It's also not possible for foreign companies to own retail assets at the moment."Mr Blair and the other UK business leaders present at the talks will also urge Mr Singh to go further in relaxing restrictions on foreign investment. But foreign groups that sell multiple brands, such as supermarkets, are still not allowed to operate in India.Tesco has expanded rapidly overseas in recent years. They can now own 51 per cent of joint ventures set up with Indian partners. In January, Mr Singh eased rules for foreign retailers that sell only one brand - such as Nike. Mr Blair is expected to lobby particularly hard on behalf of supermarkets such as Tesco when he hosts the first high-level UK-Indian investment summit in London, organised by the government agency UK Trade and Investment (UKTI). India's retail market is the eighth-largest in the world and analysts expect it to double in value by the end of the decade. Tony Blair will this week urge the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, to relax laws stopping British companies doing business in his country.

There is nowhere to store surplus gas because Britain's storage facilities have been filled up to prepare for winter. And this autumn has so far been so mild that none of the winter supplies have been used - as a result, storage facilities are even fuller than usual.Hamblin-Boone says that as soon as this situation unravels - once pipeline testing is complete or the weather turns - the market will return to normal conditions. The typical household has faced at least five price increases in the past three years - the latest such rise was announced only last Friday, when Scottish & Southern Energy said it would put up gas and electricity bills by 12.2 and 9.4 per cent respectively.Despite such an apparently obvious incongruity, Scottish & Southern's Julian Reeves claims there is no contradiction between falling wholesale prices and rising household bills. "The prices we've been paying for the gas we supply today have been much higher," he says.British Gas, the market leader, is also hugely sensitive about accusations that it is profiteering - it refused to comment this week, referring questions to the Energy Retailers Association, the industry trade body.The ERA's Russell Hamblin-Boone says this week's dramatic fall in wholesale gas prices was nothing more than a "blip", brought about by an unusual set of circumstances.There has been a sudden surge in supply of gas, because a record-breaking new 746-mile pipeline from Norway to the UK is being tested at peak flow this week.

Try telling that to households facing gas bills 80 per cent higher today than in January 2004. It's a tough argument - particularly as the price of gas on the wholesale market, from where Britain's gas companies source their supplies for homes, fell to minus 5p on Tuesday. The market was so flooded that suppliers actually had to pay gas companies to take it off their hands. The fact that wholesale gas prices have been falling for months has not resulted in lower bills for consumers. Supporters of privatisation believe that once markets are opened up to competition, prices should fall as rivals fight to win a share of customer demand. That was certainly the theory when British Gas was privatised two decades ago.