Morrisons is preparing to pull down the shutters on 100 loss-making convenience stores in a move that places hundreds of shop-floor jobs in jeopardy, with the Bradford-based grocer pointing the finger squarely at Labour’s tax and wage agenda for tipping the sites into terminal decline.

Britain’s fifth-largest supermarket said the shops, all of them legacy outlets from its 2022 rescue of collapsed convenience chain McColl’s, had been “challenged for a number of years” despite remedial action. The closures will be phased in over the coming months, with affected staff entering consultation.

In an unusually pointed statement, a spokesman for the group said the situation had been “exacerbated in more recent years by significant cost increases resulting from Government policy choices, which have made returning these stores to profitability even more difficult”. While bosses stopped short of naming specific measures, the timing leaves little room for ambiguity.

From 1 April, the National Living Wage rose by 50p to £12.71 an hour for those aged 21 and over, with the 18-to-20 rate climbing 85p to £10.85 and the apprentice rate up 45p to £8. Layered on top is last year’s increase in employer National Insurance contributions, which lifted the headline rate from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent and dragged the secondary threshold down from £9,100 to £5,000 — a double whammy that has fallen most heavily on retailers reliant on part-time labour.

The British Retail Consortium has warned that the combined hit added some £5bn to industry wage bills last year alone, and that as many as 160,000 retail roles could be lost over the next three years as employers re-engineer their cost base. Morrisons’ announcement is the latest data point in that grim arithmetic.

The McColl’s portfolio has proved a persistent thorn in chief executive Rami Baitiéh’s side. Morrisons paid roughly £190m to take the chain out of administration in May 2022, and almost immediately moved to shutter 132 of the worst-performing sites while converting the remainder to its Morrisons Daily fascia. The latest round of closures suggests that conversion alone has not been enough to fix the unit economics on a stubborn rump of stores.

It is also the third significant restructuring announcement from the grocer in recent months. Earlier this year, Morrisons confirmed it was closing 103 cafés, florists, pharmacies and Market Kitchens in a sweeping shake-up of in-store services, and last month staff were told the company was consulting on up to 200 head office redundancies at its Bradford headquarters as part of an artificial intelligence-driven productivity drive.

Despite the closures, Morrisons was at pains to stress that its convenience strategy is far from in retreat. The group still operates around 1,700 convenience stores alongside 497 supermarkets and employs roughly 95,000 people. It said it remained on the front foot when it came to opening “hundreds more” franchise convenience stores in the coming years, arguing that pruning the underperforming tail and bolting on capital-light franchise sites would leave its convenience estate “stronger overall”.

For SME owners watching from the sidelines, the message is sobering. When a £20bn turnover supermarket cannot make the numbers stack up on stores carrying its own brand, smaller independents operating on slimmer margins will be feeling the squeeze even more acutely. The Treasury’s own minimum wage uplift, unveiled in last autumn’s Budget, was billed as a pay rise for the lowest earners; for many small employers, it has become a stress test of their viability.

The Department for Business and Trade has been approached for comment.

Read more:
Morrisons to shut 100 convenience stores as supermarket blames Labour’s ‘policy choices’ for rising costs

British families planning a getaway this summer could find the cost of flying creeping up again, after it emerged that Treasury officials are quietly drawing up plans for a £1bn VAT raid on the fees airports charge airlines, a move the industry has branded a stealth tax on holidaymakers and exporters alike.

The proposals, being worked up inside HMRC, would impose the standard 20 per cent rate of VAT on top of the per-passenger charges levied by airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester for the use of runways, terminals and ground services. Those fees are almost always passed straight through to passengers in the ticket price, meaning the burden would land squarely on travellers and the small and medium-sized businesses that depend on affordable air travel to reach overseas customers.

At Heathrow, where the regulated charge currently sits at around £24 a head, the change would add close to £5 to the cost of every passenger — before a single penny of Air Passenger Duty, fuel surcharge or booking fee has been added. The official APD rates published by HMRC already range from £15 to £106 for an economy seat depending on distance, and rose again from April under increases pencilled in at the Autumn Budget.

A retrospective sting

What is alarming airlines and airports most is not just the prospect of a new levy, but the possibility that Whitehall might backdate it. Industry sources tell Business Matters that ministers are exploring whether to apply the charge as far back as four years, the maximum permitted under current legislation, generating an immediate windfall for the Exchequer running to around £1bn from Heathrow alone.

Heathrow generated £1.13bn in revenue from passenger charges last year, while Gatwick reported £607m and Manchester Airports Group, owner of Manchester and Stansted, recorded £470m. Factoring in smaller hubs, the total VAT take could comfortably top £1.5bn, although officials have yet to clarify whether the tax would bite on both outbound and inbound legs.

One airline industry insider described the plan as “a stealth tax on families at a time when the cost-of-living crisis means many people are already struggling to afford a holiday”. The warning lands alongside fresh evidence that Britons are already tightening their belts on travel, Barclays data recently showed holiday spending falling for the first time since the pandemic as cost-of-living and Iran conflict fears bite.

Reeves giveth, HMRC taketh away

The disclosure could hardly come at a more awkward moment for the Chancellor. Even as her officials sharpen the pencil on aviation VAT, Rachel Reeves was on her feet in the Commons unveiling a £1bn cost-of-living package designed to take the sting out of the school summer holidays.

From 25 June to 1 September, theme parks, zoos, museums, cinemas, soft play centres and theatres will charge a reduced 5 per cent rate of VAT in place of the usual 20 per cent. Children’s meals are included in the cut, which the Treasury values at £300m. The Government claims the measure will shave £20 off a theme-park day out for a family of four, £1.50 off cinema tickets and £2 off a family meal.

Fuel duty will be frozen for the rest of the year, free bus travel will be offered to children throughout August, and import taxes have been trimmed on a basket of staple foods. The energy-intensive chemicals and ceramics sectors, meanwhile, will share a £470m lifeline aimed at protecting jobs in some of the country’s most exposed manufacturing hubs.

Ms Reeves told MPs the package would be paid for by raising “hundreds of millions of pounds a year” from oil and gas majors such as BP and Shell, with the Office for Budget Responsibility due to assess the impact at the autumn fiscal event. Broader support on household energy bills was held in reserve, with the Chancellor signalling that targeted help would follow in the autumn “if bills continue to rise”.

The hospitality and visitor economy were quick to welcome the move. Fiona Eastwood, chief executive of Merlin Entertainments, which operates Alton Towers and Legoland, confirmed the discounted rate would apply to both admission tickets and children’s meals. Kate Nicholls, chair of UKHospitality, said it was “the quickest and simplest way to lower prices and boost consumer confidence”.

Aviation cries foul

The aviation sector, however, is in no mood to applaud. An Airlines UK spokesman said: “The UK is already one of the most overtaxed aviation markets in the world and, as the cost burden increases, we risk becoming even more uncompetitive. The only people cheering a move like this would be those running rival airports overseas.”

Industry analysis backs the point. The Office for Budget Responsibility already forecasts APD will raise close to £5bn a year by the end of the decade, while Airlines UK research suggests mandatory taxes can account for as much as half the price of an off-peak short-haul ticket. Bolting VAT on to airport charges would compound a tax burden that low-cost carriers say is already pushing routes, and the SME-friendly connectivity that comes with them, into mainland Europe.

Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, was blunter still: “Any additional tax on aviation is a tax on doing business, a brake on exports or an attack on hard-working families. No government on the side of growth would indulge this idea.”

The proposals may also collide with international aviation rules, which broadly exempt airfares from VAT. Heathrow is understood to be taking specialist tax advice, while one industry source characterised the work inside HMRC as a “fishing trip” by officials looking for new revenue. “It’s a very technical conversation, with HMRC trying to work out if they can capture additional tax revenue,” the source said. “The question is whether it’s going to move forward and, if it does, whether it is going to hit passengers.”

What it means for SMEs

For Britain’s small and mid-sized businesses, the stakes are real. Air freight, sales travel and trade-show attendance all sit downstream of airport economics, and any uplift in landing charges feeds quickly into per-trip costs. It is also the second time in twelve months that the regulator has tangled with the Heathrow pricing model, earlier this year Heathrow was forced into a bigger cut of passenger landing fees by the Civil Aviation Authority, capping charges below the level the airport had sought.

Airports are unlikely to absorb a new VAT charge in-house. Heathrow has been lobbying loudly for measures to restore competitiveness, including the reinstatement of VAT-free shopping for international visitors, warning that the UK is losing ground to European rivals on tax. Adding a fresh 20 per cent layer to its core regulated charge would, the airport believes, run directly counter to the Government’s own growth narrative.

A government spokesman insisted there was no formal policy change in train, telling reporters: “The Government is not considering any changes to tax rules in this area. HMRC routinely engage businesses on how existing tax rules are being applied.”

That is unlikely to settle nerves in boardrooms in West London or aboard the airlines. For now, families booking summer flights can enjoy a temporary VAT cut at the theme-park turnstile, but the smart money in the aviation lobby is on a rather chillier autumn at the airport check-in desk.

Read more:
Labour eyes £1bn VAT raid on airport charges in stealth blow to family holidays

Britain’s largest online retailer has waded into one of the most uncomfortable debates in Westminster and the boardroom: who, exactly, is to blame for almost a million young people sitting outside the labour market?

The answer, according to Amazon’s UK country manager John Boumphrey, is not the young people themselves.

In a candid interview with the BBC’s Big Boss series, Boumphrey said the prevailing narrative that Generation Z lacks motivation, resilience or grit simply does not square with what his managers see on the warehouse floor. “We have to stop blaming young people,” he said, arguing that the education system is no longer “producing young people who are ready for work”.

Coming from the man who runs an operation employing 75,000 people across roughly 100 UK sites — half of them recruited straight out of school, college or unemployment — the intervention will sting employers who have spent the past 18 months grumbling about a “soft” younger workforce.

A million reasons to pay attention

The numbers behind Boumphrey’s comments are sobering. Almost a million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK are now classified as NEET — not in education, employment or training — a figure that has hovered uncomfortably close to seven-figure territory for more than a year, according to the Office for National Statistics. At the same time, the headline unemployment rate ticked up to 5 per cent in the three months to March, from 4.9 per cent a month earlier.

For SME owners, who account for the lion’s share of first jobs in Britain, the picture is grimmer still. Hospitality has retrenched, graduate schemes have thinned and entry-level vacancies in retail have collapsed, leaving fewer of the rungs school leavers traditionally use to climb into work. Business Matters has tracked the trend through the year, including in our recent report on how the NEET rate is closing in on the one-million mark.

Boumphrey’s argument is that the diagnosis matters. “I think too often you read about young people that somehow they lack motivation, they lack resilience, they lack the will to develop skills,” he said. “That is not our experience. We work with some individuals who are probably furthest from work and that’s where we actually see the biggest transformation.”

The case for compulsory work experience

His proposed remedy is unfashionably practical: make a stint of work experience mandatory for every over-16 in the country.

He argues that even a single week on a real shop floor, in a logistics hub or in an office teaches the soft skills schools struggle to deliver. “If you get a T-level student, they come in for a week, they understand the value of teamwork, of communication and problem solving,” he said. “It’s not a motivation problem, it’s a system problem, and that requires a system response.”

The T-level itself, introduced in 2020 and structured around a mandatory industry placement of at least 315 hours, has been quietly absorbed by larger employers but remains a foreign concept to many smaller firms. As Business Matters has set out before, T-levels carry real upside for SME employers willing to host a placement, not least because they create a low-risk pipeline of pre-trained recruits.

The Amazon paradox

The irony, Boumphrey concedes, is that his own business cannot find enough of the workers it needs. Amazon has just over 100 premises in the UK, including 30 fulfilment centres, and is on course to add several more on the back of its £40bn UK expansion programme. Yet roles built around its newer robotic infrastructure — mechatronics engineers, robotics technicians, maintenance specialists — sit stubbornly unfilled.

“When Amazon introduced robots into its warehouses there was some concern they would replace people,” he said. “Actually, the reverse happened. We ended up employing more people. Mechatronics engineers, people who can actually maintain the robots, people who are technicians, they’re not roles that exist. We can’t find enough people to fill those roles.”

His proposed fix is regional and collaborative: business, local authorities and further education colleges sitting around the same table to map skills gaps in each travel-to-work area, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all national curriculum.

Tax, scale and the political subtext

The Amazon UK boss could hardly avoid the perennial question of tax, given the group’s scale and its political profile. He claimed the company contributed “more than £5.8bn” in the UK last year and insisted Amazon pays “all the tax we’re meant to pay”. The wider contribution, he argued, must also be measured in the 75,000 jobs the company underwrites.

Amazon now accounts for roughly 30 per cent of all online sales in the UK and, earlier this year, overtook Walmart as the world’s largest company by annual revenue. That scale gives Boumphrey a louder microphone than most when he tells policymakers and fellow employers that the country’s youth jobs problem is structural, not generational.

For SME owners watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is uncomfortable but useful. The labour market is not short of young people who want to work. It is short of pathways that prepare them to do so — and, increasingly, short of employers prepared to build those pathways themselves.

Read more:
Blame the system, not the school leavers for youth unemployment, says Amazon’s UK boss

After years of quiet desperation in Stoke-on-Trent, the kilns finally have something to celebrate. The government has unveiled a £120 million support package for the UK ceramics industry, ending a prolonged lobbying campaign by manufacturers and trade bodies who had warned that one of Britain’s oldest industrial sectors was being allowed to slip away.

The funding, announced by business secretary Peter Kyle alongside chancellor Rachel Reeves, is split evenly: £60 million in capital grants to help manufacturers invest in new equipment, energy efficiency and decarbonisation, and a further £60 million to ease the punishing operational costs that have brought several household names to their knees. Eligible firms across refractory products, clay building materials, household ceramics and technical ceramics will be able to apply when the scheme opens later this summer, according to the official announcement from the Department for Business and Trade.

For Rob Flello, chief executive of trade body Ceramics UK, the package is vindication of a campaign that has at times felt like shouting into a void. He said he was “delighted” with the decision, calling it “a fantastic recognition of the importance of the UK ceramics industry,” and confirmed that Ceramics UK had been asked to work directly with civil servants on the scheme’s design and delivery.

“We’ve got manufacturers that have been around for many hundreds of years,” Flello added. “We want to have manufacturers that are around for the next few hundred years. It’s really about making sure this money is spent wisely and well, and achieves the maximum potential it can.”

He conceded the funding had come too late for some firms, but said it had been “long fought for” and represented a hard-won breakthrough after sustained lobbying.

A sector hit by every conceivable headwind

The relief, while substantial, lands on an industry that has been battered by an unusually brutal cocktail of pressures. Gas accounts for roughly 90 per cent of the energy consumed in ceramics production, a structural reliance that has left the sector painfully exposed to the price shocks triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Previous government support targeted largely at electricity bills, manufacturers complain, has offered only marginal relief.

That frustration has been simmering for some time. Earlier this year, the trade union GMB publicly criticised the design of the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme, arguing that ceramics and brickmaking had been overlooked in favour of electricity-intensive industries — a perceived snub that galvanised the lobbying effort behind the new package.

The damage of the past few years is visible across north Staffordshire. The number of ceramics firms in the area has fallen from 137 in 2018 to 123 in 2024, according to research commissioned by Stoke-on-Trent City Council and compiled by Kada and Ortus Economic Research. Denby Pottery in Derbyshire entered administration earlier this year, citing rising energy and labour costs; manufacturing at the site ceased in April with the loss of more than 100 jobs. Royal Stafford has also collapsed. Moorcroft, the storied Stoke-on-Trent maker, only survived after being rescued by its founder’s grandson last year.

Iain Martin, chief executive of Emma Bridgewater, whose own business has absorbed a £1.4 million loss against the backdrop of soaring input costs, described the announcement as “positive” after a long run of bad news.

“We’re very grateful for any support we can get,” he said. The industry, he added, had faced “quite severe headwinds in the past few years” around energy costs, labour costs and competition from overseas. “This represents a very welcome support from the government, which I think the whole industry will be very pleased with.”

He noted that “significant British brands” had “fallen over” in recent times. “There are 120 brands left and we have a future,” he said. “The money can’t come soon enough really.”

Why Whitehall blinked

The political calculation behind the funding is not difficult to read. Rachel Reeves and Peter Kyle have framed the package as part of a wider commitment to economic resilience and to safeguarding the industrial base that supplies sectors regarded as strategically critical.

“At a time of global uncertainty it’s never been more important to ensure Britain’s resilience and back the industries our country depends on,” Kyle said. “This funding will support thousands of jobs and put businesses on a secure footing for the long term.”

Reeves echoed the point, noting that “the chemicals and ceramics industries underpin our economic resilience and support skilled jobs across the UK.” The wider announcement also included £350 million for the chemicals sector, reflecting concern in the Treasury that energy-intensive manufacturing in Britain has been quietly losing ground to European rivals.

The research commissioned by Stoke-on-Trent City Council made the case bluntly: ceramics is a “vital component” of supply chains across aerospace, defence, clean energy and electronics. Advanced and technical ceramics, sanitaryware and refractory products have seen net company worth rise since 2018, with supply chain turnover up 35 per cent between 2018 and 2024 — a reminder that, properly supported, this is far from a sunset industry.

The campaign to secure the support extended well beyond Westminster. The GMB had previously pushed ministers to showcase UK pottery in British embassies worldwide, a piece of soft-power advocacy that helped keep the sector’s plight on the political agenda.

What happens next

Attention now turns to the detail. Flello and Ceramics UK will spend the coming weeks working with officials on the application process, the eligibility thresholds, and how the £60 million capital pot will be apportioned between firms still investing for the long term and those simply trying to keep the lights on.

The mood among manufacturers remains cautious. Few in Stoke-on-Trent believe £120 million alone solves a problem that has been a generation in the making, and structural questions about UK industrial gas pricing remain unresolved. But for the first time in several years, the country’s ceramics industry has reason to believe it has been heard.

“I’m really delighted for the industry,” said Flello. “I can’t wait to get sleeves rolled up and work out how we’re going to spend it.”

Read more:
Potters win £120m rescue as government finally backs Britain’s ceramics heartland

The founder of 4Networking lost a £2 million business in an afternoon, then spent four years being smeared online by a woman he had met for 30 seconds.

In an unflinching conversation with Richard Alvin, he describes the four seconds that nearly ended it all, and the platform failures he now wants the next Secretary of State to put right.

There is a moment, about twenty minutes into our conversation, when Brad Burton goes very still. We are talking about the period in 2022 when his business had collapsed, his stalker was posting fifteen lies a day across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and X, and the platforms were responding to his complaints with cut-and-paste boilerplate. He is sitting at his desk in Somerset, the same desk he sat at then.

“Four seconds,” he says. “For four seconds, I thought I can’t do this anymore.” He pauses. “Luckily those four seconds happened when I was sat at my desk, as in another setting the outcome might have been different, either way it motivated me to go to the doctors and get some antidepressants. Hadn’t done them for 25 years. That just shows you how severe this was.”

It is a remark, delivered in the matter-of-fact Salford cadence familiar to anyone who has ever booked Burton for a keynote, that reframes the whole interview. Britain’s self-styled “number one motivational speaker”, the man who built 4Networking from a £25,000 debt and a pile of pizza delivery sheets in 2006 into the country’s largest face-to-face business network — was, on his own admission, four seconds from a very different ending.

We had sat down for the latest edition of the ‘In Conversation Podcast’ to talk about three things, all of them, in his view, urgent for anyone running a small business in 2026: how you rebuild when turnover goes to zero with no playbook; what happens when the professional platform you have anchored your reputation to stops protecting you; and what resilience, mental, financial, reputational, actually looks like on the other side. They proved to be the same story.

From £2.3 million to nought in a single afternoon

The first collapse was televised. On 20 March 2020, with 4Networking turning over £2.3 million a year at its peak and running 5,000 face-to-face breakfast meetings in Premier Inns and Brewers Fayre up and down the country, Boris Johnson told the country to stay at home.

“When you’re running 5,000 networking meetings in Brewers Fayres and Holiday Inn Expresses up and down the land, that’s a problem,” Burton says, with characteristic understatement. The original assumption that “this will be a short pause, we’ll be back”, turned into a “dance of the seven veils”, a fortnightly extension that he believes did more damage than honesty would have.

Burton’s response was to invoke what he calls his 24/24/24 framework. “If I can’t make a decision in 24 seconds, revisit in 24 minutes. If after 24 minutes I can’t make a decision, I revisit in 24 hours. If after 24 hours I can’t make a decision, I’ve just made a decision, it’s not important. Next.” Within days, 4Networking had become the first network in the country to move wholesale onto Zoom, under the banner 4N Online. He calls it “drawing a picture of a sandwich when you’re hungry”, a holding measure rather than a substitute. He exited the company in 2022.

That should have been the story: a textbook British SME pivot, a clean founder exit, a man in his early fifties moving on to keynotes and books. It was not.

Thirty seconds at Aston Villa

In January 2019, at one of Burton’s personal development events at Aston Villa Football Club, a woman in an audience of around 200 was introduced to him by a mutual contact and asked for a selfie. The exchange lasted less than a minute. Her name was Sam Wall.

A year later, with Britain locked down and Burton’s identity as the country’s networking-in-chief evaporating in real time, Wall began posting on social media. The first post was vague; the second referenced “a high-profile speaker”; the third named him. Within days she had 30,000 LinkedIn followers, more than Burton’s own, and was alleging he had given her death threats, poisoned her cat, slashed her tyres and put a tracker on her car. Burton was 200 miles away in Somerset throughout lockdown.

“I was 200 miles away in lockdown and being accused of poisoning her cat — and Linkedin did nothing”

“People don’t do checks and measures on social media,” he says. “It was a modern-day witch hunt. I was guilty until proven innocent.” A cease-and-desist letter, served at a cost of £3,000, was promptly photographed and posted to her feed beneath the caption: “I’m not allowing this guy to bully me into submission.” Supporters cheered her on. Speaking engagements began to be quietly cancelled. Family members were drawn in.

