or subscribe to. And if you want to read what was said we publish a transcript every week by late Monday or early Tuesday.

Best wishes,

Paul

PS Don’t forget the programme taster on BBC Breakfast between quarter to nine and nine o’clock. If you miss it, you can watch it on the web. And if you missed last week’s - about replacement car costs - you can see it here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7743477.stm

You can also watch me on BBC News on 25 November 2008, talking about the pre-Budget report:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7748739.stm

And on Wednesday you can catch up with the latest news by watching Samantha Washington’s midweek money headlines on our website. Most recently: Income tax changes, child benefit boost and credit cards under fire: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7750641.stm

* Welfare Reform and Pensions Act 1999, Child Support Pensions and Social Security Act 2000, State Pension Credit Act 2002, Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003, Pensions Act 2004, Pensions Act 2007, Pensions Act 2008.

e-mail Paul Lewis