Wednesday newspaper round-up: BP, North Sea workers, City Link...

With crude prices set to register their worst annual slide since 2008, oil majors such as BP, Shell, Total and Chevron have all ordered sharp cuts in the rates paid to skilled contractors in the North Sea, according to the Financial Times. “The groups are cutting up to 15% of the pay of thousands of self-employed oil and gas workers in the region,” the paper says.

Thousands of City Link staff are expected to lose their jobs on Wednesday after Vince Cable declined to intervene in the collapse of the delivery company, The Telegraph reported. Although rival couriers said they were prepared to take on workers being made redundant. The publication said that EY is due to announce “substantial redundancies” on Wednesday morning, a week after City Link’s private equity owner, Jon Moulton’s Better Capital, appointed the firm as administrators.

Goldman Sachs’ senior staff have been labelled as the best-paid in the City after it emerged that over 120 bankers working in London shared payouts worth over £350m, writes The Times.

Figures from HungryHouse.co.uk have shown that Christmas Day orders for takeaway food in Britain were up 19% on last year, The Telegraph writes.

Nationwide figures showed that the rate of house-price inflation in the UK slowed sharply to just 1.1% over the final quarter of 2014, The Guardian says. “In more evidence of the rapidly cooling property market, three regions of the UK – north-west England, Yorkshire and Humberside, and Wales – recorded price declines in the final quarter of the year,” the paper writes.

Bob Ruddiman, one of the top energy lawyers in Scotland, has called on chancellor George Osborne to cut taxes for oil and gas companies “without delay”. However, he played down fears of a North Sea meltdown, saying: “Contrary to the hysterical claims by some pundits, the North Sea oil and gas industry is not going to end tomorrow.”