The legal road, when he finally took it, was as slow as it was bruising. A statement given at Taunton police station vanished from the system. Wall was arrested, bailed for 30 days, “30 days of peace”, and resumed her campaign, in Burton’s recollection, “30 days and 10 minutes later”. She forged what purported to be a stalker protection order against him and posted it online. She wrote a 22,000-word article about him on LinkedIn. By his own count, she made roughly 500 posts about him across the major platforms over four years.

In March 2025, the case finally reached a national audience. BBC Panorama broadcast My Online Stalker, presented by Darragh MacIntyre, with Burton and the Manchester tech entrepreneur Naomi Timperley as its central voices. Channel 4’s Social Media Monsters followed with a second-episode treatment of the same case. ITV covered the sentencing. In October 2025, at Minshull Street Crown Court, Sam Wall was jailed for 28 months for what Judge Neil Usher described as a “prolonged, deliberate and calculated” campaign and an “unrelenting barrage” that was “breathtaking” in its scope.

Burton’s case is one of the fewer than two per cent of stalking complaints in this country that result in a conviction.

“There is no leadership at LinkedIn”

It is the response of the platforms, and one platform in particular, that animates him now. Wall’s LinkedIn account, as of publication, remains live, and so does much of the content she posted about him. Business Matters has previously reported on the mounting pressure on LinkedIn to act.

“We contacted LinkedIn legals. We contacted support. We tagged in everybody,” Burton says. “Not a single piece of content came down. We had people from America come on Zoom calls, they wouldn’t even turn the cameras on, saying, ‘She’s not doing anything illegal.’ I said, ‘What happens if she gets convicted?’ They said, ‘If she gets convicted, do let us know and we’ll see what we can do.’ So guess what? We let them know. They did nothing about it.”

Top-tier legal advice, he says, surfaced a structural problem: LinkedIn hides behind European law jurisdictionally rooted in Ireland and corporate decision-making rooted in California. “They’ve got this double moat. Nobody wanted to champion it.” Reporting Wall’s account, by design, blocked the reporter from her output rather than removing it. “That’s not a solution.”

If he had ten minutes with the Secretary of State and LinkedIn’s UK MD, what would he ask for? “Imagine if on your platform, I called you this, and I said this about your family. Would you ignore it and block me? Or would you make some changes and get me off the platform? That is exactly what should have happened here. Your business is people, and that’s the bit that’s been lost.” He goes further: there is, he says, “no leadership” at the UK level. “Nobody stepped forward and said, ‘I’m the UK managing director. I’m going to sort this crap.'”

It is a critique that lands at a moment when the regulatory tide is turning. The Online Safety Act is reshaping platform obligations in the UK, and stalking prosecutions, although still woefully low against a high base of reported offences, are at a record high. Burton’s case is the gap between the law and its enforcement made flesh.

Building the antidote

What Burton always does, and is doing again, is build. His new venture, Motivational Business Network, has opened for paid membership at £75 a month, vetted, deliberately slow, and capped at the kind of room size where, as he puts it, “you go and put yourself in a room with 50 people who are on side and positive, and tell me that’s a waste of time.”

The product cue is something called Shine: every member receives 100 daily “Shine points” they can award to others for genuine help, the awards visible on a member’s profile as social proof. “When everyone’s shouting, no one’s listening,” he says. “We’ve got to start getting quieter. We’ve got to start talking again. Less AI, more human.”

He pauses, the Salford grin back in place. “When I built 4Networking, it was a wobbly Jenga tower. This time we’re building it slow, methodical. No rush. Let’s get it right, not right now, which goes 100 per cent against everything I’ve ever done.”

For a man who came within four seconds of a different outcome, “right, not right now” sounds less like a strapline and more like a hard-won operating principle. British business, and the platforms that profess to serve it, would do well to take the note.

Read more:
Brad Burton interview: how the UK’s no.1 motivational speaker rebuilt after lockdown wiped out 4Networking, and survived a four-year online stalking campaign

The Government’s headline-grabbing summer VAT giveaway has been dismissed as politically convenient window-dressing by the head of the UK’s night-time economy trade body, who argues that the country’s clubs, festivals and live music venues have once again been left to fend for themselves.

Michael Kill, chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA), launched a withering critique of the Great British Summer Savings scheme unveiled by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, which slashes VAT from 20 per cent to 5 per cent on a narrow band of family attractions, including theme parks, zoos, museums, children’s cinema tickets and kids’ meals, between 25 June and 1 September. The cut, ministers say, is designed to help households afford summer days out and bolster the hospitality sector through its peak trading window.

For an industry that has watched roughly a third of the country’s nightclubs disappear since 2017, however, the measure looks less like a lifeline and more like a snub. The full details of the chancellor’s family-focused VAT package made no mention of the late-night venues, festivals or grassroots music spaces that have been pleading for sector-wide tax relief for the better part of a decade.

“The Government’s latest VAT announcement is not just a missed opportunity, it is a glaring example of short-term thinking and a fundamental misunderstanding of the UK’s leisure and cultural economy,” Kill said. “While positioning this as support for families, the policy completely overlooks and effectively sidelines the night-time economy, including festivals, clubs, live music venues and late-night cultural spaces that have been fighting to survive under relentless financial pressure.”

A backbone, not a footnote

Kill’s frustration is rooted in hard numbers. NTIA data shows the UK lost roughly 1,940 licensed clubs between 2015 and 2025, a 26 per cent decline, while 26 per cent of British towns that previously had at least one nightclub now have none at all. Industry research published earlier this year warned that, without urgent intervention, Britain risks losing 10,000 late-night venues and 150,000 jobs by 2028.

The festival circuit is faring little better. More than 40 UK festivals were scrapped in 2024, with a similar tally lost in 2025 and a fresh wave of 2026 cancellations, including Red Rooster, Stone Valley South and WestworldFest, already announced as operators buckle under soaring production costs, post-pandemic debt and softer ticket sales.

“These businesses are not peripheral, they are the backbone of the UK’s global cultural reputation and a critical driver of jobs, tourism and economic activity,” Kill argued. “For years, we have consistently lobbied for a fair and meaningful reduction in VAT across hospitality, live events and cultural experiences. Instead, what we have been given is a narrow, temporary measure that cherry-picks certain activities while leaving the rest of the sector to absorb rising costs, punitive tax burdens and ongoing instability.”

The trade body has repeatedly pressed Treasury ministers for a permanent VAT cut from 20 to 10 per cent across hospitality and the cultural sector, a campaign that has gathered momentum after a string of nightclub closures prompted renewed calls for action.

Squeezed at every turn

Operators say the picture on the ground is bleak. April’s business rates reforms removed the 40 per cent Hospitality, Leisure and Night-Time Relief, pushing the typical rates bill for a £100,000 rateable-value venue from £28,800 to roughly £43,000. Combined with higher employer National Insurance contributions, a steeper National Living Wage and double-digit increases in utilities, the cumulative cost burden has tipped many otherwise viable businesses into the red.

A recent New Statesman investigation into the policies killing Britain’s nightlife painted a similarly grim picture, charting how successive Westminster decisions, from licensing reform to tax tinkering, have hollowed out the cultural infrastructure of British towns and cities.

“Festivals are being squeezed to breaking point. Grassroots venues are closing at an alarming rate. Clubs and late-night operators are facing unsustainable operating conditions,” Kill said. “And yet, once again, they have been completely sideswiped by policy that claims to support leisure and participation.”

A test of credibility

The political calculation behind the Great British Summer Savings scheme is straightforward. A targeted, family-friendly cut delivers a punchy headline, plays well with voters facing another stretched school holiday and concentrates the Treasury’s fiscal firepower on a tightly bounded window. The trouble, as Kill sees it, is that such tactical interventions cannot substitute for a coherent strategy.

“This is not just short-sighted, it is economically reckless,” he warned. “You cannot claim to support the visitor economy, regional growth and cultural output while actively ignoring the sectors that deliver it at scale. If the Government is serious about growth, it must stop delivering piecemeal, headline-driven interventions and start engaging with the full reality of the industries it relies on. That means meaningful VAT reform, long-term policy stability and a commitment to supporting the entire ecosystem, not just the parts that are politically convenient.”

Until then, Kill concluded, the summer VAT cut “will be seen for what it is: a superficial fix that fails the very industries it should be backing.”

For SME operators across hospitality and the cultural economy, the message from Whitehall is becoming uncomfortably familiar. The headline is generous; the small print is not.

Read more:
Nightlife chief brands Chancellor’s summer VAT cut a ‘superficial fix’ that abandons clubs and festivals

The Treasury faces the unenviable task of plugging a shortfall of up to £33bn after ministers conceded that the latest reset of HS2 has driven the embattled rail project’s bill towards a staggering £102bn, leaving the chancellor with little choice but to raid other budgets, raise taxes, or both.

Analysis of the Department for Transport’s revised plans for the London-to-Birmingham line, published in the wake of transport secretary Heidi Alexander’s bruising statement to the Commons on Tuesday, suggests Whitehall will need to find between £18bn and £33bn of additional public money before the end of the current spending review period. For Britain’s beleaguered small and medium-sized businesses, many of whom were promised that HS2 would unlock regional growth and faster supply chains, it is yet another reminder that the country’s record on delivering major infrastructure remains, to put it mildly, patchy.

Alexander did not mince her words at the despatch box. She branded the line, originally intended to whisk passengers between London Euston and central Birmingham in under 50 minutes, an “over-specced folly” and accused her Conservative predecessors of needlessly gold-plating a scheme that has already swallowed £44bn of taxpayers’ cash over its 17-year existence. According to the official update delivered to Parliament, the first trains will not now run before 2036 at the earliest, with services into central London delayed until at least 2040, meaning construction will have stretched across more than a quarter of a century by the time the project is complete.

It is the sixth major reset HS2 has endured in just 13 years. The latest came after the so-called Stewart Review, commissioned by Labour shortly after it entered government in 2024, lifted the lid on what its author described as a “litany of failures” inside the Department for Transport and arms-length body HS2 Ltd, where management had been allowed to “spiral out of control”. The Institution of Civil Engineers’ assessment of the Stewart Review painted a damning picture of weak governance, optimism bias and a procurement strategy that left contractors holding too few of the risks, the sort of failings that any seasoned SME owner would recognise as fatal in their own business.

The numbers tell their own grim story. Officials now expect the line to cost as much as £36bn more than the previous official estimate, on top of the £25bn of additional taxpayer cash already earmarked at last year’s spending review. That leaves between £18bn and £33bn of unfunded spending sitting awkwardly on the Treasury’s books, money which will either have to come from fresh tax-and-spend measures, from cuts to other cash-strapped departments, or, most likely, from a combination of both. Sources familiar with the matter tell Business Matters that ministers have ruled out additional borrowing on the scale needed to plug the gap, fearful of breaching the government’s self-imposed fiscal rules.

For now, Whitehall insists the Treasury’s current envelope, which covers all public spending up to 2029-30, absorbs every penny HS2 requires this decade. The pain will instead be felt at the next spending review, when chancellor Rachel Reeves – or her successor – will have to decide which other priorities give way. Whether that means leaner settlements for schools, hospitals and policing, or whether the burden falls on business and household taxes, will be the defining fiscal battle of the late 2020s. Ms Reeves had previously hoped to anchor her growth strategy on a £92bn transport investment programme, much of which is now at risk of being crowded out by HS2’s voracious appetite for capital.

It also raises uncomfortable questions about the credibility of the cost figures that have been presented to Parliament over the past decade. The same Whitehall machinery that signed off on earlier estimates is now telling business leaders to take the new £102bn projection on trust, even as transport experts begin to whisper that the eventual bill could climb higher still. Business Matters recently reported that ministers had been actively considering slowing HS2 trains in a bid to claw back billions, a move that critics argue undermines the original rationale for the project in the first place.

The political backdrop is no less awkward. The line was originally conceived as a Y-shaped network connecting London to both Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham. Boris Johnson axed the eastern leg to Leeds in 2021; his successor Rishi Sunak then scrapped the Manchester arm two years later. Each cut was sold as a saving, yet the bill has continued to climb. As one senior figure with experience of past resets put it earlier this year, Conservative ministers had wasted billions on a project that was never properly gripped – a charge the party’s frontbench is now finding difficult to rebut.

For Britain’s SMEs, the implications are stark. Construction supply chains in the Midlands and along the line of route have ridden the rollercoaster of stop-start commitments for the best part of two decades. Manufacturers, engineering consultancies and specialist tier-two contractors had built order books on the assumption that phase two would, at the very least, run as far as Crewe. Many of those orders have evaporated. Meanwhile the broader business community is being asked to believe that the same Treasury now juggling a £33bn shortfall on a single project can still be trusted to underwrite the long-promised renaissance of regional infrastructure.

The lesson, painful as it is, is one that any owner-managed business learns in its first decade: budget overruns of this scale do not just happen. They are baked in at the start by woolly objectives, scope creep, weak commercial discipline and political interference. HS2 has had all four in industrial quantities. Until Westminster develops the institutional muscle to deliver megaprojects on time and on budget, British business will continue to pay the price, both directly, through taxes and forgone investment, and indirectly, through a global reputation for infrastructure delivery that is fast becoming a cautionary tale.

Read more:
HS2 reset to punch £33bn black hole in Britain’s public finances

Facebook’s parent company has begun notifying staff worldwide that they are out of a job, with engineers and product teams bearing the brunt of a 10 per cent cull designed to bankroll a $145bn artificial intelligence spending spree.

Meta Platforms started handing out redundancy notices on Wednesday morning, kicking off one of the most aggressive restructurings in Silicon Valley this year. As many as 8,000 roles, roughly a tenth of the company’s global headcount, are expected to disappear as Mark Zuckerberg shifts the business onto a leaner, AI-first footing.

The cuts are heavily concentrated in the company’s engineering and product divisions, according to a Bloomberg report, with around 350 jobs in Dublin, Meta’s European headquarters, set to go. The Irish capital has long been a critical hub for the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, hosting thousands of staff serving customers across the EMEA region.

Even before the redundancy letters landed, the wheels of internal change were already in motion. On Monday, some 7,000 employees were told they had been redeployed to newly formed teams charged with developing AI products, agents and assistants that will be threaded through Meta’s family of apps.

“We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, wrote in an internal memo seen by staff this week.

A $145bn bet on ‘personal superintelligence’

The job losses come as Meta pours unprecedented sums into the data centres, chips and engineering talent it believes will define the next decade of computing. At its most recent quarterly results, the company told investors it would spend up to $145bn on capital expenditure this year, more than double the $72bn it shelled out in 2025.

Where rivals such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are funnelling much of that AI capability into cloud services they can sell to corporate customers, Mr Zuckerberg is taking a different path. The Meta co-founder is pursuing what he calls “personal superintelligence” — a hyper-personalised AI assistant designed to live inside Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and the company’s growing range of smart glasses and headsets.

Meta’s Muse Spark model, released in April, is the first significant product to emerge from its Superintelligence Labs unit, which was set up last June and stocked with high-profile hires poached from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

That spending has unnerved investors and weighed on the share price. Meta’s stock is down 8.4 per cent so far this year, even as the wider Nasdaq has put on 12.5 per cent, a divergence that, as Business Matters reported after the first-quarter results, reflects mounting unease over the lack of a direct revenue line attached to Meta’s AI bill. When pressed on the return on investment of the spending, Mr Zuckerberg told analysts on the Q1 earnings call that it was “a very technical question”, a line that did little to soothe nerves on Wall Street.

A wider AI-driven shake-out in tech

Meta is far from alone in trying to wring efficiencies out of its workforce while throwing money at AI. Intuit, the American owner of QuickBooks and TurboTax, is preparing to lay off around 17 per cent of its workforce, or roughly 3,000 staff. Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare and Jack Dorsey’s payments group Block have all announced major redundancy rounds this year, with Amazon’s own 16,000-job cull framed by chief executive Andy Jassy as a way to “remove bureaucracy”.

According to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks redundancies in the tech sector, more than 140 companies have laid off in excess of 111,000 employees so far this year, already closing in on the 124,636 cuts recorded across the whole of 2025.

For UK small and medium-sized businesses, the message from the world’s most valuable technology companies is unmistakable. Capital that once funded sprawling product teams is now being redirected into infrastructure, models and a much smaller pool of senior engineers. As consultancy giants such as McKinsey trim their own ranks on the same logic, British SME owners weighing their own AI strategies face an uncomfortable question: are they investing fast enough to keep up, or being lured into a costly arms race they cannot win?

Meta and Intuit were contacted for comment.

Read more:
Meta to axe 8,000 jobs as Zuckerberg doubles down on AI race

Britain’s private sector workforce is staring down its sharpest squeeze on real take-home pay since the cost-of-living crisis of 2022, as a fresh burst of oil-driven inflation outpaces a visibly slowing rate of earnings growth.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics this week show that average weekly earnings excluding bonuses rose by 3.4 per cent in the three months to March, exactly matching the average rate of inflation over the quarter. Including bonuses, the figure climbed to 4.1 per cent, although that headline number was almost certainly flattered by outsized payouts in the City’s financial services sector.

For the rank-and-file employee outside the public payroll, the picture looks considerably bleaker. Real incomes are on course to flatline through 2026, with the surge in global crude prices expected to drag annual CPI back up towards 4 per cent in the coming months. With unemployment now at 5 per cent and youth joblessness at an 11-year high, the bargaining power that working households briefly enjoyed during the post-pandemic labour shortage has all but evaporated.

“There is potential for a sharp squeeze in real wage growth in 2026,” said Peter Dixon, senior economist at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

A broad-based slowdown

Wage growth has weakened across nearly every sector of the economy, with construction wages actually contracting outright by 0.6 per cent between January and March. Builders have been hit on three sides at once, energy, transport and raw materials, since the US-Iran conflict triggered a fresh spike in oil and shipping costs.

Private sector earnings growth has slipped to 3 per cent, the slowest pace since the pandemic. Analysts at ING calculate that the rolling three-month measure of private sector pay grew by just 0.6 per cent, its weakest reading in more than a decade.

The contrast with Whitehall is stark. Public sector pay rose by 4.8 per cent over the same period, buoyed by the increase in the national living wage and by generous settlements recommended by the independent pay review bodies under the Labour government. The growing divide has reignited a long-running political row with employers warning that the gap is becoming politically and economically untenable.

A new period of falling real wages

The Resolution Foundation is unambiguous about what the figures mean for household finances. The think-tank’s latest analysis warns that Britain is on the brink of its fourth period of falling real wages in less than two decades, a record unmatched by any other advanced G7 economy.

“The UK is on the cusp of its fourth period of falling real-wage growth in less than two decades,” said Julia Diniz, economist at the Resolution Foundation. “This stuttering performance goes a long way in explaining the political and economic discontent that surrounds modern Britain.”

For lower-income households, that discontent is more than rhetorical. Edward Allenby, senior economist at Oxford Economics, warned that the inflation about to hit family budgets will be concentrated in the categories that bite hardest at the bottom of the income distribution.

“Higher inflation will likely be concentrated in essential categories, food, energy, petrol, that comprise much larger shares of lower-income household spending,” Allenby said. “These households also appear to be entering the latest energy shock in a more vulnerable financial position than the last one.”

The Bank’s dilemma

The Bank of England is now caught in an uncomfortable bind. Threadneedle Street has kept Bank Rate pegged at 3.75 per cent since the Middle East conflict broke out, but the Monetary Policy Committee has already signalled that it may have to resume tightening to head off so-called “second-round effects”, the risk that companies pass higher energy costs through to prices, and workers in turn demand inflation-busting settlements.

The wage figures suggest the second of those channels is closed for the moment. The Bank has previously indicated that it needs average earnings growth in the region of 2 to 3 per cent to hit its 2 per cent inflation target, a benchmark the latest data are converging on rapidly. The prospect of rate rises in the middle of an energy-driven inflation spike risks compounding the squeeze on households already feeling the pinch.

“A soft labour market could limit arguments that there will be notable second-round effects from the current energy shock,” said Josie Anderson, economist at Nomura.

Markets had been pricing in close to three quarter-point increases this year, taking the base rate back to 4.5 per cent, before Tuesday morning’s labour market release. That bet now looks aggressive. Andrew Wishart, economist at Berenberg, said the MPC would be “wary of pushing the labour market over a tipping point that triggers recessionary dynamics”.

“The market still prices three hikes today but the labour market is too weak to bear them,” Wishart added. “Even if energy prices remain high, we suspect that the Bank will deliver one quarter-point hike at most.”

Market reaction

Investors agreed. Yields on two-year gilts, which track expectations of the Bank Rate over the policy horizon, fell by 0.02 percentage points on the repricing, bond yields move inversely to prices. Sterling weakened against the dollar and the euro as traders trimmed their bets on UK interest rates.

For Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses, the takeaway is mixed. A pause in the Bank’s tightening cycle would offer welcome relief on borrowing costs at a moment when many SMEs are still digesting the rise in employer National Insurance contributions and the higher national living wage. But the wider story, flat real incomes, rising unemployment and cooling consumer demand, points to a more difficult trading environment through the second half of 2026, particularly for businesses with discretionary, consumer-facing revenue streams.

Whether the squeeze ultimately delivers the political backlash that the Resolution Foundation’s analysis implies remains to be seen. What is no longer in doubt is that, for the fourth time in less than 20 years, the average British worker is becoming poorer in real terms, and SME owners hoping for a confident consumer to spend their way through the next 12 months should plan accordingly.

Read more:
Private sector workers face worst real pay squeeze since 2022 as oil-driven inflation bites

The chief executive of US fintech Bolt has mounted a robust defence of his decision to sack the company’s entire human resources department, telling a Fortune audience that the team “created problems that didn’t exist” and that those issues “disappeared” the moment he showed them the door.

Ryan Breslow, the 32-year-old co-founder who returned to the helm last year after a three-year absence, insisted the move was central to his attempt to drag the one-time darling of Silicon Valley back into “start-up mode”. The online checkout software business shed roughly 30 per cent of its workforce in April, its fourth round of redundancies in as many years.

“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist,” Breslow told delegates. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”

He argued that traditional HR professionals were better suited to the “peacetime” rhythms of larger, more mature businesses than to the bare-knuckle conditions of a turnaround. In their place, Bolt has installed a leaner “people operations” function, charged with employee training and day-to-day support rather than policy-making.

“We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done,” Breslow said. “There is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot.”

The remarks land at a delicate moment for the company. Bolt’s valuation has plunged from $11 billion at the peak of the 2022 fintech boom to just $300 million, according to The Information, a humbling reset for a business once held up as the future of one-click commerce.

Breslow, who stepped away from the chief executive’s office in 2022 before returning in 2025, has made little secret of his view that the workforce he inherited had grown soft on venture capital largesse.

“There’s a sense of entitlement that had festered across the company,” he said. “People who felt empowered, felt entitled — but weren’t actually working hard. And this is the number one thing that I had to battle. Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.”

Bolt has confirmed that fewer than 40 staff were affected by the latest cull, which it said was driven in part by the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. In a company-wide Slack message in April, Breslow reportedly told employees: “Developing products and operating in 2026 is very different than it was in prior years, and we need to adapt as an organisation to be leaner and more AI-centric than ever to keep up with competition.”

The comments echo a broader trend across the technology sector, with employers from Meta to Microsoft using AI investment as cover for sweeping headcount reductions. Recent CIPD research suggests one in six UK employers now expect AI to eliminate jobs within the next 12 months, with white-collar roles bearing the brunt.

For founders of smaller British businesses watching from afar, the Breslow doctrine will provoke equal measures of admiration and unease. Few would deny that bloated middle layers can hobble a growth-stage company, and the temptation to strip back in tougher times is real. But UK employment law offers far less latitude than the at-will culture of the United States, and dispensing with HR expertise carries reputational as well as legal risks.

Employment lawyers have long warned that getting redundancy wrong can prove ruinously expensive, particularly for SMEs without the budgets to absorb tribunal claims. The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) continues to urge employers to follow a structured, transparent process, including meaningful consultation and fair selection criteria — protections that, in practice, are typically marshalled and monitored by an HR function.

Breslow’s broader argument, that growth-stage businesses must run leaner and faster in an AI-driven economy, is one that increasingly few in the City would dispute. The challenge for British founders is to translate that ambition into a culture that delivers results without falling foul of either employment law or staff morale. As the wave of AI-related layoffs sweeping global tech has shown, the line between bold restructuring and reckless cost-cutting is easily crossed.

Whether Bolt’s stripped-back, founder-led model can return the business to its former $11 billion valuation — or simply hasten its slide — will be one of the defining fintech stories of the year. As reported by Fortune, Breslow has slimmed the headcount from a peak of around 800 to roughly 100. For a man who once championed the worker-friendly four-day week, it is a striking volte-face — and one his remaining staff, and his investors, will be watching closely.

Read more:
Bolt boss defends sacking entire HR team, claiming staff ‘invented problems that didn’t exist’

Smruti Sriram OBE, the second-generation chief executive who has built Bags of Ethics by Supreme Creations into one of Britain’s most quietly influential sustainable manufacturers, has been named winner of the 2026 Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award. Alisha Fredriksson, the 31-year-old co-founder of maritime carbon-capture pioneer Seabound, takes home the Bold Future Award.

The awards, now in their 54th year and the longest-running international honours for women in business, were presented in London last night by Thomas Mulliez, president of the champagne house. The pair join an alumni list that includes Dame Julia Hoggett DBE, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, vaccine scientist Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, and Anne Pitcher, the former chief executive of Selfridges Group. Hoggett picked up the same honour at last year’s ceremony alongside Shellworks co-founder Insiya Jafferjee.

For Sriram, the award caps an eighteen-year run at the helm of a business that has done more than most British SMEs to give the much-abused phrase “purpose-driven” some commercial heft. Founded in 1999 by her father, Dr R. Sri Ram, Supreme Creations has grown into a vertically integrated supplier of reusable merchandise and sustainable packaging that, on the company’s own reckoning, has displaced an estimated 30 billion single-use items. Its “Bags of Ethics” label, which guarantees full supply-chain transparency, has become something of a quiet standard in a sector still riddled with greenwashing.

The judging panel, which this year included Kristina Blahnik of Manolo Blahnik, Allwyn UK managing director Bridget Lea, Ada Ventures co-founder Matt Penneycard and The Dots founder Pip Jamieson, cited Sriram’s work scaling a globally integrated supply chain alongside her commitment to social impact. More than 80 per cent of the workforce at the group’s factory in Pondicherry, southern India, is female; partnerships with the British Fashion Council and the Royal Forestry Society have raised millions for environmental and educational causes.

“As a second-generation entrepreneur, my journey has been shaped by a strong foundation of values, kindness, purpose and business acumen from my family, and especially my father, who founded the business in 1999 and is still very much involved,” Sriram said. “These eighteen years have been a professional and personal evolution, with a strong belief that business can and should be a force for good. To be recognised alongside such inspiring women is a reminder of what is possible when we use our skills not just to succeed, but to serve.”

She was quick to share the credit. “Our global teams from Pondicherry, and across Europe, are creative, highly skilled, and have always been showcased as partners to our clients, not just suppliers. This award is a spotlight on them, not me. They are the backbone and deserve the full recognition.”

Sriram beat a strong shortlist that also featured Paula MacKenzie, the chief executive of PizzaExpress, and Kanya King CBE, founder of the MOBO Group, as flagged when the nominees were announced earlier this year.

A shipping disruptor with a 95 per cent answer

If Sriram’s award nods to two decades of patient compounding, the Bold Future Award recognises a business that did not exist five years ago. Fredriksson co-founded Seabound in 2021 with a single, audacious proposition: that shipping, the industry behind roughly three per cent of global CO₂ emissions and long regarded as “too hard to abate”, could be cleaned up with retrofittable, container-sized carbon-capture kit bolted onto vessels already at sea.

The London-headquartered start-up’s modular system uses calcium looping to trap CO₂ from exhaust gases and convert it into solid calcium carbonate pebbles that can be offloaded at port. Independent assessments, including a case study published by Innovate UK Business Connect, put potential capture rates at up to 95 per cent. Following successful pilots with Lomar Shipping and Hapag-Lloyd, Seabound has now moved into commercial deployment, with the first full-scale units serving a cement carrier chartered to Heidelberg Materials.

“I am incredibly proud of the journey we have taken at Seabound, tackling one of the toughest challenges out there: reducing emissions in global shipping,” Fredriksson said. “What began as an ambitious idea to address the climate crisis has grown into a brand new category of technology for the industry. With successful pilot projects behind us, we are now at an exciting inflection point: heading into our first full-scale deployments, with the world’s largest shipping companies and regulators actively engaging with us.”

Fredriksson’s win lands at a moment when capital for female-led climate tech is still vanishingly scarce, a recurring theme are investors such as Sustainable Ventures, which backs female founders at twelve times the industry average. The Bold Future shortlist, which also included Josephine Philips of repair-and-alteration platform SOJO and Marisa Poster of matcha disruptor PerfectTed, suggests the talent pipeline is healthier than the funding statistics imply.

A 54-year-old hymn to Madame Clicquot

The awards trace their lineage to Madame Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, who took over her late husband’s champagne house in 1805 at the age of 27 and turned it into a global business in defiance of nineteenth-century convention. More on the programme’s history and previous winners is available on the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award UK page.

“Madame Clicquot led Veuve Clicquot to become a brand of excellence and courage,” Mulliez said. “Building on her legacy, Smruti Sriram OBE and Alisha Fredriksson are shaping the future of business. Their businesses tackle global issues and their achievements extend far beyond commercial success, offering powerful inspiration to the next generation of female entrepreneurs.”

For British SMEs watching from the sidelines, the more useful inspiration may be quietly structural. Sriram’s eighteen-year build of a profitable, transparent manufacturing group, and Fredriksson’s rapid commercialisation of a deep-tech climate solution, between them sketch out two viable archetypes for bold business in the second half of the 2020s: patient and purposeful on one hand, fast and technically ambitious on the other. Both are evidently still rewarded.

Read more:
Bags of Ethics chief and shipping carbon-capture pioneer crowned at 2026 Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Awards

England’s water security is heading for a serious squeeze, and the bill for inaction will land squarely on the desks of farmers, food producers, manufacturers and the wider small business community.

That is the blunt message from a cross-party House of Lords committee, which on Thursday 21 May publishes a report warning that the taps risk running dry unless the Government moves quickly to capture, store and reuse more of the rain that already falls on these islands.

In Surviving drought: reclaim the rain, the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee argues that climate change, a growing population, leaky Victorian pipework and thirsty industries are pushing the system towards a tipping point. Britain, the peers note, is not actually short of rainfall. The problem is that far too much of it is wasted, washed straight into rivers and the sea rather than held back for the dry months that climate science now tells us to expect with growing frequency.

The figures the committee cites are arresting. If ministers fail to act, public demand for water could outstrip supply by five billion litres every day by 2055, the equivalent of around 2,000 Olympic swimming pools draining away unmet each morning. That projection sits in line with the Environment Agency’s own National Framework for Water Resources, which has previously warned of a shortfall of similar scale unless leakage is cut and new sources of supply brought online.

A warning aimed at Whitehall, but felt on the shop floor

Baroness Sheehan, who chairs the committee, says the experience of the 2025 drought should serve as an early warning rather than a one-off. “Climate change is increasing the risk of drought through a combination of hotter summers and heavier winter rains, making the capture and storage of rainwater increasingly important,” she said. “We have already had a dry start to this spring, so it is critical that action is taken now to prepare for serious drought conditions, particularly as we enter a reported El Niño year.”

Forecasters at the Met Office have signalled a likely return of El Niño conditions from mid-2026, raising the probability of hotter, drier summers. For SMEs already nursing tight margins through a sluggish economic recovery, another summer of hosepipe bans, abstraction restrictions and stressed supply chains is the last thing the order book needs.

That much was clear last spring, when Business Matters reported on how drought conditions had begun hitting UK crop production, with reservoirs running low and farmers warning of early yield losses after the driest spring in 69 years. A year on, the peers say the lesson has barely been absorbed.

Four areas where ministers are urged to move

The committee’s recommendations sit in four broad buckets, each of them with direct read-across to the boardroom.

First, the peers want a proper grip on the numbers. That means better drought monitoring and impact data, and a full environmental and economic assessment that weighs the cost of doing nothing against the long-term value of building resilience. Without that, the committee argues, capital spending decisions on reservoirs, transfer schemes and demand-management measures will continue to be made in the dark.

Second, the report calls for a whole-of-society push on demand. Awareness campaigns, tougher water-efficiency standards in new homes, and incentives for water reuse and rainwater harvesting all feature. For the SME estate, this is likely to translate into firmer expectations on water-using appliances, fittings and processes, particularly in hospitality, food and drink and light manufacturing.

Third, the committee zeroes in on sectors that rely on direct abstraction from rivers and aquifers. It urges ministers to make it easier for farms, golf courses and other appropriate operations to build local resource reservoirs, and to introduce more flexibility into the abstraction licensing regime so that catchment-based water projects can scale. For the rural economy, that flexibility could be the difference between a viable harvest and a written-off crop.

Finally, the peers want emergency planning brought up to date. They are asking the Government to publish a prioritisation plan for severe drought by autumn 2026 at the latest, alongside a wider rollout of nature-based solutions, from wetland restoration to sustainable urban drainage, in both town and country.

Why this is a balance-sheet issue, not just an environmental one

The temptation in many quarters will be to file this report alongside the broader stack of climate warnings. That would be a mistake. Water is an input cost like any other, and one that the City is only now starting to price properly. Investors, lenders and insurers are sharpening their interrogation of corporate exposure to physical climate risk, and water scarcity sits near the top of that list for any business with a meaningful UK footprint.

The point was made forcefully in a recent Business Matters opinion piece arguing that the UK economy risks collapse without urgent investment in nature, with the financial sector urged to wake up to the fact that nature loss and water stress are no longer fringe concerns but central to long-term economic stability.

There is also a competitive angle. UK SMEs are, on the whole, ahead of the curve on sustainability, with Business Matters previously reporting that nearly two-thirds of small firms are taking practical steps to cut their environmental footprint. Those firms that have already invested in water-efficient kit, leak detection and on-site capture should find themselves better placed if regulatory pressure tightens, as the Lords clearly want it to.

The bottom line

Baroness Sheehan is unequivocal in her closing remarks: “Water is the foundation of life itself. The Government must act now to secure England’s most vital resource for the future and work with the public to ensure the taps don’t run dry.”

For business owners, the practical implications are already taking shape. Expect higher water bills in catchment areas under stress, tighter rules on abstraction and discharge, growing investor scrutiny of water risk in annual reports, and new commercial opportunities for firms offering harvesting, reuse and efficiency technologies. The smart money will not wait for Whitehall to catch up. The companies that get ahead of this curve, in much the same way that the best-prepared firms got ahead of net zero, are the ones likeliest to keep producing, serving and selling when the next dry spring arrives.

The peers have laid out the warning and the to-do list. The question now is whether ministers, water companies and businesses themselves are prepared to treat rainwater as the strategic national asset it has quietly become.

Read more:
Taps could run dry without urgent action on drought, peers warn ministers

Cheap chatbots are helping residents fire off forensic objections in minutes, piling pressure on already-stretched council planners and threatening the government’s flagship housebuilding pledge.

A new generation of artificial intelligence tools is being weaponised by opponents of housing and commercial schemes, producing torrents of detailed, policy-laced objections that are clogging town halls and slowing decisions across England.

The warning comes from Geoff Keal, chief executive of TerraQuest, the company that runs the national planning portal under a joint venture with central government. The portal handles roughly 95 per cent of all planning applications in the UK, giving Keal a near-unique vantage point on what is actually happening on the ground.

“They’re using AI to be able to provide better objection documents, much wider and much broader, which is slowing the system down, because obviously those things need to be dealt with in the right way,” Keal told Business Matters. “It’s certainly what we’re seeing local authorities suffer from.”

His comments will land awkwardly in Whitehall, where ministers have made unsticking the planning system central to their economic growth strategy and the pledge to deliver 1.5 million new homes during the current parliament, a target already under strain from a deepening construction skills shortage and rising build costs.

The £45 objection

Until recently, mounting a credible objection to a retail park, brownfield redevelopment or housing scheme typically meant hiring a planning consultant, often at a cost running into thousands of pounds. AI has collapsed that barrier almost overnight.

Objector.ai, one of a small but fast-growing crop of consumer-facing services, promises “strong, policy-backed objections in minutes” for £45 per full planning application, with a £249 crowdfunded option for residents who want to pool against bigger housing schemes. A rival, planningobjection.com, markets its “Planning AI” as a way to produce “persuasive, policy-centred objection letters … in just a few clicks, for a fraction of the cost of a planning consultant”.

Beyond the dedicated platforms, there is mounting anecdotal evidence of individual residents using general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT to submit hundreds of bespoke objections to a single application, each one tailored just enough to escape being dismissed as a duplicate.

For councils already buckling under workload, that creates a real-world problem. Officers cannot simply ignore submissions that cite the National Planning Policy Framework, local plans and case law, even when they suspect a chatbot has done much of the heavy lifting. Every objection has to be logged, weighed and, where material, addressed in committee.

The result is a system increasingly tilted against speed. According to the Home Builders Federation, the number of housebuilding sites granted planning permission in England last year fell to the lowest level since records began more than two decades ago, with average determination times stretching beyond 40 weeks against a statutory target of 13.

Defenders of digital democracy

Proponents of the technology argue this is, in fact, planning democracy working as it should. For years, well-resourced developers have been able to mount sophisticated arguments while ordinary residents have struggled to be heard in the language of policy that planning committees actually respond to.

Hannah George, co-founder of Objector, said the company was set up to help residents produce “high-quality, evidence-based objections … while reducing the number of invalid, repetitive or purely emotional submissions”. The platform, she added, advises against using generic AI tools to mass-produce letters and triages every application free of charge to decide whether there are valid grounds to object in the first place.

That argument is unlikely to satisfy housebuilders, who privately complain that even nominally well-drafted objections can be used to delay schemes long enough to wreck their economics, particularly for the small and medium-sized developers ministers say they want to back. Yet it does highlight the policy bind: the same tools that empower a parish to push back against an unloved retail shed also empower a handful of determined individuals to grind a 200-home scheme to a halt.

It is also worth remembering that pressure on the system pre-dates the chatbots. Labour has already pledged to face down what the Chancellor has called a culture of obstruction, with Rachel Reeves vowing to ease building rules and challenge ‘nimbys’ as part of the broader planning overhaul led by Angela Rayner. AI is now landing on top of a system that was already creaking.

The case for AI on the other side of the desk

If chatbots are creating the problem, they may also be part of the answer. Keal argues that AI can “speed up decision-making” in some areas, particularly the routine evaluation of submissions, although he cautions that large schemes involving parish councils, statutory consultees and wider community engagement remain stubbornly resistant to automation.

There are early signs of progress. Leeds City Council has piloted Xylo Core, an AI-enabled tool designed to help process planning applications, with officials reporting that planning officers saved an average of one day a week during the trial through “streamlining of administrative tasks” and faster access to planning data.

The wider regulatory mood is also shifting. The Planning Inspectorate, the agency that hears appeals against council refusals, has issued official guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in casework evidence, urging applicants and objectors alike to use the technology responsibly and to declare when tools such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot have played a significant role in drafting their submissions. Failure to do so, the Inspectorate warns, risks undermining the credibility of any case.

What it means for SME developers and British business

For SME housebuilders, commercial landlords and high-street operators planning to expand, the implications are uncomfortable but unavoidable. Schemes that might once have attracted a handful of handwritten letters can now generate dozens of forensic, policy-citing objections within days of a notice being posted, lengthening determination times and increasing holding costs.

Three practical conclusions are worth drawing. First, the era of low-friction local opposition is here to stay; planning strategies will need to assume sophisticated, AI-assisted objections as a baseline rather than a worst case. Second, early and genuine community engagement, the kind that takes place before an application lands, not after, is likely to become a more important commercial discipline, particularly for smaller developers without in-house PR teams. And third, applicants should expect councils and inspectors to start asking pointed questions about AI use on both sides of the planning fence.

Britain’s planning system has been creaking for years. The arrival of cheap, capable AI on the objector’s side of the desk does not change the underlying problem. It does, however, make the political and operational case for reform considerably more urgent, and the cost of getting it wrong considerably higher for the businesses that build, lease and trade from the buildings the country has yet to approve.

Read more:
AI-powered nimbyism is jamming Britain’s planning system putting 1.5 million new homes at risk

For all the column inches lavished on hoodie-wearing teenage coders and so-called “Silver Starter” retirees launching second-act ventures from the kitchen table, the typical British entrepreneur looks remarkably like the one who turned up at Companies House a quarter of a century ago. They are 43 years old, mid-career, and, by the looks of it, completely unmoved by fashion.

That is the central finding of a sweeping new study by company formation agent 1st Formations, which has crunched more than 9.2 million UK director appointments stretching back to the year 2000. Across 26 years of dot-com booms, banking collapses, a Brexit referendum and a global pandemic, the average age at which Britons take the plunge into running their own company has scarcely shifted, hovering between 41 and 44 throughout.

A stubbornly steady number

The data tracks a gentle drift upwards in the early years of the millennium, with the mean founder age sitting at 42 across 2000 to 2009 before nudging to 44 between 2010 and 2019. From 2011 right through to 2023, it parked itself stubbornly at 44, before easing back to 43 in both 2024 and 2025 – the first material decline in more than a decade.

The pattern holds with eerie consistency against the backdrop of the past quarter-century’s defining moments. The dot-com boom of 2000 produced an average founder age of 41. By 2008, with Lehman Brothers collapsing and the financial system in freefall, that figure had crept to 43. The post-recession recovery and the Brexit referendum vote of 2016 both registered 44. The pandemic year of 2020 did the same. And the current AI and green-energy gold rush, far from minting a wave of twentysomething founders, has so far produced an average age of 43, almost identical to the figure recorded at the dawn of the millennium.

The numbers cover an extraordinary span of would-be company directors, from 16-year-olds, the legal floor set by the Companies Act 2006, to a 110-year-old who took on a directorship in 2012. The average age of the oldest founder in any given year is 91, suggesting the entrepreneurial itch is one that lasts the best part of seven decades.

Why mid-career still wins

The picture is at odds with much of the cultural mythology around start-ups, which tends to oscillate between dorm-room prodigies and silver-haired second-acters. Yet the figures align with a broader truth about the country’s business base: small and medium-sized enterprises make up 99.9% of the UK’s private sector and employ roughly 16.9 million people, according to the latest Department for Business and Trade business population estimates. The economy’s beating heart, in other words, is run by people who have already spent a couple of decades in someone else’s payroll.

Graeme Donnelly, founder and chief executive of 1st Formations, argues that the sheer volume of data strips the romance out of the debate. “When you are analysing over 9 million data points, the noise of ‘trends’ disappears and the reality emerges,” he says. “British business thrives on experience. Today, the average age to start a business matches that of the millennium’s start.

“While younger generations enter the business world and veterans continue to grow, the heavy lifting of the economy is done by the 43 Club. These are professionals who have spent decades honing their craft before taking the leap.”

It is a useful corrective. The classic mid-life founder profile, a manager with a hard-won contact book, a mortgage to defend and a working understanding of cash flow, has long been the unglamorous engine room of British enterprise, even as media attention drifts elsewhere.

The Gen Z asterisk

That said, the picture at the edges of the dataset is changing fast. A Glassdoor-Harris poll cited in the study suggests 57% of Gen Z workers now run some form of side hustle, fuelled by social platforms that allow a teenager in a bedroom to test a product on a global audience for the price of a ring light. Business Matters has previously reported on the growing army of UK side-hustlers turning hobbies into income streams, as well as the broader entrepreneurship boom among young Britons, two-thirds of whom now say they intend to work for themselves.

At the other end of the spectrum, the rise of the so-called Silver Starter, older founders launching their first venture after 50, continues apace, supported in part by a significant uptick in over-50s drawing on the British Business Bank’s Start Up Loans scheme.

The slight dip in average founder age to 43 in 2024 and 2025 may yet prove the start of something more meaningful. The current cohort is starting businesses against a backdrop of accessible AI tooling, lower fixed costs and a sharp pivot towards the green economy, all of which lower the barriers that traditionally kept first-time founders in mid-career rather than their twenties.

What it means for SME Britain

For lenders, advisers and policy-makers wondering where to point their attention, the message from the 1st Formations data is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. The growth at the margins – teen side-hustlers and seasoned career-changers, is real and worth nurturing. But the Federation of Small Businesses’ latest data on the UK’s 5.5 million-strong small business population underlines that the country’s economic resilience still rests on the experienced middle: people who have done their time, know their market, and decide, somewhere around their forty-third birthday, that they would rather build something of their own.

Through dot-com, downturn, Brexit and Covid, that has been the one constant. Britain, it turns out, prefers its founders battle-tested.

Read more:
The ’43 club’: why Britain’s typical entrepreneur has barely aged a day in 25 years

After more than a quarter of a century pouring Old Speckled Hen down the throats of British shoppers, Greene King has decided enough is enough.

The Suffolk pub group has agreed to sell its best-known supermarket ale to Damm UK, the British arm of the family-owned Spanish brewer behind Estrella Damm, in a deal that effectively ends its ambitions in the off-trade.

The price has not been disclosed, but the strategic message is loud. Old Speckled Hen, which Greene King has owned since acquiring Morland Brewery in 1999, accounts for more than half of the company’s off-trade sales, the volumes that flow through Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and the independents rather than across the bar. By handing the brand to Damm, chief executive Nick Mackenzie is conceding that the supermarket beer aisle is no longer a battleground worth fighting in.

“This has been a long-term decision,” Mackenzie told The Times, pointing to the structural challenges facing cask ale and the wider beer category. Selling through pubs, restaurants and bars, he added, “is where our long-term strategy and focus is”.

Why a spanish brewer was the natural buyer

For Damm, the deal is the logical next step in a UK push that began in 2023, when it picked up the former Charles Wells brewery in Bedford. The site, rechristened Damm Eagle Brewery, has since been the focus of a £70m investment programme designed to make it the company’s flagship outside Spain, as The Grocer reported when the upgraded facility opened last autumn. Folding Old Speckled Hen, together with Old Golden Hen, Old Crafty Hen and Old Hen sister brands, into that operation gives Damm a heritage British cask name to sit alongside its lager imports, and the volume to keep its new lines humming.

Brewing of the Hen family is expected to migrate from Greene King’s Westgate Brewery in Bury St Edmunds to Bedford by June next year. Crucially for drinkers, the beers will still pull through in Greene King’s 1,600 managed pubs and on supermarket shelves once the transition is complete, according to the Morning Advertiser, which first detailed the wider brewing reset.

A tighter, on-trade-led brewing model

The transaction sits inside a much bigger reshaping of Greene King’s production footprint. The group is pouring £40m into a new, smaller brewery on the edge of Bury St Edmunds, alongside a fresh distribution depot. From next year it will brew only its core on-trade portfolio, Greene King IPA, Abbot Ale and the newer Hazy Day, at the site, replacing the historic Westgate Brewery in the town centre. Belhaven Brewery in Dunbar, East Lothian, is untouched by the changes.

“We are reflecting the size of the new brewery to reflect the market we are now operating in, and the market has changed pretty significantly,” Mackenzie said. “We believe we can control what we can control by focusing on our beers in our pubs.”

That candour will land uncomfortably with brewery staff. Greene King has declined to put a number on the jobs at risk, but a consultation began on Tuesday. The new plant is designed to be more efficient and to need fewer hands. For an industry already navigating brutal economics, the UK lost 100 breweries in 2024 alone, as Business Matters reported in its review of rising brewery insolvencies, it is another sign that scale-back, not expansion, is the order of the day.

The off-trade retreat in context

The decision to walk away from supermarkets is striking, given how much energy big brewers have historically spent on shelf space. But the maths has changed. Off-trade beer is a heavily promotional, low-margin game dominated by global lager brands, while cask ale, once a supermarket fixture, has been in slow retreat as drinkers gravitate to lager, world beers and low-and-no alternatives.

For Greene King, which still pulls a competitive pint through its own estate, the calculus is simpler than ever: a barrel sold in a managed pub earns far more than the same barrel battling for promotional slots in a multiple grocer. The Old Speckled Hen sale crystallises that logic.

The wider strategic reset under hong kong ownership

The brewing shake-up is the latest move in a sweeping rethink of the business under Hong Kong owner CK Asset Holdings, which bought Greene King for £4.6bn in 2019 in a deal led by billionaire Li Ka-shing. Last year the group posted revenues of £2.53bn but slipped to a £23.4m pre-tax loss, with net debt, excluding lease liabilities, running at around £2bn and annual servicing costs of close to £95m.

In March, Greene King confirmed it would sell 150 of its managed pubs and convert another 150 into tenanted houses as part of a refreshed estate strategy. Combined with the brewing slimdown and the Old Speckled Hen disposal, the picture is of a group methodically shedding the things it does not need to own and concentrating capital on what it considers core, wet-led, managed pubs where it controls the customer, the menu and the margin.

“For us, this is about how we future-proof the wider business and how we leverage our model,” Mackenzie said.

What it means For SME drinks and hospitality operators

For independent brewers and smaller pub operators, the implications cut both ways. The exit of a heritage cask brand from Greene King’s in-house portfolio frees up roughly half a pump line’s worth of off-trade attention and could give regional cask ale producers a slightly better shot at supermarket buyers. Equally, Damm’s decision to back a British ale at scale signals continued international appetite for UK-brewed brands, and reinforces Bedford’s emergence as a serious brewing cluster.

The blunter truth, though, is that one of the country’s most recognisable cask ales is now under foreign ownership because its British parent has concluded that supermarkets are not where its future lies. In an industry still struggling with input costs, business rates and shrinking discretionary spend, that is as honest a piece of strategic communication as the sector has heard for some time.

Read more:
Greene King pulls the plug on supermarket strategy with sale of Old Speckled Hen to Spain’s Damm

Britain’s labour market has buckled under the twin weight of geopolitical turmoil and stubbornly high interest rates, with the unemployment rate climbing unexpectedly to 5 per cent and payrolls plunging by 100,000 in April, the steepest monthly fall in years.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Tuesday showed the jobless rate edging up from 4.9 per cent in the first quarter, confounding City forecasters who had pencilled in no change. The fall in payrolls was sharply worse than the 28,000 decline economists had anticipated, and follows a 28,000 contraction in March, signalling that the cooling that has gripped the British jobs market for the best part of two years is now hardening into something closer to a freeze.

Job vacancies tumbled to their lowest level in five years, an ominous bellwether for small and medium-sized employers already squeezed by elevated borrowing costs and faltering consumer demand. The Bank of England, which only weeks ago warned that hiring intentions were weakening, now expects the unemployment rate to peak at 5.1 per cent in the second quarter, in line with its April 2026 Monetary Policy Report.

Iran war casts long shadow over hiring

Behind the figures lies a stark geopolitical backdrop. The United States–Iran war has now entered its eleventh week, with no immediate prospect of a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply has historically transited. The closure has driven a fresh spike in global energy prices and forced UK businesses, from manufacturers to hospitality operators, to put hiring and capital expenditure on ice. The supply shock, as Business Matters has previously reported, has pushed oil close to $120 a barrel and rattled global markets.

For SMEs, the message from the boardroom is plainly defensive. Recruitment freezes, deferred investment and rationed inventory have become the order of the day across sectors most exposed to discretionary consumer spending. The ONS noted that the sharpest declines in vacancies and payrolls have come from hospitality and retail, two pillars of the British high street that were already grappling with rising employment costs before the energy shock landed. The squeeze echoes earlier warnings that hospitality has been hit hardest in the wake of recent tax rises.

Pay growth slips below price rises

Wage growth, once the great hope of households battered by the cost-of-living crisis, is also losing steam. Average weekly earnings excluding bonuses slowed to 3.4 per cent between January and March, down from 3.6 per cent, leaving pay rising only fractionally above the March inflation reading of 3.3 per cent. Including bonuses, the picture was slightly stronger, with average wages up 4.1 per cent compared with 3.9 per cent in the previous rolling quarter.

That fragile real-terms gain is unlikely to last. Headline inflation, which had been on a steady downward path, is expected to dip to 3 per cent in April when temporary government measures to cap household energy bills came into force, but economists warn the relief will be short-lived as the Bank of England weighs interest rate decisions against the Middle East oil shock. With Brent crude trading well above pre-war levels, food and fuel inflation are likely to reassert themselves over the summer.

Liz McKeown, director of economic statistics at the ONS, said the labour market remained “soft”, noting that vacancies were at their lowest level in five years and unemployment higher than a year ago. “The number of payroll employees continued to fall in the three months to March, while regular wage growth slowed further,” she said. “Lower-paying sectors such as hospitality and retail have seen some of the largest falls in vacancies and payroll numbers, both in recent months and over the last year.”

Real pay set to slide

For workers, the implications are sobering. Yael Selfin, chief economist at KPMG, warned that with both private and public sector pay growth easing, “workers are likely to face a period of declining real pay, as headline inflation is set to outpace earnings, driven by higher energy and food prices.” Martin Beck, chief economist at WPI Strategy, added that “the latest labour market data suggest the UK jobs market is starting to feel the repercussions of higher energy prices, geopolitical uncertainty and weaker business confidence.”

For Britain’s 5.5 million small businesses, the data is more than a statistical curiosity, it is a warning shot. With borrowing costs unlikely to fall meaningfully before clarity returns to the Gulf, and consumer-facing sectors bearing the brunt of weaker demand, the second half of 2026 looks set to test the resilience of the SME economy in ways not seen since the pandemic.

The Bank of England’s next move will be closely watched. Threadneedle Street faces an unenviable choice between cutting rates to support a softening labour market and holding firm against the inflationary echoes of the Hormuz crisis. Either way, the era of cheap hiring and easy growth that defined much of the post-pandemic recovery now feels firmly behind us.

Read more:
UK jobless rate climbs to 5% as Iran war and Hormuz shock chill hiring

Lloyds Banking Group is preparing to scrap the Halifax brand after 173 years on the high street, in what would amount to one of the most significant rebrands in British banking history.

The FTSE 100 lender, which also owns Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland and pensions and investment business Scottish Widows, is reported to be drawing up plans to wind down Halifax as a standalone consumer-facing brand, with existing customers gradually migrated across to Lloyds Bank. According to The Sun, which first reported the story, new digital account applications through Halifax could be paused as early as July, with the brand expected to stop taking on new customers altogether by October.

A Lloyds Banking Group spokesperson said the company “regularly looks” at the role its brands play in supporting customers, but stressed there are “no changes for customers as of today” and that no final decision has been taken.

The end of a 173-year-old high-street name

If confirmed, the move would draw a line under a brand whose roots stretch back to 1853, when the Halifax Permanent Benefit Building and Investment Society was founded above a coffee house in the Yorkshire mill town that gave it its name. By 1913 it was the largest building society in the country, and its 1997 demutualisation, which turned 7.5 million members into shareholders, remains the biggest stock-market flotation of its kind in UK history.

Halifax merged with the Bank of Scotland in 2001 to form HBOS, before being absorbed into Lloyds Banking Group during the emergency rescue of the financial crisis in January 2009. It has since operated as a trading division of Bank of Scotland, sitting alongside Lloyds Bank within the same group while continuing to compete with it on the high street and online.

Why lloyds is consolidating

Industry analysts have long suspected that maintaining four overlapping consumer brands, Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Scottish Widows, would eventually become commercially unsustainable as more customers move to digital channels. With the differences between Lloyds and Halifax now largely cosmetic for many product lines, particularly mortgages and current accounts, consolidating onto a single retail brand would reduce marketing duplication, simplify technology spend and concentrate scale behind one black horse.

The shake-up also lands against a backdrop of accelerating physical retrenchment. The group has already confirmed plans for a fresh round of Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland branch closures running through 2026 and into 2027, affecting dozens of locations across the country.

More broadly, the House of Commons Library estimates that around 6,700 bank and building society branches have closed in the UK since January 2015 – roughly two-thirds of the network that existed a decade ago.

Lloyds is not alone in slimming down its brand portfolio. The recent decision to retire the TSB name from Britain’s high streets following Santander’s takeover of the lender underlines a broader pattern of UK banking consolidation in which long-standing high-street identities are being absorbed into larger corporate parents.

What it means for customers and SMEs

For existing Halifax customers, the group has indicated that any transition would be phased and that account numbers would remain unchanged. Customers who hold accounts with both Halifax and Lloyds will continue to benefit from separate Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) protection limits because of the way the group is structured, an important point for savers and small businesses with balances above the £85,000 single-bank threshold.

For SMEs in particular, the implications are more strategic than administrative. Halifax has historically been a significant mortgage lender to self-employed borrowers, contractors and owner-managers, often willing to underwrite cases on as little as one year of accounts, and a familiar route into homeownership for staff at small businesses. Folding the brand into Lloyds reduces the optical diversity of the UK lending market, even where the underlying balance sheet remains the same, and may concentrate decision-making in fewer hands.

Consumer group Which? has repeatedly warned that successive waves of branch closures and brand consolidation are narrowing choice for vulnerable customers and small firms, particularly in market towns where rival fascias are increasingly run from the same back office.

The Treasury’s Access to Banking Review, launched to assess the impact of branch withdrawals across the UK, is now expected to face fresh political pressure if one of the country’s most familiar high-street names is also removed from the skyline.

A defining moment for british banking

Quietly retiring Halifax would mark a defining moment in the long-running consolidation of UK retail banking, the point at which the post-2008 patchwork of legacy brands finally gives way to a smaller number of dominant digital-first names. Lloyds will be acutely aware of the sentimental power of a 173-year-old high-street fixture, and of the political sensitivity around access to face-to-face services.

For now, the group is keeping its options open. But for customers, small businesses and the wider market, the signal is unmistakable: the era in which Lloyds Banking Group ran two parallel retail high-street brands is drawing to a close.

Read more:
Lloyds set to scrap Halifax brand after 173 years in major high-street shake-up

Britain’s reliance on bricks-and-mortar levies has reached a level unmatched anywhere else in the developed world, leaving businesses shouldering a disproportionate share of the burden and the Exchequer dangerously exposed to any wobble in commercial property values.

The United Kingdom now extracts more from property taxes than any other major economy, with receipts equivalent to 3.7 per cent of the entire economy, according to the annual business rates review published by tax firm Ryan. The figure is well clear of France and Canada, both on 3.4 per cent, with Belgium and Luxembourg trailing on 3.3 per cent, a gap that underlines just how exposed the British system has become to a downturn in commercial real estate.

Taken together, business rates, council tax and transaction levies such as stamp duty are now generating around $136 billion (£108 billion) a year for the Treasury, more than France, Japan or Canada raise, and second only to the United States, where total receipts are nearly seven times larger at $855 billion. The OECD’s most recent Revenue Statistics confirm Britain’s outlier status among advanced economies.

Just under 11 per cent of every pound the Government raises in tax now comes from property — the third highest share among advanced economies, behind only South Korea on 11.8 per cent and the United States on 11.4 per cent. That level of dependence, analysts argue, has begun to crowd out investment in precisely the kind of physical, capital-intensive businesses ministers say they want to attract.

A structural problem, not a valuation quibble

Alex Probyn, practice leader at Ryan, said the combination of stubborn inflation, the end of pandemic-era reliefs and a string of policy tweaks had pushed receipts ever higher, in effect baking the squeeze into the architecture of the tax.

“Business property is carrying a disproportionate share of the overall tax burden, and that is beginning to weigh heavily on investment, particularly in sectors that rely on physical assets and long-term capital,” Probyn said. “Property taxes in the UK are the highest by international standards, and the system is designed in a way that continues to increase the yield over time. That creates a clear tension between the need to raise revenue and the need to support investment. That balance has to be addressed.”

The Government’s revaluation of business rates in England, Wales and Scotland, which came into force this April, is forecast to drag the total rates take up to £37.1 billion in 2026-27, from £33.6 billion the previous year, a leap of £3.5 billion in a single year. Business Matters has already reported on the £1.56 billion rise in rates bills that has rippled through every sector of the economy.

Probyn warns that the Exchequer’s fiscal dependence on these revenues is itself becoming an obstacle to reform. “This is not simply a question of valuation methodology. It is a structural issue,” he said.

Appeals backlog hits 40,000 as SMEs go to the wall

The pressure on businesses has been compounded by a logjam at the valuation office, the HM Revenue & Customs agency responsible for setting rateable values. Nearly 40,000 firms have lodged appeals against their revised bills and are still waiting for a hearing, with the Valuation Office Agency bracing for a further deluge of challenges from hospitality operators hit by punishing increases to their rateable values.

The average wait is now 11 months, during which firms must continue paying the higher rate. Some businesses are waiting up to 18 months for an assessment — a delay that has tipped a number of small companies into closure before their case is even heard. The squeeze helps explain why nearly 5,500 small firms have urged the Chancellor to halt what they describe as an “apocalyptic” revaluation, and why business rates appeals have plummeted overall, with many owners deterred by the cost and complexity of challenging their bills.

Layered on top of all this is the spike in energy costs flowing from the war in Iran, which broke out at the end of February. Three in five companies say the combination has forced them to freeze hiring and investment plans, the precise opposite of the growth story ministers are trying to sell.

The verdict from the high street

For SME owners on Britain’s high streets and industrial estates, the message from the data is unambiguous: the country’s tax system is increasingly tilted against the firms that take on premises, employ staff and pay rates in the local authority where they trade. Until ministers grasp the nettle of structural reform, rather than tinkering with reliefs at the margins, the burden on physical businesses will continue to rise, and so will the risk that the next downturn in property values takes the public finances down with it.

Read more:
Britain’s property tax burden is now the heaviest of any major economy

Britain’s artificial intelligence sector pulled in a record £8.3bn of investment last year, as global capital piled into a new generation of British AI companies and London tightened its grip as Europe’s pre-eminent technology hub.

New research from Barclays Eagle Labs found that funding into UK AI businesses surged through 2025 after a sluggish stretch for venture capital markets, fuelled by appetite for firms building everything from the picks-and-shovels infrastructure underpinning generative AI through to specialist legal and financial software.

The numbers underline just how rapidly AI has become one of Britain’s hottest investment narratives, with backers scrambling not to miss the next DeepMind-style breakout. The 2025 total represents a near-trebling on the £2.9bn raised by UK AI firms a year earlier, confirming a step-change in both deal flow and ticket sizes.

London remains squarely at the centre of the action. Almost three quarters of Britain’s AI fintech companies are now headquartered in the capital, according to the report, reflecting the city’s deep pool of engineering talent, financial expertise and proximity to global capital.

Much of the cash has flowed towards businesses thought capable of supplying the plumbing behind the AI boom, the compute power, software platforms and data architecture required to train and run large language models, rather than consumer-facing chatbots and apps. For investors hunting the next category-defining business, Britain increasingly looks like one of the few places outside Silicon Valley credibly producing AI firms with global ambitions.

Crucially, nearly half of all UK AI funding rounds last year came from first-time raises, suggesting a fresh cohort of start-ups is entering the market even as the contest for engineers and capital intensifies.

The Barclays Eagle Labs AI 100 cohort, its annual ranking of Britain’s fastest-growing AI businesses, has collectively raised £11.3bn, generates £734m in annual revenue and now employs more than 8,500 people. Software companies dominate the list, mirroring investor appetite for businesses able to monetise AI tools at speed as corporates rush to bolt automation and generative AI into day-to-day operations.

Abdul Qureshi, head of Barclays Business Banking, said: “The UK has no shortage of world-class AI innovation. The challenge is turning those breakthroughs into sustainable global businesses.”

The funding surge mirrors AI’s growing weight in wider markets. Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable listed company earlier this year as investors backed the firms supplying the silicon behind frontier models, while Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet continue to pour tens of billions into global data centre capacity, including Microsoft’s own £22bn commitment to a UK AI supercomputer build-out. London-listed asset managers and pension funds are coming under mounting pressure to ensure they are not bystanders to the trend.

Westminster, for its part, has moved aggressively to brand Britain as a destination for AI capital. The government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, launched last year and updated in 2026, sits alongside a new Sovereign AI Unit charged with backing home-grown firms and preventing prized intellectual property from drifting overseas before it can scale.

Yet for all London’s dominance, the story is not solely a capital one. The North West’s AI ecosystem has expanded faster than London’s since 2019, the report notes, albeit from a far smaller base, as clusters built around advanced manufacturing and industrial AI begin to take root outside the M25. For SME founders weighing where to plant their flag, that quiet regional rebalancing may prove as significant as the headline £8.3bn.

Read more:
Britain’s AI boom hits record £8.3bn as London cements European tech crown

Britain’s biggest bookmakers are squaring up for a High Court fight with the Gambling Commission over a controversial new regime of so-called affordability checks, in a row that threatens to drag the regulator into yet another costly courtroom battle and reopen one of the most contentious debates in UK consumer-facing business.

Industry chiefs say the checks, which would block customers from placing further bets once they cross specific loss thresholds, contain “serious failings” and risk pushing hundreds of thousands of punters into an unregulated black market that is already mushrooming online. With the Gambling Commission expected to decide this week whether to impose the rules unilaterally, the Betting & Gaming Council (BGC) has put the regulator on formal notice that legal action is now firmly on the table.

A flagship reform under fire

Affordability checks – formally known as financial risk assessments (FRAs), sit at the heart of the biggest overhaul of British gambling laws in a generation, introduced under the previous Conservative government in 2023. The intention was straightforward: identify high-spending customers who may be in financial difficulty and intervene before harm escalates. The political promise that accompanied it was equally clear – any such checks would be “frictionless”, invisible to the ordinary punter.

Under the proposed regime, an FRA would be triggered when a customer loses £1,000 or more in 24 hours, or £2,000 over 90 days. Operators that fail to carry out the checks risk regulatory action; customers who refuse to comply face being locked out of their accounts.

The Commission has leant heavily on the results of its pilot, which ran from September 2024 to April 2025 and used around 800,000 historical data points. According to its own published findings, only 3 per cent of gamblers would face an assessment, and 97 per cent of those would be “frictionless” – meaning the customer would not have to lift a finger.

The BGC disputes almost every part of that picture.

“Serious failings” and a 20% problem

In a letter dated 21 April and addressed to the interim chair of the Gambling Commission, seen by The Sunday Times, the BGC set out “grave concerns about the wider ramifications” of the FRA proposals. The trade body argues that once you strip out customers spending less than £200 a year on betting – essentially casual punters who place the occasional flutter, the true proportion of regular customers caught up in checks could be closer to 20 per cent, not 3 per cent.

It also flagged stark inconsistencies in data drawn from the three credit-reference agencies involved in the pilot. In more than half of some cases, the BGC said, a risk flag was raised by only one of the three agencies, a finding that, if accurate, undermines the central claim that the system can reliably distinguish a vulnerable customer from a comfortable one.

Grainne Hurst, BGC chief executive, did not mince her words: “Given the serious concerns raised by operators, there is a real risk that the industry could ultimately be left with little choice but to consider legal challenges if these proposals proceed without further scrutiny.”

The Commission, the BGC told The Sunday Times, has not yet responded to the April letter.

One senior industry source put it more bluntly: “It’s ridiculous that we’ve been forced to consider such a dramatic step. I hope the Gambling Commission and government see sense. They’re blind to the damage these checks could cause.”

The black market gathering pace

The commercial backdrop for the dispute is what makes it a story for British business, not just the gambling lobby. The Commission’s own reforms, first unpacked by Business Matters, have already raised the cost of compliance for licensed operators and tightened the screws on bonusing, customer interaction and product design – a trend examined in more detail in our analysis of the 2026 gambling reforms.

The fear inside the regulated industry is that affordability checks tip an already finely balanced equation in the wrong direction. The BGC estimates that the offshore black market has more than tripled in size since 2022 and that unlicensed operators could be spending £1 billion a year on advertising by 2028, more than the entire regulated UK market combined. The trade body warns that as much as £300 million in tax receipts could be lost as customers migrate to operators that ask no questions and offer no protections.

Critics counter that the industry is talking up the black-market threat to protect incumbents. Either way, as our earlier reporting on the business of British bookmakers made clear, the licensed sector is a meaningful contributor to the Treasury, to racing’s levy and to high-street employment – and few in Whitehall want to be seen handing market share to operators based in jurisdictions Britain does not regulate.

“The evidence so far suggests these proposals are not fit for purpose and risk driving people away from the regulated market towards the growing illegal online black market, where there are no protections and no safeguards,” Hurst said.

A regulator on the back foot

For the Gambling Commission, the prospect of another High Court fight is awkward, to put it mildly. The regulator has been at the centre of an unusually heavy caseload in recent months, including a bruising dispute with Richard Desmond, the billionaire former proprietor of the Daily Express, over the awarding of the multibillion-pound National Lottery contract, and a separate privacy case brought by executives from Entain, the parent company of Ladbrokes and Coral.

It is also rudderless at the top. Andrew Rhodes, the Commission’s chief executive, departed abruptly earlier this month to join Hawkbridge, the new advisory arm of law firm Harris Hagan – a firm that has acted for several of Britain’s largest bookmakers. The optics of the departure are not lost on operators now contemplating litigation.

In a statement, the Commission defended its approach: “A pilot was used to test how frictionless the White Paper policy could be and give us useful findings on how it could be implemented. We have been rigorously assessing that work in detail throughout the pilot, drawing upon a range of evidence and input from pilot participants and advised by NatCen. The proposed approach has been subject to significant scrutiny already and we have published findings during the process.”

What to watch this week

For the SME-heavy supply chain that hangs off Britain’s regulated betting industry, from data providers and payments firms to marketing agencies and the racing sector, this week’s decision matters. A green light without industry buy-in raises the prospect of months of legal uncertainty, suspended investment and contractual disputes. A pause or a redesign would buy time but extend the regulatory grey zone that has already prompted operators to scale back UK exposure.

What is harder to dispute is that the Commission’s room for manoeuvre is shrinking. With High Court action threatened, a chief executive gone and a black market growing in confidence, the regulator’s next move will be watched not just by bookmakers but by every consumer-facing business that depends on a stable, proportionate licensing regime.

Read more:
Bookmakers ready legal challenge as Gambling Commission prepares to wave through affordability checks

For the umpteenth time in 16 years of campaigning, the Westminster fuel-tax script appears to be writing itself again.

According to Treasury sources briefing the FairFuelUK campaign, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is preparing to drop the planned fuel duty rise from her Autumn Budget, though insiders caution that any reprieve is unlikely to survive beyond the March 2027 Financial Statement.

The retreat, if confirmed at the despatch box, will be the latest chapter in a saga that has become a fixture of every fiscal event since George Osborne first froze the duty in 2011. It will also be a notable, if temporary, win for Britain’s 5.5 million small businesses, many of whom now describe forecourt costs as the single biggest unhedgeable line in their operating budgets.

A £3bn pump tax raid since the Iran crisis began

Since hostilities flared in the Gulf, drivers have paid an estimated £3 billion more to fill up, while the Treasury has banked close to an additional £500 million in VAT receipts off the back of higher pump prices alone. Oil majors, predictably, have reported bumper margins. The motorist, equally predictably, has been left to foot the bill.

That contrast – soaring corporate profits set against a stagnating consumer economy – is what has put fuel duty firmly back on Reeves’s desk. As Business Matters reported last month, the Middle East flare-up has dragged headline inflation back to 3.3 per cent, hitting transport-heavy SMEs hardest of all.

71,000 emails, 148,000 signatures and counting

FairFuelUK says more than 71,000 of its supporters have now emailed their MPs urging the Chancellor to abandon the Budget hike. A separate petition, which has gathered more than 148,000 signatures, will be hand-delivered to the Treasury in the coming weeks. The campaign is calling not only for the freeze to be extended but for an immediate cut in fuel duty, in line with measures taken by more than 40 other countries.

The lobbying push echoes the cross-party effort earlier this year, when MPs delivered an earlier tranche of FairFuelUK signatures to Downing Street. That campaign cited Centre for Economics and Business Research analysis suggesting any short-term Treasury bounce from raising duty would be wiped out by a collapse of more than 60 per cent in fuel-tax income within five years as drivers cut mileage and shift to EVs.

“Cut all fuel taxes now,” says Cox

Howard Cox, founder of FairFuelUK, was characteristically blunt. “This clueless, bankrupting net-zero-driven Government remains stuck in a state of torpor, keeping the UK economy virtually stagnant,” he said. “Time and again, over 16 years of campaigning, we have shown that lower fill-up costs deliver more tax to the Treasury by boosting other revenue streams. The current cost of petrol, particularly diesel, is crippling motorists’ and small businesses’ ability to spend in the economy. When will these ignorant Treasury politicians understand that more money in people’s pockets drives growth? For goodness’ sake, cut all fuel taxes now.”

His frustration is shared in the haulage yards, trades vans and rural high-street economies that keep much of the SME sector ticking. Diesel, the lifeblood of British logistics, remains stubbornly above £1.55 a litre in many regions, and as Business Matters has previously documented, small employers lack both the financial resilience and the pricing power of their corporate counterparts to absorb or pass on the cost.

The international comparison: Britain stands almost alone

What is striking about Cox’s argument is not the rhetoric but the international evidence behind it. The International Energy Agency’s 2026 Energy Crisis Policy Response Tracker lists more than 40 countries that have actively cut, suspended or capped fuel taxes since the Iran conflict began. Britain is conspicuously not on the list.

Among the most striking moves logged by the IEA as of late April:

• Germany has cut petrol and diesel duty by roughly 14–17 euro cents a litre.
• Spain has slashed fuel VAT from 21 to 10 per cent and suspended its hydrocarbon excise duty.
• Poland has cut fuel VAT from 23 to 8 per cent and reduced excise duty to the EU minimum.
• Ireland has trimmed excise on petrol and diesel by €0.15–0.20 a litre, plus related levies.
• India has taken excise duties on petrol and diesel close to zero in some categories.
• Canada has suspended its federal fuel excise tax.
• Australia, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden and Türkiye have all implemented some form of fuel-tax or duty relief.
• Emerging markets including Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Ghana, Kenya, Lao PDR, Namibia, the Philippines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Vietnam and Zambia have followed suit, often with measures targeted at hauliers and small operators.

By contrast, the UK has so far stuck rigidly to the 5p Spring 2022 cut and a series of frozen rates, an approach that according to Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts is already pencilled in to deliver a £2.2 billion uplift in fuel duty receipts in 2027–28 once the 5p cut is fully unwound and RPI indexation resumes.

What it means for SMEs

For business owners, the politics matter less than the planning. A scrapped Autumn hike will provide short-term breathing room for fleet operators, tradespeople and rural businesses heading into the winter, but the OBR’s own numbers make clear that the reckoning has merely been postponed. Any operator modelling 2027 cash flow would be wise to assume duty rates will rise sharply once the temporary cut expires and indexation kicks back in.

The deeper question for the SME community is whether the Chancellor is prepared to follow the IEA-tracked majority and use fuel taxation as an active lever to support growth, or whether she will continue to treat the duty as a guaranteed revenue stream to be quietly squeezed. On the evidence of 16 years of campaigning, FairFuelUK is bracing for the latter – even as it prepares to claim a tactical victory in the Autumn.

For now, Britain’s van drivers, hauliers and white-van entrepreneurs can breathe a cautious sigh of relief. The bigger fight, as ever, is in the spring.

Read more:
Treasury wobble: Reeves poised to ditch autumn budget fuel duty hike as fairfueluk pressure tells

Ministers have set the high street banks on notice. The Treasury has commissioned an independent review into the impact of more than 6,700 bank branch closures across the UK, and has signalled it is prepared to compel lenders to provide face-to-face services where the evidence shows communities and small businesses are being left adrift.

The Access to Banking Review, announced on Thursday by Lucy Rigby, the economic secretary to the Treasury, will be led by Richard Lloyd OBE, the former executive director of consumer group Which? and a one-time interim chair of the Financial Conduct Authority. Lloyd has been asked to report back by October, gathering evidence on where branch withdrawals have bitten hardest, who has suffered most and where new intervention is needed.

The review lands alongside the government’s Enhancing Financial Services Bill, trailed in the King’s Speech, which the Treasury said would arm ministers with powers to “act swiftly if the evidence supports intervention on access to banking services”. In Whitehall parlance, that is unusually direct language — and a clear shot across the bows of an industry that has spent a decade thinning out its physical estate.

A decade of decline

The scale of the retreat is striking. According to consumer champion Which?, 6,719 branches have shuttered since 2015 — an average of roughly two a day. Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest, Barclays, HSBC and Santander have all taken the axe to their networks, with a fresh tranche of more than 130 closures pencilled in for May and June alone.

The economics from the banks’ perspective are not in dispute. Customers have migrated en masse to mobile apps, footfall has collapsed and the cost of running a Victorian-era branch estate has become harder to justify to shareholders. But the human and commercial fallout has been uneven, with rural towns, older customers and cash-reliant small traders disproportionately affected — a pattern Business Matters has tracked over several years and documented in its reporting on more than 6,000 UK branch closures.

Hubs: helpful, but not enough

The industry’s answer has been the shared banking hub: a Post Office counter for everyday cash and cheque needs, with the big lenders taking it in turns to send their own staff into a private room for more complex queries, typically one bank per weekday. Some 234 hubs have opened since April 2021, and Labour pledged in its manifesto to push the total to 350 by 2029.

Yet hubs come with a structural weakness. While the Financial Conduct Authority polices access to cash, there are no statutory rules governing what banking services must actually be provided inside a hub, those decisions remain at the banks’ discretion. The Post Office’s role as the de facto banking partner has been a lifeline for many high streets, but small business owners say the model still falls short on lending conversations, complex account servicing and the kind of relationship banking that used to be taken for granted.

That gap matters. For owner-managers running a café, a building firm or a one-van logistics operation, the disappearance of a local branch is not an inconvenience, it is a productivity tax. Cash takings have to be banked further afield. Loan applications increasingly run through opaque, centralised credit-scoring systems. And the local manager who once knew the business, and could vouch for it, has all but disappeared.

A turning tide?

There are tentative signs the industry is reading the room. Barclays last year began reopening high street branches and reinstating the role of the bank manager, an explicit bet that physical presence, and human judgement, is once again a competitive advantage. Whether that becomes a trend or remains a marketing flourish will depend in no small part on what Lloyd’s review concludes.

Rigby was careful to frame the exercise as evidence-led rather than punitive. “We are supporting industry’s rollout of banking hubs, but we also need a clear picture of where communities are still losing out,” she said. “This independent review will show us where the problems are and what further action may be required, and we will move quickly to legislate where the evidence shows it is needed.”

Lloyd, for his part, signalled an open-door approach. “It’s important to take stock of the impact that the big shift to digital services has already had, and to understand the need for access to in-person banking in the future,” he said. “I hope to hear from as wide a range of views as possible.”

What it means for SMEs

For Britain’s 5.5 million small businesses, the review is more than a consumer issue dressed up in policy language. Access to a banker who understands the trading rhythms of a local economy has historically been a quiet but consequential ingredient in SME growth. Should Lloyd’s report conclude — as campaigners expect — that hubs alone cannot plug the gap, the Enhancing Financial Services Bill gives ministers the statutory teeth to mandate minimum service levels.

That would represent a significant philosophical shift: from leaving branch strategy to commercial discretion, to treating face-to-face banking as something closer to a regulated utility. The banks will lobby hard against any such reframing. But after a decade in which the lights have gone out above 6,700 high street branches, the political mood in Westminster, and the patience of small business owners, is wearing visibly thin.

Read more:
Treasury orders review into bank branch closures as small firms count the cost

The 150-year-old British sweeteners and ingredients group Tate & Lyle has confirmed it is in advanced discussions with the American food science giant Ingredion over a possible £2.7 billion cash takeover, a move that, if completed, would lift another household name off the London market and forge a transatlantic ingredients heavyweight valued at more than $10 billion (£8 billion).

The FTSE 250 company said on Thursday that the Illinois-headquartered suitor had tabled a conditional 615p-a-share proposal, comprising 595p in cash and up to 20p in dividends. That represents a punchy 64 per cent premium to Tate & Lyle’s closing price the previous evening and prompted an immediate scramble in the stock, which jumped 45.4 per cent to close at 545p. Even after that one-day surge, the shares remain well shy of the 800p-plus levels they were changing hands at three years ago.

In a brief statement to the London Stock Exchange, Ingredion confirmed it had lodged the offer and said it “believes a potential transaction would deliver significant benefits to customers, consumers, employees and Ingredion shareholders”. The Westchester, Illinois-based business added that it was “engaged in discussions and a period of due diligence with Tate & Lyle to further explore a potential transaction. Discussions are ongoing, and there can be no certainty that a binding offer will be made.”

Under City Takeover Panel rules, Ingredion has until 5pm on 11 June either to put a firm offer on the table or to walk away. Tate & Lyle’s board has indicated that the latest approach is one of a series of overtures from the same suitor, and stressed there is no guarantee that a binding bid will materialise.

A price the board will struggle to dismiss

For a company that has spent the past two years grappling with softer bakery demand in the United States, weaker European pricing and stubbornly high input costs, the timing is awkward — and the price is generous. Shares in Tate & Lyle have underperformed those of its American suitor over the past 12 months, leaving the board with little obvious cover for digging in.

Lucinda Guthrie, head of mergers and acquisitions research firm Mergermarket, said the proposal sat at “a level that the board would have to consider”, adding that the public disclosure “will act as a price discovery mechanism to see if a deal can be struck.”

A combination would marry Tate & Lyle’s expertise in low- and no-calorie sweeteners, including the sucralose used in Coca-Cola’s diet ranges — with Ingredion’s broader portfolio of starches, texturisers and plant-based ingredients. Both groups view the United States, where consumers are increasingly steering towards low-calorie drinks and reformulated packaged foods, as their single most important market.

From victorian sugar cubes to silicon-age science

Tate & Lyle’s roots reach back into Victorian Britain, when sugar refiners Henry Tate and Abram Lyle built up rival operations on opposite banks of the Thames. Tate is credited with introducing the sugar cube to the UK in 1875, while Lyle, refining cane sugar in east London, discovered the viscous byproduct he later canned as Lyle’s Golden Syrup.

The instantly recognisable green-and-gold tin, featuring bees emerging from the carcass of a lion in a nod to the biblical riddle of Samson, was entered into the Guinness Book of Records in 2006 as the world’s longest unchanged commercial brand packaging. The two refining houses formally merged in 1921, shortly after the deaths of their founders.

The modern Tate & Lyle bears little resemblance to that Victorian sugar giant. After diversifying through the 1970s, the company eventually sold its sugar refining business, including the historic Plaistow Wharf refinery in London’s Docklands, to American Sugar Refining in 2010, along with the rights to use the Tate & Lyle name on retail sugar packets. What remains in London is a leaner, business-to-business food science group that helps multinational manufacturers cut salt, fat and sugar from their products.

Another london name in foreign sights

The approach lands at a sensitive moment for the City. With more than 30 companies having delisted or announced plans to leave the London exchange this year, much of it driven by private equity and overseas industrial buyers, a Tate & Lyle exit would only sharpen the debate about the steady drift of UK plc into foreign ownership and the wider London market exodus.

It also comes against a backdrop of broader fragility in corporate Britain. Business Matters has previously reported on the record wave of business closures amid a tough operating environment and on the £300 million pulled by investors from UK equities amid inheritance tax fears — trends that have left mid-cap names such as Tate & Lyle particularly exposed to opportunistic offshore bidders.

For its part, Ingredion is hardly a stranger to the global ingredients game. The New York-listed group employs around 12,000 people, sells into more than 120 countries and traces its own history to the mid-20th century, when National Starch was absorbed into the Corn Products Refining Company to create one of America’s dominant corn refiners. The company markets itself as a business that turns “grains, fruits, vegetables and other plant materials into ingredients that make crackers crunchy, candy sweet, yogurt creamy, lotions and creams silky, plastics biodegradable and tissues softer and stronger” — and which now helps brand owners reformulate their products for health-conscious consumers.

Wider coverage from Bloomberg and Food Dive suggests City advisers expect the bid talks to dominate the agenda at Tate & Lyle’s next round of investor briefings, with hedge funds already piling in on the spread between the offer price and Thursday’s closing level.

Whether or not Ingredion ultimately stumps up a firm offer before the 11 June deadline, the disclosure has already done its work. For shareholders who have watched the share price drift for three years, a 64 per cent premium will be hard to wave away. For the London market, it is another reminder that some of its most historic names are now firmly in play.

Read more:
Tate & Lyle weighs £2.7bn approach from US rival Ingredion

For most small and medium-sized British exporters, the painful moment is rarely the order itself. It is the phone call a few days later, when the bank politely points out that the working capital required to fulfil it sits stubbornly the wrong side of an agreed credit ceiling. A career-defining contract becomes, almost overnight, a balance-sheet problem.

That is precisely the bind that Masters Speciality Pharma, a 41-year-old Hertfordshire specialist pharmaceutical company, found itself in last year after winning two sizeable orders from Saudi Arabia worth a combined £2.3 million. The remedy, as is increasingly the case for ambitious British SMEs eyeing the Gulf, came from UK Export Finance (UKEF), the government’s export credit agency, which stepped in with insurance cover against the risk of non-payment and gave HSBC UK the confidence to lift its credit thresholds.

The deal is the latest example of how government-backed insurance is quietly underwriting British SME ambition in one of the world’s most lucrative regions, and it lands at a moment when UKEF is leaning harder than ever into the SME exporter agenda.

A 41-year-old elstree exporter that punches above its weight

Founded in 1984 by Dr Zulfikar Masters OBE and based in Elstree, Masters Speciality Pharma is precisely the sort of business that ministers like to wheel out at trade receptions but that the wider public rarely hears about. The company specialises in making hard-to-source medicines available in markets that the big pharmaceutical multinationals often overlook, and now serves more than 75 countries across the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Saudi contracts in question were not vanity wins. One covered the supply of a treatment for sickle cell disease, a debilitating inherited blood disorder that disproportionately affects patients in the Middle East and Africa. The other was for a specialised antibiotic used to treat life-threatening infections. In both cases, demand was urgent and the procuring authorities expected delivery on terms that demanded substantial up-front cash.

Therein lay the problem. Masters needed to pay its own suppliers well before the Saudi buyers were due to pay it, and the orders themselves were larger than its existing credit facility with HSBC UK. Without additional headroom, the contracts would have been physically impossible to deliver without straining the rest of the business.

How UKEF’s insurance unlocks the bank

The mechanism UKEF deployed is one that more British SMEs will encounter as the agency expands its remit. By insuring HSBC UK against the risk that the Saudi buyers fail to pay, the government effectively de-risked the additional lending the bank needed to provide. With UKEF on the hook for the downside, HSBC was able to raise its credit thresholds and free up the working capital that Masters needed to fulfil the orders, all without disrupting the company’s day-to-day operations.

It is a model UKEF has been deploying with growing frequency. The agency, which now has authority to provide up to £80 billion of support to British exporters, has set out a target of helping UK firms win more than £12.5 billion of new export contracts by 2029, with the Middle East firmly at the centre of that ambition. It forms part of a broader push that has seen UKEF step up support for SME exporters through faster-track products and higher auto-inclusion limits.

Tim Reid, chief executive of UK Export Finance, said the case for backing companies such as Masters extended well beyond GDP arithmetic. “British businesses like Masters Speciality Pharma are doing vital work, not just for the UK economy, but for patients around the world who depend on access to critical medicines. These are exactly the kind of exports we want to support,” he said. “UKEF is open for business, and we will continue to provide insurance and guarantees to UK exporters of all sizes as they take on new opportunities in the Middle East and across the world.”

The ceiling problem every sme exporter knows

For Simon Clarke, chief operating officer at Masters Speciality Pharma, the appeal of the arrangement boiled down to a frustration that is wearily familiar to any SME finance director who has tried to scale internationally. “A problem for SMEs like us is that you can get a certain amount of credit, but when you hit the ceiling you can go no further,” he said. “UKEF’s support made the difference – it meant we could take on these contracts that would otherwise have been beyond our reach or would have stretched working capital to the detriment of the rest of the business.”

That ceiling is one of the most reliable killers of British export ambition, particularly in higher-ticket sectors such as pharmaceuticals, engineering and capital equipment where customers expect long payment terms and suppliers want their money quickly. James Cundy, head of corporate and leveraged finance at HSBC UK, which already banks Masters in several markets, said the partnership with UKEF had allowed the bank to back the customer without flinching. “HSBC supports Masters Speciality Pharma in several markets across the globe. We know customers exporting overseas often struggle with freeing up working capital, so we were delighted to work with UKEF and increase our facilities to allow Masters Speciality Pharma to continue their vital work without disruption,” he said.

Why the middle east, and why now

The Middle East is becoming an ever more strategic plank of UK export policy. Saudi Arabia is the UK’s largest market for healthcare products and medical equipment in the region, and its Vision 2030 reform programme is creating sustained demand for everything from specialist medicines and medical devices to clean energy infrastructure, education services and advanced manufacturing. UK goods and services exports to Saudi Arabia ran into the billions of dollars in 2024, and ministers expect that trajectory to steepen.

For UKEF, the Masters deal is also a useful case study in selling its proposition to British SMEs who often assume export credit agencies are the preserve of defence primes and civil engineering giants. The agency’s recent push has included a £6.5 billion boost for British exporters and a tighter focus on the kind of insurance and guarantee products that suit smaller, faster-growing companies.

The takeaway for finance directors at Britain’s SMEs is straightforward enough. The Gulf contracts are there for the winning, the medicines, machines and services they want are squarely in British wheelhouses, and the working capital problem that has historically killed those wins can, increasingly, be solved with a phone call to UKEF and a sympathetic bank.

For Masters Speciality Pharma, the result is two delivered contracts, patients in Saudi Arabia receiving treatments they urgently need, and a Hertfordshire SME that has demonstrated, once again, that British specialist manufacturing remains very much open for business.

Read more:
Hertfordshire Pharma lands £2.3m Saudi contracts after UKEF steps in to plug working capital gap

A swelling queue of British exporters hoping to recoup money lost to Donald Trump’s now-discredited emergency tariffs may discover that they are entitled to precisely nothing, the audit, tax and business advisory firm Blick Rothenberg has warned.

According to John Havard, a consultant at the firm, roughly 126,000 claims have been lodged through the US Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) system since it opened for business on 20 April. Yet a sizeable proportion of those applications are expected to be bounced, either because the claimant is not legally eligible or because the paperwork has fallen foul of the portal’s exacting requirements.

“Some UK businesses hoping for compensation may find they are ineligible for it and receive nothing,” Mr Havard said. “A number of small British firms may never have encountered tariffs until President Trump’s second term. They are likely unaware that, although falling sales and higher shipping costs have inflicted significant harm on their finances, legally they are owed nothing by the US Government.”

Who actually owns the tariff bill

The crux of the issue, Mr Havard argues, lies in the small print of international trade contracts. Where British firms shipped goods to American customers on an “ex-works” or “cost and freight” basis, the legal obligation to settle the tariff sat with the US importer rather than the UK seller.

“Reimbursing the US importer for its additional costs does not qualify the UK entity to apply for a tariff refund,” he explained. In other words, even where British exporters voluntarily absorbed the cost to preserve a customer relationship, they cannot now walk into the CAPE system and ask for it back.

It is a hard truth for the cohort of SMEs that scrambled to keep American buyers on side after Mr Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to slap tariffs on a wide range of imports, measures that were subsequently struck down by the US Supreme Court, opening the door to refund claims in the first place.

A system creaking under the weight of claims

An official status report timed at 7am Eastern on Monday 11 May 2026 indicated that of the 126,000 claims received, roughly 87,000 had been validated. The remainder are sitting in limbo, with many of the rejections traceable to mundane formatting problems in the CSV files uploaded to the portal.

“Rejections may be because the CSV files submitted to the online portal could not be read and processed by the system due to formatting mistakes,” Mr Havard said. “But some rejections will be due to the claimants’ ineligibility for refunds.”

He added that before businesses can even attempt to file, they must hold an account with US Customs and Border Protection’s Automated Commercial Environment. “Anecdotally there has been considerable activity in new account registrations since the Supreme Court ruled the IEEPA tariffs to be unlawful, but this presents another system for businesses to navigate before they can attempt to get refunds.”

A further pitfall is mistaken identity. “Another reason for rejection could be that the person who filed for a tariff refund is not in Government records as the listed importer, or that person’s broker, for the particular tariffs identified in the claim. This could be people trying to game the system, but it is also potentially because individuals do not fully understand who is supposed to make the claim.”

Refunds trickling out – and bank details missing

Despite Washington signalling that no payments would land before 12 May, Mr Havard said there is reliable evidence that some refunds have already been paid out, with at least one claimant receiving interest on top.

But the process is being held up at the final hurdle for nearly 1,900 claimants who have failed to supply bank details. “As at 7am Eastern time on Monday 11 May 2026, there were 1,880 consolidated refunds which could not be passed from the Office of Trade to US Treasury for payment because the claimant had still to provide the necessary bank account details,” Mr Havard said.

Importers whose applications have been rejected can correct errors and resubmit. “However, no amount of resubmission will help if the claim is invalid in the first place – or if they are not getting clear messages from CAPE to explain why they were rejected.”

The next legal front: the 10% global tariff

Even as refunds for the IEEPA tariffs begin to flow, a second courtroom battle is unfolding over Mr Trump’s replacement measure, a blanket 10% “global tariff” introduced under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 after the Supreme Court struck down the original duties.

A coalition of small businesses and roughly two dozen, mostly Democrat-led, states challenged the move at the US Court of International Trade, which ruled by a 2:1 majority on 7 May that the new tariffs were also invalid. The Government has appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has granted an administrative stay, meaning the 10% levy continues to be collected on US-bound shipments while the legal process plays out.

“Whatever decision the Appeals Court eventually hands down, it seems inevitable that the losing side, as with the IEEPA tariffs, will want to make a further appeal to the US Supreme Court,” Mr Havard said.

The sums at stake are far from trivial. Estimates suggest some $8 billion of Section 122 tariffs were collected in March alone, a substantial slice of the wider tariff burden being shouldered by British exporters, which has weighed heavily on UK trade flows and prompted British factories to cut their exposure to the US market.

For SME exporters watching from this side of the Atlantic, the message from Blick Rothenberg is sobering: those who think a cheque is in the post would do well to check the terms of their export contracts, and the bank details on their CBP account, before they start spending it.

Read more:
Many British exporters chasing US tariff refunds may end up with nothing

In a move that has set the M&A community talking on both sides of the Atlantic, eBay has firmly slammed the door on a $55.5bn (£40.9bn) unsolicited takeover approach from American video games retailer GameStop, branding the bid “neither credible nor attractive”.

The rejection, communicated in a sharply worded letter from eBay’s board to GameStop chief executive Ryan Cohen, will come as little surprise to anyone with a passing acquaintance of the relative scale of the two businesses. GameStop, the bricks-and-mortar gaming chain that found cult status in 2021 as the original “meme stock”, is roughly a quarter of the size of the online auction house it is attempting to swallow, a David-and-Goliath dynamic that City analysts have long viewed as a near-insurmountable hurdle.

In its rebuff, the eBay board cited “uncertainty” over how the deal would be financed, alongside concerns about “the impact of your proposal on eBay’s long-term growth and profitability”. Directors also pointed to “operational risks, and leadership structure of a combined entity”, as well as questions over “GameStop’s governance”, a pointed reference, observers will note, to a company whose share price has historically been driven as much by social media sentiment as by retail fundamentals.

GameStop had attempted to bolster the credibility of its overture with a commitment letter from TD Securities for roughly $20bn of debt financing. Yet that prospective debt pile is precisely what gave eBay’s board, and a chorus of independent analysts, pause for thought. Sucharita Kodali, retail analyst at Forrester, told Business Matters the proposition was hardly “a terribly good offer”, warning that it would saddle the auction giant with GameStop’s borrowings at a moment when eBay is finally finding its feet again.

That recovery is no idle boast. Despite the well-documented competitive squeeze from Amazon, Etsy and, more recently, the Chinese disruptor Temu, eBay posted net profits of $418.4m in 2025, more than treble the $131.3m delivered the year before, even as sales softened. The board insists its turnaround strategy is bearing fruit and is in no mood to surrender the upside to an opportunistic suitor.

Mr Cohen, however, is unlikely to retreat quietly. The GameStop chief, who built his fortune through online pet retailer Chewy before becoming the unofficial figurehead of the meme-stock movement, claimed last week that eBay could be transformed under his stewardship into a credible challenger to Amazon. He has also signalled his willingness to bypass the boardroom and take his proposition directly to eBay’s shareholders, a hostile gambit that would set the stage for one of the more colourful takeover battles of the year.

For Britain’s SME owners watching from across the Atlantic, the saga is more than a transatlantic curiosity. eBay remains a vital sales channel for thousands of small British retailers, many of whom built post-pandemic businesses on its platform. Any prolonged ownership dispute, or a deal that materially loaded the company with debt, could have tangible consequences for the fees, listing policies and seller protections those firms depend on.

For now, eBay’s chairman and chief executive will be hoping the matter ends here. The bookies, and most of Wall Street, are betting it won’t.

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ebay rebuffs GameStop’s surprise $55.5bn swoop

Britain’s economy delivered a rare piece of good news this morning, with the Office for National Statistics reporting that GDP expanded by 0.3 per cent in March, comfortably ahead of City forecasts and capping a first-quarter growth rate of 0.6 per cent.

The figures, the last to capture activity before the outbreak of the Iran war began rattling global markets, point to a services-led upswing that has handed the Chancellor a brief reprieve as she braces for what most economists agree will be a far bleaker summer.

According to the ONS, the services sector, still the engine room of the British economy, grew by 0.8 per cent over the quarter, with production nudging up 0.2 per cent and construction rising 0.4 per cent. Wholesale, computer programming and advertising were the standout performers.

“Growth picked up in the first quarter of the year, led by broad-based increases across the services sector,” said Liz McKeown, director of economic statistics at the ONS. “Within that, wholesale, computer programming and advertising performed particularly well.”

For the country’s 5.5 million small and medium-sized enterprises, however, the headline number masks a far more uncomfortable reality. The March print captures only the opening days of the conflict; April and May data, when they land, are expected to reveal the full cost of the disruption ripping through the Strait of Hormuz and into global supply chains.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves seized on the figures to defend her fiscal strategy, telling reporters that “now is not the time to put our economic stability at risk”.

“Today’s figures show the government has the right economic plan,” Reeves said. “The choices I have made as Chancellor mean our economy is in a stronger position as we deal with the costs of the war in Iran. This government is getting on with the job of building an economy that is stronger, more resilient, and prepared for the future.”

Shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride was quick to puncture the mood, arguing that “the chaos surrounding the Labour leadership is destabilising Britain’s economy”. His intervention reflects mounting nerves in Westminster, where Sir Keir Starmer is fighting to hold his position amid backbench unrest.

Forecasters have already sharpened their pencils. Capital Economics has slashed its 2026 UK growth projection, with deputy chief UK economist Ruth Gregory warning that “prolonged political instability” represents “an extra downside risk” to her outlook.

“We would be very surprised if growth doesn’t weaken from May as the temporary boost from stockpiling unwinds and the squeeze on households’ real incomes from higher energy prices intensifies,” Gregory said. “In our adverse scenario, the economy suffers a mild recession. So the economy will probably give whoever is Prime Minister a rough ride.”

The energy picture is doing most of the damage. Brent crude has surged by roughly 50 per cent since March on fears of sustained supply disruption, and as a net energy importer Britain is more exposed than most of its G7 peers. Higher import costs are expected to filter rapidly into inflation, while weakening global demand threatens to weigh on the export book just as Britain’s manufacturers had begun to find their feet.

For SME owners, the practical consequences are already taking shape. Survey data shows consumer confidence has fallen sharply since the conflict began, and business investment, which had been showing tentative signs of recovery, is widely expected to stall as boardrooms wait for clarity on energy costs, interest rates and political direction.

The Treasury is understood to be poring over the latest figures ahead of an energy support package for businesses and households, with smaller firms in energy-intensive sectors lobbying hard for targeted relief.

Compounding the uncertainty, Reeves herself is reportedly weighing whether she could remain in her current role under a new Labour leader should Sir Keir be forced out. Bond traders are already pricing in a leftward shift, with gilt yields reflecting expectations that fiscal rules could be loosened and the current government’s growth policies quietly shelved.

For now, Sir Keir has dug in. Following Tuesday’s King’s Speech, in which he promised to “tear down” the status quo and pursue a “radical agenda”, the Prime Minister has cited the war as reason enough to remain at the helm. Whether anxious backbenchers, and equally anxious business owners, will share that assessment over the coming weeks remains very much an open question.

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UK economy defies gloom with surprise March growth as Iran war clouds outlook

Global oil stockpiles are emptying at the fastest pace ever recorded as the war in the Middle East tips the world into a deepening supply deficit, in a development that threatens to derail the recovery of Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses just as they were beginning to find their footing.

The International Energy Agency has warned of an “unprecedented supply shock” following the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow shipping lane that until recently carried roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. The destruction of energy infrastructure across the Gulf has compounded the damage, leaving traders, hauliers and manufacturers scrambling to absorb costs that were unthinkable only six months ago.

The Paris-based agency now expects a shortfall of around 1.8 million barrels a day to materialise this year, a dramatic reversal of the 410,000-barrel surplus it had forecast as recently as last month. The shift has come even as the economic damage of the conflict pulls demand sharply lower.

“With global oil inventories already drawing at a record clip, further price volatility appears likely ahead of the peak summer demand period,” the IEA cautioned.

Global supply is forecast to fall by an average 3.9 million barrels a day this year to 102.2 million, on the assumption that tanker traffic through the strait gradually resumes from the end of June. Even on that optimistic footing, the market is expected to remain in deficit until the final quarter.

Markets have whipsawed since hostilities between the United States and Iran erupted, with Brent crude, the international benchmark, surging to as high as $126 a barrel from just $60 at the start of the year. On Wednesday evening Brent snapped a three-day winning streak, sliding 2 per cent to $105.63 in its sharpest one-day retreat in a week. Even so, the benchmark is up 73.6 per cent year-to-date, a move that has rippled through every corner of the British economy from the haulage yards of the Midlands to the petrol forecourts of the south coast.

The IEA estimates that 246 million barrels have been drawn from inventories since the war began, leaving a perilously thin buffer against further shocks. In March the agency, which represents 32 member countries, released 400 million barrels of strategic reserves as a “stop-gap measure” in a co-ordinated bid to steady nerves.

Producers outside the Middle East have been pumping flat out to plug the gap. Forecasts for supply growth from the Americas have been raised by more than 600,000 barrels a day since January, to 1.5 million barrels a day this year, with Texan shale operators and Brazilian deepwater producers leading the charge. It has not been enough. Global supply slumped by a further 1.8 million barrels a day in April to 95.1 million, taking total losses since February to 12.8 million barrels a day. Output from Gulf states affected by the closure of the strait is running 14.4 million barrels a day below pre-war levels.

For Britain’s SME community, the second-order effects are arguably more punishing than the headline oil price itself. The IEA expects the economic fallout, rising inflation, slower growth and a sharp squeeze on household budgets, to drag global oil demand down by 420,000 barrels a day this year. That compares with a forecast decline of just 80,000 a day last month and projected growth of 850,000 barrels a day before the war began. It is the rapidity of the reversal, rather than its absolute scale, that has unnerved policymakers.

“Escalating demand destruction is underpinned by a surge in oil prices since the start of the war,” the IEA said. “Slower economic growth in both OECD and non-OECD countries is also beginning to weigh on consumer and industrial consumption.”

Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, last month described the current squeeze as the worst energy crisis the world has ever faced, eclipsing the oil shocks of the 1970s. “We are indeed facing the biggest energy security threat in history,” he said.

For owner-managed businesses already absorbing higher employment costs, stubborn inflation and fragile consumer confidence, the message from Paris is sobering. With warnings that the conflict could push Britain to the brink of recession, the next quarter is shaping up to be the most demanding test of SME resilience in a generation.

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Oil stocks drain at record pace as Iran war chokes global supply

GB News Radio has emerged as the fastest-growing network station in the country, with the latest RAJAR figures showing a 21 per cent surge in year-on-year reach that has pushed the upstart broadcaster decisively ahead of its closest commercial rivals.

The station, which forms part of the wider GB News operation, attracted 676,000 listeners during the first quarter of 2026, comfortably overtaking Times Radio on 604,000 and Talk on 560,000. It is a result that will sharpen the competitive temperature in a speech-radio market that has seen heavy investment from News UK, Global and Bauer over the past five years.

GB News Radio’s 21 per cent expansion outstripped Talk’s 16 per cent uplift and the 6 per cent rise recorded by LBC, the long-standing market leader in the news-and-talk format. Times Radio, by contrast, saw its annual reach contract by 3 per cent, raising fresh questions about the trajectory of News UK’s five-year-old digital station.

Listening hours at GB News Radio reached 4.35 million in the quarter, a modest 1 per cent improvement on the same period last year but a figure the broadcaster argues underlines deepening listener loyalty alongside the headline reach growth.

Much of the momentum has come from younger demographics that commercial talk-radio operators have historically struggled to capture. The station reported a 20 per cent increase among adults aged 35 to 54 over the past quarter, with the 35-to-54 male audience climbing 30 per cent — a cohort that remains particularly prized by advertisers in the speech genre.

Ben Briscoe, head of programming at GB News, said the numbers reflected a clear shift in listening habits. “These figures show more and more people are turning to GB News Radio for breaking news, opinion and coverage of the day’s biggest stories,” he said. “The continued growth reflects the hard work, commitment and first-class journalism produced by our teams across the schedule every day. Just like on TV, GB News Radio is leaving its rivals trailing behind.”

The radio performance mirrors a strong run for the group’s television operation. GB News was the most-watched news channel in the UK on local election results day, with BARB figures showing an average audience of 185,700 on Friday 8 May. That was 56 per cent ahead of Sky News, which drew 119,000 viewers, and almost double the BBC News Channel’s 93,200.

During April, the channel averaged 89,500 viewers and a 1.59 per cent share, edging Sky News on 86,200 viewers and a 1.53 per cent share. Between July 2025 and April 2026, GB News averaged 90,300 viewers and a 1.47 per cent share, ahead of the BBC News Channel’s 83,900 viewers (1.37 per cent) and Sky News’s 72,000 viewers (1.18 per cent), capping a ten-month run in which the broadcaster has consistently outperformed both established rivals.

For the wider commercial broadcasting sector, the latest RAJAR data points to a more fragmented and contestable speech-radio market than at any point in the past decade, and one in which the newest entrant is now setting the pace.

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GB News radio outpaces rivals with fastest growth on the UK airwaves

Britain’s ambitions to lead the global race for driverless cars took a significant step forward today as the Government inked a formal partnership with Wayve, the London-headquartered artificial intelligence scale-up that has emerged as the country’s standard-bearer in autonomous vehicle technology.

The Memorandum of Understanding, signed between Wayve and the Department for Business and Trade, is designed to deepen collaboration on next-generation self-driving systems and underpin the company’s continued expansion on home soil, a notable vote of confidence at a time when many of Britain’s most promising tech firms have been lured across the Atlantic by deeper pools of capital.

For the SME and high-growth community, the deal is being read as a barometer of Whitehall’s willingness to back homegrown champions with more than warm words. Under the agreement, Government and industry will pool research interests around the responsible deployment of automated vehicles, with the explicit aim of converting Britain’s world-class AI research into commercial reality on its roads, in its factories and across its supply chains.

Officials hope the partnership will act as a catalyst for fresh investment, skilled employment and long-term growth across an automotive ecosystem that has been buffeted in recent years by the transition to electric vehicles, supply-chain disruption and intensifying competition from China and the United States. The signal to international investors, ministers insist, is unambiguous: the UK is open for business and intends to be the destination of choice for ambitious technology companies looking to scale.

Business Secretary Peter Kyle said the agreement demonstrated how the Government’s Modern Industrial Strategy was being put into practice. “This partnership with Wayve shows how government is backing high-growth British scale-ups through our Modern Industrial Strategy to turn world-leading research into real-world deployment,” he said. “By working hand-in-hand with innovative companies, we are accelerating self-driving technology while anchoring jobs, investment and manufacturing here in the UK, making Britain the best place to start, scale and grow a business.”

Alex Kendall, Wayve’s co-founder and chief executive, struck a similarly bullish tone. “I’m delighted to deepen our collaboration with the Department for Business and Trade. We share the Government’s ambition to drive economic growth through the development of the self-driving vehicle sector in the UK and globally,” he said. “Strengthening domestic capabilities will anchor high-value manufacturing in the UK, create thousands of skilled jobs across the supply chain, and support the future of the automotive industry. This is in addition to the transformative benefits to road safety to be gained from self-driving vehicles deployed at scale.”

Founded in 2017 and now one of Britain’s most valuable AI businesses, Wayve has established itself as a pioneer of so-called “embodied AI”, training vehicles to learn from experience rather than relying solely on hand-coded rules and high-definition mapping. The company’s investor roster reads like a who’s who of global capital, and its decision to keep its centre of gravity in the United Kingdom has become a touchstone for the broader debate about retaining home-grown intellectual property.

Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall described Wayve as “a true British AI success story, putting the UK at the forefront of self-driving technology.” She added that the agreement would “help secure high-skilled tech and advanced manufacturing jobs in this country” and send a clear signal that “the UK is the best place for ambitious tech firms to start up and scale up.”

The substance of the MoU is squarely aimed at moving automated vehicles beyond the prototype phase and into commercially viable services on British roads. Joint workstreams will cover safety assurance, large-scale simulation and the integration of full self-driving capability into production-ready vehicle platforms, areas where Britain has long held latent expertise but has often struggled to commercialise at pace.

The partnership also reinforces the Government’s ambition to position the UK as a global hub for automated vehicle manufacturing, strengthening domestic supply chains in artificial intelligence, systems integration and advanced automotive hardware. Wayve, for its part, has agreed to share insights from real-world trials with ministers and regulators, providing the empirical foundation for the rules and standards that will govern a national roll-out of self-driving services.

For an automotive sector in the throes of structural reinvention, the implication is significant. Closer collaboration between industry, Government and local partners is intended to revive and evolve British vehicle manufacturing, demonstrating that fast-growing companies can scale at home rather than relocating overseas in search of supportive policy and patient capital.

The announcement comes against the backdrop of the Modern Industrial Strategy, which Whitehall says has already crowded in private investment into priority growth sectors. The Government points to roughly £360 billion in investment commitments, £33 billion in export announcements and 120,000 jobs secured since publication, figures that ministers will be keen to translate into a wider narrative of economic renewal as the political cycle wears on.

For founders, investors and SME leaders watching from the sidelines, the lesson is straightforward enough. When Government and a scale-up of Wayve’s calibre line up around a shared industrial agenda, the message is that Britain intends to compete at the sharpest end of the technology frontier, and that the long-promised marriage between policy and enterprise may, finally, be moving from theory into practice.

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Wayve lands government deal in race to put Britain in the self-driving fast lane

Sir Jim Ratcliffe has thrown his Ineos Grenadier into one of the most coveted defence procurement contests of the decade, gunning for a Ministry of Defence contract worth an initial £900 million to replace the British Army’s ageing fleet of Land Rovers.

The billionaire industrialist, tax exile and part-owner of Manchester United has been in active discussions with the MoD, lining his utilitarian 4×4 up for a tender that opens shortly and could ultimately deliver up to 7,000 vehicles to the armed forces. A formal announcement from Ineos Grenadier is understood to be imminent, with initial bids due on Monday.

It sets the stage for a four-way scrap that pits Ratcliffe directly against his long-standing rival, Jaguar Land Rover, the British marque he once tried, unsuccessfully, to acquire. JLR is fielding a military variant of its commercially successful new Defender, the modernised reincarnation of the very vehicle the Grenadier was inspired by. The two firms previously clashed in court when JLR accused Ratcliffe of copying the original Land Rover silhouette; the judge ruled there had been no breach of copyright, though Ratcliffe has never disguised the lineage of his design.

Also in the running are BAE Systems, which has paired with the American giant General Motors under the working title Team LionStrike, offering GM’s Infantry Squad Vehicle already in service with US forces, with engineering support based in Leamington Spa and Silverstone. Devon’s Supacat, working alongside defence contractor Babcock, is pitching an armoured derivative of the Toyota Hilux fitted with a bespoke chassis and combat cell.

Mike Whittington, chief commercial officer at Ineos, made it clear the Grenadier’s ambitions stretch well beyond Whitehall. “The Grenadier is the ideal choice for defence services as it’s the most capable 4×4,” he said. “Its local supply lines make it ideal for deployment in European countries, for sovereign defence and operations in the UK and on the continent.” Whittington pointed to existing demand from elite counter-terrorism and special operations units in Germany and France, alongside border forces in Germany, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Hungary and Spain.

Mark Cameron, managing director of the Defender programme at JLR, was equally bullish. “Defender will again begin supplying UK-designed and engineered light logistics vehicles for people and equipment transportation for the defence and blue light sectors, which Defender has a long history of supporting.”

For all the patriotic flag-waving, neither of the two frontrunners is actually built in Britain. The Grenadier rolls off a production line on the French–German border, in the former Smart car plant at Hambach, while the Defender is assembled at JLR’s Slovakian facility in Nitra. The MoD’s tender notably stops short of demanding domestic manufacture, a concession that will raise eyebrows in Westminster given Ratcliffe’s increasingly vocal criticism of the Labour government’s industrial policy.

The MoD confirmed in March that it was retiring the Land Rover from frontline duties after more than seven decades of service, describing the moment as “the end of an era for the vehicle that has been a cornerstone of military operations”. Officials want the first replacement vehicles in soldiers’ hands by 2030, with the initial tranche of 3,000 vehicles, plus engineering support, valued at £900 million.

For Ratcliffe, the contract represents more than a commercial prize. Having built Ineos into one of Britain’s largest privately-held chemicals empires, the Grenadier was always a passion project, conceived over a pint in a Belgravia pub and named after it. Winning the MoD’s blessing would validate his bet on a market that the original Land Rover effectively abandoned and hand him a powerful reference customer to chase further European defence deals.

For JLR, the stakes are arguably even greater. Losing the Land Rover’s spiritual home contract to an upstart designed by a critic of its design heritage would be a public relations setback of considerable magnitude, particularly as the Tata-owned business pushes its premium Defender into ever-higher price brackets and away from the workhorse roots that earned it military favour in the first place.

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Ratcliffe’s Grenadier rolls into battle for MoD’s £900m Land Rover replacement

Few retailers wear their politics quite so visibly as Alan Roper. Stand the managing director of Blue Diamond, the UK’s leading garden centre group, with 54 destination sites across Britain and the Channel Islands, in front of a microphone and the easy West Country charm gives way to something rather more pointed.

In recent weeks Roper has gone on the record claiming that successive minimum wage rises, layered on top of higher employers’ national insurance, have stripped £12.6m from Blue Diamond’s bottom line, money, he says, that would otherwise have been reinvested in stores, suppliers and people.

“I’m not against the minimum wage,” he insists, in the office above one of his flagship centres. “But you have to recognise that prior to Labour, it was the Conservatives who increased it by ten per cent for two years in succession. Then Labour came in with another 6.7 per cent, plus the 3.5 per cent employers’ NI rise. That is a major hit. I don’t know anyone who has not seen a pub go under recently because of these costs. Sometimes I wonder if politicians realise the level of impact this has.”

The £12.6m figure, he is at pains to stress, is not back-of-an-envelope. Blue Diamond benchmarks profit per employee across the group and Roper can trace the number precisely. It also reflects his own choices as an employer. “It is not just the people on the minimum wage. The colleagues who were earning a pound or one-fifty above it, as a good employer, I chose to maintain that gap. When their pay moved up, the department managers’ salaries moved up. That is where the 12.6 million comes from. I wish it had happened over eight years; instead, it happened in three.”

The consequence has been a quietly ruthless review of full-time equivalent hours, first across the garden retail estate and now in the restaurants. “We benchmarked the most efficient centres against the rest and got everybody working on the same page in terms of hours recruited per day,” he says. “Restaurants are naturally trickier because we won’t compromise service. But we have reduced man-hours, and we’re not the only retailer doing it.”

He is sceptical of those who claim artificial intelligence will fill the gap. “In this format I don’t think AI is going to have a big impact on man-hour reduction. Although I am trialling a full-size salesman avatar in one of our centres this year, I saw one at the Retail Tech Show in London and thought, well, that’s novel, give it a go.”

Such pragmatism has guided 27 years of growth at Blue Diamond, which has now completed its fifty-fourth deal. Yet for every acquisition there is a much larger pile of opportunities Roper has walked away from, something he attributes, only half-jokingly, to the cautionary tale of Wyevale, the once-mighty chain whose collapse he watched at uncomfortably close quarters.

“Wyevale at one point was close to £300m of turnover from about 130 sites,” he says. “That is barely £2m per centre, and at that size you are going to struggle to make money. They got into this mindset of: we want to be national, we’ll just buy centres. Small, large, the demographics didn’t matter. There was no filter on their judgement. It had a garden centre on the tin, so they bought it. The problem was in their DNA from very early doors. Private equity may have finished it off, but the issue was already there.”

Blue Diamond’s filter has remained narrow: demographics, footprint, location, and what Roper calls the “shape” of the opportunity. “I have never said, where’s my fifty-fifth centre,” he says. “That megalomaniac approach is a disaster. It is about the quality of the opportunity, growing sustainably, with low debt on the balance sheet.” Asked where Blue Diamond will be in five years, however, he answers without theatre: “If the right opportunities come, we could easily double in size.”

The most striking strategic shift in the wider sector is one Roper saw coming long before his rivals. In February last year, catering sales overtook live plant sales across the UK garden centre industry for the first time in four years. Blue Diamond’s restaurant arm grew faster than its retail business in 2025. Walk into a busy Blue Diamond at lunch on a Saturday and the queue for breakfast, cake and afternoon tea can resemble that of a casual dining group.

Roper bridles, mildly, at the suggestion that his stores have drifted into hospitality. “Catering goes back 30 years here. I had a large restaurant in a garden centre 30 years ago. What is happening is that other operators have belatedly caught up. Garden centres are a destination, a day out. Customers expect a nice restaurant where they can have breakfast or afternoon tea. It is a prerequisite. Without a restaurant, I think you would lose half your customers.”

The catering footprint, he points out, is far smaller than the planteria and almost always sits at the end of the customer’s natural route through the store. “It is part of the heartbeat. The pressure on us is always to find more space to grow the restaurants. Increasingly, customers demonstrate an insatiable desire for them.”

The same instinct for the local sits behind one of the more counter-intuitive parts of Blue Diamond’s playbook: a refusal to slap a single masterbrand on every site. Acquisitions at Wilton House, the Chatsworth Estate, the Grosvenor Estate and others have all retained their original names, with Blue Diamond co-branded.

“Wilton was my first big move, back in 2001,” he says. “People came there because it was the Wilton House Estate. You couldn’t simply call it Blue Diamond. So we kept the name and put Blue Diamond on it. The same is true at Chatsworth, at Grosvenor, and at the new centre we are building on Lord Iveagh’s Elveden Estate, which will be Elveden Garden Centre.” He bats away the standard corporate playbook. “Customers see their garden centre as part of their local community. Over the years the Blue Diamond brand has caught up alongside the local brand. We’re now in a sweet spot where they see it as both. When we rebadged three of the former Dobbies sites as Huntingdon Garden Centre last year, we were getting emails saying ‘glad you’re coming’ before we had even opened.”

Equally distinctive is Blue Diamond’s commitment to British growers. Unusually for a retailer of its scale, the group will exhibit at the National Horticulture Trade Association plant show at Stoneleigh in June with the explicit aim of meeting smaller suppliers it does not yet stock. “A lot of growers don’t approach groups because they assume we won’t be interested,” Roper says. “We will be. The challenge is volume. Where we can’t take a grower nationally, we’ll regionalise them, the south-west or the north-west. Knowing the family that grows the fuchsias is a strong USP. It’s a win for the grower, a win for us, and it’s something the customer really wants.”

Underpinning everything is data. Two decades ago Roper built what he calls his Best Practice Indicator, or BPI, an internal benchmarking engine that ranks every centre, department, category and individual line on its conversion of footfall into profit. A weekly league table places the 54 centres in order, one to 54. Where a centre underperforms, a BPI calculator now being rebuilt with artificial intelligence will tell the team exactly which lines were missed and why.

“It is the eighty-twenty rule,” he says. “Twenty per cent of your product does most of the work – hydrangeas, salvias, the genuses you cannot get wrong. The right plant, the right product, in the right place at the right time, at the right price. If you get all of that right, conversion goes up. If you don’t, customers feel it is hard work and they switch off.” It is, he argues, what makes growth safe. “I wrote my own retail ethos. I tell my team to define their church and then write their religion. Once everyone is on the same page, you can give people ownership. But you can only give them ownership if you can measure their decisions. BPI does that.”

On consumer demand, Roper concedes the macro picture is hard to read while weather still dominates. “We are up against a very hot, very dry March and April last year. So it is hard to tell what is real.” At the high-ticket end, suites of garden furniture at £2,000 and pergolas at £4,000, he says he is not yet seeing softness, “but I am not stupid enough to think it isn’t coming. I’m introducing an easy-payment system because I think recalibration is coming.” Last year’s business rates reform was, he says, a marginal win: smaller stores benefited, larger sites took six-figure increases, “but if it helps small businesses, I’m all for it.”

What would he do with a day in Number 11? He pauses, then offers something close to a manifesto. “I understand the need to get debt down. But instead of punitive solutions that suppress growth, this government needs to consult the business community on creating a more Thatcherite environment – or, to use a horticultural analogy, a growing environment where businesses can prosper, employ more people and pay more tax. At the moment, reactions feel knee-jerk and we end up on the back foot, repairing profitability.” He sighs, briefly. “Some days I look at it all and think it would be easier to retire.” Then a grin. “I won’t be doing that.”

Read more:
Alan Roper: ‘wage and tax policy has stripped £12.6m out of our profits’

Britain’s best-loved purveyor of sausage rolls is finally packing its bags for the Costas.

Greggs, the Newcastle-headquartered bakery giant, has confirmed it will open its first shop outside the United Kingdom at Tenerife South Airport within the coming weeks, a landmark moment for a business that has spent more than eight decades feeding the British high street.

The announcement, which is likely to delight sun-seeking holidaymakers in equal measure to City analysts watching for signs of fresh growth, came alongside a trading update in which the FTSE 250 group struck a cautiously optimistic tone for the remainder of the year despite what it described as a “challenging market”.

Greggs told investors it expects “to deliver good first half profit progress” and reiterated its full-year outlook. Management indicated that pre-tax profits for the year are likely to be broadly flat against last year, with any uplift “contingent on a recovery in the consumer backdrop”. Analyst consensus pencils in sales of £2.29bn and pre-tax profit of £172.1m for the full year.

Like-for-like sales at company-managed shops rose 2.5 per cent in the first 19 weeks of the year, slightly below the 2.9 per cent recorded over the first 20 weeks of 2025. Total sales, however, advanced a healthier 7.5 per cent to £800m, buoyed by the continued rollout of new outlets. Encouragingly, the pace of growth has picked up in the most recent ten weeks of trading, with like-for-like sales accelerating to 3.3 per cent.

“We have made encouraging profit progress in the year to date, partly reflecting a weak comparator period but also good operational cost control,” the company said.

Greggs added 41 shops to its estate during the period, 17 of them franchised, and shuttered 21, taking its national footprint to 2,759 outlets. Management is targeting 120 net new openings over the current financial year and has set its sights on growing the chain beyond 3,000 sites in the long term.

Yet the move overseas has not silenced the sceptics. The slowdown in like-for-like growth has reignited debate over whether the Geordie giant is nearing saturation point on the British high street. Shares have shed close to a fifth of their value over the past twelve months, and Greggs remains one of the most heavily shorted stocks on the London market, with an estimated £150m wagered on further declines.

For now, though, attention turns to the Canary Islands, where pasties and steak bakes will soon take their place alongside tapas and tortilla. Whether the format travels, and whether franchising overseas proves a more capital-light route to international growth than building out a directly managed estate, will be the question keeping investors guessing through the summer.

Read more:
Greggs takes the sausage roll abroad with Tenerife debut

Britain’s second-hand electric vehicle market has shifted into a higher gear, with sales of used battery-electric cars climbing to a record high in the opening quarter of the year as buyers wrestling with stubbornly high pump prices reassess the cost of motoring.

Figures published by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) show that 86,943 used pure-electric cars changed hands between January and March, a 32 per cent jump on the same period last year and the strongest quarterly performance since records began. Battery-electric models also captured a record 4.3 per cent share of the second-hand market, edging the technology closer to the mainstream.

The headline EV growth came against a notably subdued backdrop for the wider sector. The SMMT reported that just over two million used vehicles in total changed hands during the first three months, leaving the broader market essentially flat. That contrast underlines the speed at which the electrification thesis is now feeding through to ordinary forecourt decisions, particularly among private buyers and small business owners weighing the total cost of ownership.

Mike Hawes, chief executive of the SMMT, said the surge reflected the widening pool of affordable used electric stock coming back into the market three or four years after the first significant wave of new EV registrations. He warned, however, that the trajectory remained dependent on continued policy support for the new-car market that ultimately supplies it.

“Growing choice from manufacturers is feeding through into the second-hand electric vehicle market,” Mr Hawes said. “High fuel prices, given the conflict in Iran, may increase demand even further but to maintain this momentum, every fiscal and policy lever must be pulled to ensure a healthy new car market that delivers zero-emission vehicles that can in future flow through to the used market.”

His comments will be read closely in Whitehall, where ministers are under pressure to revisit incentives for both private buyers and the company car schemes that have, until now, done much of the heavy lifting on EV adoption. With the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate continuing to ratchet up the proportion of electric models manufacturers must sell, any softening in new-car demand would, on current trends, eventually choke off the supply of nearly new EVs that smaller businesses and private motorists are increasingly hunting down.

Ian Plummer, chief customer officer at Auto Trader, said the data dovetailed with the behaviour his platform was already seeing among shoppers. “The real story is how the market’s evolving, particularly in terms of electrification. Used EV transactions are up, and market share is rising. That mirrors what we’re seeing on our platform, where nearly one in four used car inquiries are for sub-five-year-old electric models,” he said.

“Rising prices at the pump, driven by global instability, are prompting more people to reassess their running costs, helping to accelerate this shift even further.”

For SME owners running pool cars and small fleets, the figures will sharpen an already pressing calculation. With petrol and diesel prices once again being buffeted by geopolitical risk, the gap between forecourt costs and home or depot charging is widening, while improving used-EV residuals are easing one of the longest-standing objections to making the switch. Whether the government can keep the new-car pipeline flowing strongly enough to sustain that supply, however, remains the question hanging over the second half of the year.

Read more:
Used electric car sales accelerate to record quarter as motorists seek shelter from forecourt pain

A new specialist finance platform aimed squarely at the UK’s construction and manufacturing sectors has launched in a bid to ease one of the most persistent headaches facing small business owners: getting the bank to say yes.

SME Funded, founded by construction mergers and acquisitions specialist Bradley Lay, has positioned itself as the country’s first genuine one-stop shop for funding in these two capital-hungry industries. The platform combines access to more than 130 lenders with its own deployable capital, promising faster decisions and more flexible terms than the traditional high street route.

The timing is pointed. British SMEs have spent the past two years navigating tighter lending criteria, lengthening approval times and a noticeable retreat from small business banking by the major clearers. The Federation of Small Businesses has repeatedly warned that funding bottlenecks are throttling growth at precisely the moment the country needs it most, while construction insolvencies remain stubbornly high and manufacturers wrestle with input cost volatility.

Lay, who knows the construction sector intimately after helping scale a business from £12 million to more than £150 million in revenue before exiting in 2022, is blunt about the problem he is trying to solve.

“SMEs are the backbone of the UK economy, yet when it comes to finance, they’re often underserved,” he said. “Traditional lenders are slow, restrictive and risk averse. When businesses are growing, they hold them back, and when they’re under pressure, they step away. We built SME Funded to change that. This is about giving business owners real access to capital, quickly, intelligently and without unnecessary barriers.”

The product range is deliberately broad: business loans, asset and equipment finance, bridging and property finance, motor finance and software finance, each structured around the individual borrower rather than slotted into a generic template. The pitch is that working capital, growth funding and trading lifelines should look different for a Midlands precision engineer than they do for a London-based subcontractor, and the platform is built around that distinction.

What separates SME Funded from the broker pack, the company argues, is service. Rather than acting as a matchmaker and walking away, the team takes what it calls a “white-glove” approach, structuring deals, positioning the borrower’s story to lenders and managing the process end to end. A three-step application aims to get business owners from enquiry to funds in days rather than weeks.

The team has already worked with more than 600 UK business owners, an experience base that informs both the platform’s design and its sector focus. A spokesperson for the firm said: “Too many strong businesses are held back by slow processes, rigid criteria and a lack of understanding from traditional lenders. Our role goes beyond simply finding a lender. We structure funding properly, tell the right story and manage the entire process, so our clients can focus on running and growing their business.”

Lay’s pedigree adds weight to the proposition. As co-founder of Peak Capital Group and founder of TrueNorth Capital Group, he has led strategic acquisitions across the UK and European construction markets and has advised more than 100 SME owners on growth, financial strategy and exit planning. Having sat on both sides of the deal table, he understands what lenders actually want to see and where SMEs typically fall short in presenting it.

With the economic outlook still uncertain and high street appetite for SME lending showing few signs of recovery, SME Funded is betting that a sector-specialist, capital-backed platform can carve out meaningful share. If the company delivers on its promise of speed, certainty and proper deal structuring, it may have identified one of the more compelling gaps in Britain’s small business finance market.

Read more:
SME funded launches one-stop finance platform to plug funding gap for britain’s builders and manufacturers

Construction is an industry worth $13 trillion globally, yet it remains one of the least profitable on earth. Margins of between 1 and 4 per cent are the norm, and the commercial fate of most projects is sealed long before a single foundation is poured. That uncomfortable truth has just attracted serious capital.

ProcurePro, an Australian-founded software business pitching itself as the first end-to-end procurement platform built specifically for construction, has closed an $11 million (US) funding round led by QIC Ventures, the venture arm of one of Australia’s largest sovereign wealth funds and a substantial infrastructure asset owner in its own right. The round values the six-year-old company at more than $80 million.

Existing backers Airtree and Glitch Capital followed on, and were joined on the cap table by French construction heavyweight Bouygues, which invested through its corporate venture vehicle managed by ISAI. The fresh capital will be funnelled into ProcurePro’s AI roadmap and an ambitious push into the United Kingdom, the Middle East and North America.

The thesis is straightforward, if uncomfortable for an industry not known for its appetite for change. By the time a contractor breaks ground, roughly 80 per cent of project costs have already been committed and the bulk of supply chain risk is baked in. Yet across the sector, that critical procurement stage is still largely run on a patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads and disconnected PDFs — a state of affairs that would be unrecognisable in almost any other industry handling sums of comparable size.

ProcurePro’s response is to pull the full procurement lifecycle, scheduling, tendering, bid analysis and subcontracting, into a single system designed to give commercial teams genuine oversight before pen hits paper. Over the past six years, the platform has been used on 6,000 construction projects worldwide, representing more than $90 billion in build value, and has handled in excess of 200,000 trade packages.

That accumulated dataset is now the company’s strategic moat. It underpins BidLevel AI, ProcurePro’s flagship tool for comparing complex subcontractor quotes, a job that has traditionally swallowed days or even weeks of commercial managers’ time, and which the platform claims to compress into minutes.

Alastair Blenkin, founder and chief executive of ProcurePro, said the raise opens the next chapter of the company’s international growth. “Construction firms are still managing their most critical commercial decisions and millions in spend via out-of-date and untrustworthy spreadsheets,” he said. “The lack of true oversight delays risk identification, which ultimately erodes margins. We built ProcurePro to bring structure, control and certainty to the commercial cockpit of construction firms.”

Blenkin is unsubtle about the prize. “After years of supporting procurement across thousands of projects, we now have a rich foundation of real-world procurement data. This funding allows us to invest further in AI, where we’ll enable construction firms to estimate new project costs backed by their historical purchasing data, rather than someone’s estimate, memory, or a finger in the wind.”

Nick Capell, investment director at QIC Ventures, framed the deal in industrial-policy terms. “Procurement sits upstream of construction spend, yet remains highly manual and weakly governed. It’s a globally relevant problem that remains unsolved,” he said. “With Queensland delivering a once-in-a-generation infrastructure programme ahead of the 2032 Olympics, innovations that improve construction productivity are critical.”

For Bouygues, the appeal is more operational. Marie-Luce Godinot, the group’s senior vice-president for innovation, sustainability and IT, said ProcurePro had already proved itself on live sites. “ProcurePro is one of the first technologies we have seen that brings greater control to the full procurement journey for contractors. It has been deployed successfully on some Bouygues projects, with usage progressively developing across several business units.”

For UK contractors and their SME subcontractor base, the more immediate consequence is staffing. ProcurePro plans to hire 100 people globally over the next two years across product, engineering and go-to-market roles, with its London office among those being scaled alongside Brisbane and Dubai. A first US base is also on the cards.

Whether the platform proves to be the productivity catalyst its backers describe will ultimately be decided on building sites rather than in pitch decks. But after years of construction being singled out as the laggard of the digital economy, the level of conviction now being shown by sovereign wealth, tier-one contractors and specialist venture investors suggests the sector’s spreadsheet era may finally be drawing to a close.

Read more:
ProcurePro lands $11m to drag construction’s $13 trillion supply chain out of the spreadsheet era

The high street rebrand that nobody asked for is heading towards the rocks. TG Jones, the chain hatched from the bones of WH Smith’s 450-strong shop estate, is staring down the barrel of bailiff action after racking up millions of pounds in unpaid bills, with its private equity owner conceding that the business may run out of cash before the summer is out.

In a 214-page restructuring dossier circulated to creditors last week, Modella Capital, the buyout house that snapped up the high street arm of WH Smith earlier this year, disclosed that the retailer is sitting on £3.4m of unpaid business rates, a further £4m owed to suppliers and an £8.4m tax bill that HMRC has so far agreed to defer. Add it together and the chain is in the red by the best part of £16m before the lights have so much as flickered.

“In recent weeks, the business has started to receive a significant number of demand letters and summonses as a result of the non-payment of business rates arrears,” Modella admitted in the document. “Without funding to pay these outstanding business rates or the compromise of these amounts, the business is at risk of local authorities seeking to take enforcement action.”

In plain English, that means bailiffs at the door, either to seize stock from the shop floor or to lodge a winding-up petition against the company itself.

A name nobody recognises

The whole affair has the unmistakable whiff of a deal gone sour. When Modella bought the high street estate from WH Smith, which has decamped to focus on its lucrative travel division at airports and railway stations, it was forbidden from continuing to use the WH Smith fascia. The result was TG Jones, an invented name plastered above hundreds of shopfronts where one of Britain’s most familiar brands once sat.

Trading, predictably, has collapsed. One landlord, who asked not to be named, did not mince her words. “They’ve bought the business and rebranded it with a name that’s lost all the goodwill that went with it,” she said, describing the surviving estate as “a really below-par store portfolio that sells God knows what”. Footfall, she added bluntly, “fell off a cliff”.

She is not alone in her fury. Modella is now asking the landlords of more than 120 shops to accept three-year rent holidays, three years of receiving precisely nothing, while hundreds more are being told to swallow rent reductions of between 15 and 75 per cent. If they refuse, the company has warned, it will run out of cash by the end of June.

Westminster turns the heat up

The proposals have caused consternation in Westminster. Justin Madders, the former employment minister and a member of the Commons business and trade select committee, accused Modella of operating a “heads I win, tails the taxpayer loses” model.

“If workers lose jobs, councils lose revenue and the public is left carrying the cost,” he told The Telegraph. He reserved particular scorn for the licensing arrangements buried inside the restructuring plan, under which TG Jones is required to pay millions of pounds in fees to other parts of the Modella ownership structure for the right to use the very name it was forced to adopt.

“What sticks in the craw,” Mr Madders said, “is that while councils are left chasing unpaid business rates and HMRC is giving breathing space over millions in deferred tax liabilities, the company’s own restructuring documents show millions accruing in licensing fees payable within the wider ownership structure for use of the newly created TG Jones brand name.”

It is the sort of arrangement, common enough in private equity playbooks, that tends to look rather less defensible when councils across the country are being told to wait their turn.

‘Sucking the soul out of the high street’

For all the talk of brutal trading conditions on the British high street, retail analysts are unconvinced that TG Jones can shelter behind macroeconomic excuses. Stephen Springham, head of UK retail research at property consultancy Knight Frank, pointed out that books and stationery — the very heart of the WH Smith proposition — was “the best performing retail subcategory last year, bar none”.

“They can’t blame market conditions. It’s absolutely scandalous,” Mr Springham said, before delivering the most damning verdict the sector has heard in years. The takeover, he argued, was “probably the worst example we’ve ever seen of private equity sucking the soul out of the high street — the only one I would say was worse was BHS”.

The comparison with Sir Philip Green’s collapsed department store is not one any private equity sponsor wishes to invite.

150 closures and counting

Internally, the message from management is no less stark. Alex Willson, the chief executive parachuted in to run TG Jones, told staff last week to brace for the closure of as many as 150 shops as landlords activate break clauses requiring just 43 days’ notice. Redundancies will follow.

“We absolutely cannot carry on as we are or there will not be a viable business in the future,” Mr Willson warned employees.

Creditors will vote on the restructuring plan in late June, with a High Court hearing scheduled for 29 June to determine whether the proposals can be sanctioned. Teneo, the private equity-owned restructuring consultancy, is leading the process.

Several landlords are already plotting a rebellion. “The more proactive landlords, like us, will do everything they can to take them back and re-let them to someone else,” one told The Telegraph. “We’ll do better with other retailers.”

For SME suppliers and small landlords with single-shop exposures, the calculus is rather more brutal. They are owed real money by a business that has openly told them it cannot pay, sitting beneath an ownership structure that continues to extract licensing fees for a brand worth a fraction of what it replaced.

Modella declined to comment.

Read more:
TG Jones faces bailiff threat as WH Smith successor buckles under unpaid tax bills

The Ministry of Defence has handed £16.6m to Elon Musk’s Starlink over the past four years, with much of the bill underwriting Britain’s military support for Ukraine and keeping deployed personnel connected to home.

Figures quietly released by the department show that, despite mounting political tensions between Labour and the world’s richest man, Whitehall has steadily deepened its commercial relationship with the SpaceX-owned satellite operator. A significant share of the spending has covered the purchase of Starlink terminals donated to Kyiv, where the kit has proved indispensable in maintaining uninterrupted high-speed connectivity along the front line.

The remainder has been routed towards welfare and communications provision for British troops stationed in remote theatres. Last year, sailors aboard the carrier HMS Prince of Wales were reported to be trialling Starlink to stream television and keep in touch with families during long deployments, a quality-of-life upgrade the MoD is keen to extend across the fleet.

Ukraine has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion in February 2022. The hardware has reached Kyiv through a patchwork of direct donations from SpaceX, US military aid packages and contributions from allies, with Poland the most prominent European supplier. On the battlefield, the terminals have become a critical piece of infrastructure, powering drone operations and underpinning command-and-control communications in conditions where traditional networks have collapsed.

For all the headlines, the MoD’s outlay on Starlink remains a rounding error against the wider military space budget. The Armed Forces’ principal orbital communications are still carried by the dedicated Skynet constellation, which is in line for a £6bn upgrade programme over the coming decade.

Yet the figures will reignite debate in Westminster over Britain’s reliance on a single billionaire whose politics are sharply at odds with the Government’s. Mr Musk declared in 2024 that “civil war” in Britain was inevitable, and in September that year addressed a London rally convened by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, calling on those present to demand the “dissolution of Parliament”. The intervention drew a furious response from ministers, with Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, telling the Tesla founder to “get the hell out of our politics and our country”.

Relations deteriorated further earlier this year when Mr Musk’s X platform was rocked by revelations that its Grok chatbot had circulated thousands of non-consensual sexualised images of women. The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, described the images as “absolutely disgusting”, prompting X to disable the function. X and Grok have both sat under the SpaceX corporate umbrella since February, alongside Starlink itself — meaning every contract the MoD signs with the satellite arm ultimately flows back to the same parent group.

The numbers also expose how comprehensively Starlink has eclipsed its UK-backed rival. OneWeb, the satellite operator part-owned by the British taxpayer following its 2020 government-led rescue, has secured just £2m of MoD business since 2022, barely a tenth of the Musk haul. For an industry that ministers have repeatedly identified as strategically vital, the gulf raises uncomfortable questions about domestic capability and procurement strategy.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: “Starlink technology is not used for military operations and is primarily used by our hard-working personnel to stay connected with their loved ones when they’re in areas without regular internet access, for example on a warship. As the public would rightly expect, all spending is rigorously checked to ensure it delivers value for taxpayers’ money and spend on Starlink has significantly reduced in the last year.”

Read more:
MOD hands Musk’s Starlink £16m as Ukraine support drives satellite spend

For decades, British workplaces have measured employee wellbeing in days off. A bout of flu, a chest infection, a sprained ankle: a few sick notes, a fit-to-return form, and the matter is closed.

Yet a growing body of clinical evidence, and a steady drumbeat of employment tribunal cases, suggests that this tidy framework is wholly unfit to deal with the reproductive health challenges that thousands of British workers quietly navigate every day.

Fertility treatment, pregnancy loss and the menopause are, in the words of one consultant, fundamentally different beasts. They cannot be cleared by a course of antibiotics. They are not, in any meaningful sense, temporary. And, crucially for employers, the cost of getting the response wrong is no longer simply a matter of compassion, it is a matter of retention, productivity and, increasingly, legal exposure.

The conventional model of workplace illness assumes a hurdle that the body eventually clears. IVF, miscarriage and menopause do not behave that way. They are tied to identity, to the future a person had imagined for themselves, and to a biological transition that can play out over months or years rather than days.

A miscarriage is, in effect, a bereavement requiring emotional processing alongside physical recovery. IVF involves systemic hormonal shifts that are unpredictable in both timing and intensity. The menopause, increasingly recognised as a workplace issue in its own right, brings vasomotor and cognitive symptoms that can persist for the better part of a decade. None of these is a short-term medical issue, and treating them as such is the first mistake too many British employers continue to make.

Anyone who has sat through a difficult conversation at work knows the British instinct to reach for the silver lining. “At least you can try again.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “At least it was early on.” Said with the best of intentions, these phrases can land with extraordinary cruelty.

Clinically, “trying again” is never a guarantee. For a patient with low anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) levels, the marker used to assess ovarian reserve, each failed cycle or miscarriage represents a biological window that is closing rather than reopening. The phrase also ignores cumulative trauma: the physical and hormonal exhaustion that builds with every attempt. By looking to a hypothetical future, the colleague risks dismissing the very real grief and recovery happening in the present.

The advice from clinicians is simple. Drop the platitudes. Replace them with something direct: *”I’m sorry you are going through this. I’m here if you want to talk, or if you need anything.” Managers should go a step further, focusing on the practical: “I’m happy to adjust your workload and cover meetings so you can focus on your appointments and wellbeing.”

The principle is straightforward. Treat the situation as you would any other specialised medical need. Grant the employee the autonomy to attend appointments or take rest without making them justify themselves repeatedly. The goal is comfort and clarity, and reassurance that their career is not on the line because of their biology.

There is a hard-edged business case here, too, and it begins with cortisol. Sustained workplace stress and the fear of stigma trigger the chronic release of cortisol and adrenaline, the body’s fight-or-flight hormones. These are significant disruptors of an endocrine system that is already under intense pressure during IVF, miscarriage or menopause.

Elevated cortisol interferes with the body’s ability to regulate other essential hormones. For a perimenopausal employee, stress-induced inflammation can physically worsen the frequency and severity of hot flushes and night sweats. For an IVF patient, the same chemistry can sabotage the very treatment the company is, in many cases, helping to fund.

Stigma compounds the problem. When an employee feels they must conceal a miscarriage or a failed cycle to protect their professional standing, the body remains in a state of high tension. The parasympathetic nervous system, the state required for tissue repair and hormonal balancing, never gets a chance to take over. Patients delay seeking help, skip recovery days, and a standard recovery becomes a prolonged health crisis. The cost shows up later, on the absence rota and in the resignation letter.

Among the most misunderstood symptoms is so-called brain fog. During menopause or a high-intensity IVF cycle, the brain’s oestrogen receptors, which govern how the brain uses glucose for energy, are effectively starving or being overwhelmed. The result is a genuine power failure in the regions responsible for memory and executive function.

When a colleague undergoing fertility treatment loses a word mid-sentence or drifts in a meeting, this is not distraction or reduced effort. It is a physiological response to a hormonal storm. Managers who recognise this, and who quietly adjust expectations rather than file it under “performance concern”, will hold on to talented people that less informed competitors will lose.

Reproductive health, employers should understand, is rarely a day-of event. It takes roughly 90 days for a sperm cell to mature, and a similar window applies to the preparation of an egg for ovulation in an IVF cycle. The lifestyle, stress levels and workplace environment an employee experiences today will directly shape their clinical outcome three months from now.

This has profound implications for how SMEs structure their support. A single day of compassionate leave around an egg retrieval, while welcome, is not the point. The biological lead-in — the three months in which keeping cortisol low matters most, is the period in which the employer’s culture is doing its real work, for good or ill. True support is a sustained environment, not a one-off concession.

For UK employers, particularly those running smaller businesses where HR is often a part-time concern, the temptation has long been to handle these matters informally and on a case-by-case basis. That approach is no longer fit for purpose.

Workplace support should not be viewed solely as a wellbeing initiative. It is a factor that can influence treatment tolerance, recovery and overall health outcomes — and, by extension, attendance, productivity and retention. Reproductive medicine specialists routinely see how a lack of flexibility and the strain of uncertainty add to the physical and emotional burden their patients are already carrying.

The modern framework, clinicians argue, should include protected time for medical appointments and treatment cycles; appropriate leave and recovery support following pregnancy loss at any stage; and trained managers capable of handling these conversations sensitively. Confidentiality, flexible working and access to emotional support should be considered core components of an occupational health approach, not optional extras.

Above all, the policy must remain adaptable. Fertility experiences are highly individual, and a rigid model, the kind British HR departments have historically loved, will not survive contact with the variety of clinical pathways now in play.

The businesses that grasp this will retain experienced women in their thirties, forties and fifties, the very demographic most likely to be promoted out of, and lost to, less enlightened employers. Those that don’t will continue to wonder why their best people quietly disappear. In 2026, that is no longer a wellbeing question. It is a competitive one.

Read more:
Why IVF and miscarriage still aren’t properly supported at work

The owner of Facebook and Instagram has taken the UK’s media regulator to the high court, opening a fresh front in the increasingly fractious relationship between Silicon Valley and Britain’s online safety regime.

Meta has filed for a judicial review of Ofcom’s methodology for setting fees and penalties under the Online Safety Act, arguing that pegging charges to a company’s qualifying worldwide revenue (QWR) is disproportionate and out of step with the geographic scope of the regulator’s remit. A hearing has been scheduled for 13 and 14 October.

The stakes are considerable. Under the Act, Ofcom can levy fines of up to 10 per cent of QWR or £18m, whichever is higher. Given that Meta reported global revenues of roughly $201bn last year, the regulator could in theory issue a penalty of around $20bn, a sum that would dwarf the largest fines in UK corporate history. The fee regime introduced last September applies the same QWR principle to annual tariffs, capturing companies whose user-generated content, search or adult-content services in the UK generate more than £250m a year.

Meta contends that liability should be determined by activity within the jurisdiction doing the regulating. “We and others in the tech industry believe its decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate,” a company spokesperson said. “We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history.”

Court documents filed on Meta’s behalf by Monica Carss-Frisk KC describe Ofcom’s approach as “troubling”, warning that it would result in a handful of large platforms shouldering the bulk of the regulator’s costs even though the Act covers a much broader sweep of internet services. The barrister noted that QWR is not pegged to revenue generated by any particular service in the UK; rather, once a service is offered to British users, the entirety of its global turnover is counted.

Ofcom, for its part, is preparing to dig in. The regulator said its fees and fines framework reflected “a plain reading of the law” and pledged to “robustly defend our reasoning and decisions”.

Meta is not alone in pushing back. The US online forum 4chan has refused to pay penalties imposed under the Act, and Ofcom is facing separate litigation from the operators of both 4chan and Kiwi Farms. The regime has also drawn criticism from Donald Trump’s White House, which has signalled growing impatience with European digital rules that it sees as targeting American firms.

The financial significance of the new system for Ofcom itself is hard to overstate. Once the preserve of broadcasters and telecoms operators paying for spectrum and licence fees, the regulator now expects the bulk of its £233m budget for the year to come from online safety tariffs, which are forecast to bring in £164m. That marks one of the most substantial shifts in Ofcom’s funding base in its two-decade history.

For SME founders watching from the sidelines, the case is more than a transatlantic skirmish between Big Tech and a British quango. The threshold of £250m in qualifying turnover means most smaller platforms sit outside the fee net, but the principles being tested in October, how revenue is attributed across borders, and how proportionality is measured for global digital businesses, will shape the regulatory environment for any UK-based scale-up that one day finds itself trading internationally on the back of user-generated content. The judgment, when it comes, will be read closely well beyond Menlo Park.

Read more:
Meta launches high court challenge against Ofcom over online safety act fines

American Express has thrown its weight behind the small business AI skills race, unveiling two training and education programmes designed to drag owner-managers and their staff out of the experimentation phase and into measurable productivity gains.

Announced this week, the initiatives have been built in partnership with the global non-profit Generation and US-based Scholarship America. The first, AI Upskilling for Small Business, is a free training programme delivered by Generation that is open to small firms anywhere in the world and taught in English and Spanish. The second, Smart Futures for Small Business Scholarships, is a US-only pot funded by the American Express Foundation that will hand eligible employees up to $1,000 (around £790) to spend on AI certification courses run by accredited vendors or educational institutions.

The move lands at a moment when boardroom enthusiasm for generative AI has yet to translate into shop-floor competence. Multiple recent surveys of UK and US small firms suggest that while curiosity is near universal, the share of owner-managers using AI tools in any structured way remains stubbornly low, with confidence and training cited as the principal blockers.

Jennifer Skyler, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at American Express, said the company wanted to bridge precisely that gap. “AI can be a powerful tool for small businesses when it’s used in practical, everyday ways,” she said. “These initiatives were designed to help small businesses move from Gen AI exploration to practical application, equipping them to drive productivity and help unlock new opportunities for growth.”

The Generation curriculum, refined through a series of pilots, is split into three self-guided tracks pitched at different roles and levels of AI familiarity. An AI Generalist track offers a foundational primer alongside short, applied “Mini Missions” covering everyday tasks. A Digital Marketing track focuses on using AI for content production, campaign optimisation and customer insight. A Digital Customer Success track concentrates on speeding up enquiry handling and personalising the customer experience.

Across all three, participants are taught to draft customer communications, support marketing campaigns, summarise and organise information, and convert raw research into commercial insight, while keeping a human eye on the output.

Bonni Theriault, Chief Partnerships Officer at Generation, said the structure was deliberately practical. “Generation programs support participants to practice and master the skills that make the biggest difference to them in their day-to-day work,” she said. “We are delighted to partner with American Express to offer small business owners a chance to hone their AI skills and see real benefits in their work.”

For Katy Kinch, owner of US-based Buttermilk Bakeshop and an early participant, the value lay in punching above her weight. “One of the biggest program takeaways for me was realising how powerful AI can be when used the right way, because it allowed me to do things that typically require a full team,” she said. “I was able to analyse customer feedback, identify trends and track retention patterns from my living room, which gave me insights I wouldn’t normally have access to as a small business owner.”

The Smart Futures element, administered by Scholarship America, is structured as an employer-nomination scheme. Owners can put a team member forward for funding to pursue AI courses or certificate programmes of their choice. Mike Nylund, President and CEO of Scholarship America, framed it as workforce insurance against rapid technology change. “AI tools give small businesses a world of opportunity, and education and training ensure that their workforce is ready to meet the moment,” he said.

For British small business owners watching from the other side of the Atlantic, the cash element is off the table, but the Generation training is not. The curriculum is open globally and free at the point of use, putting it within reach of any UK firm prepared to commit a few hours of staff time. With the Government continuing to push productivity as the central economic challenge facing the country, and with AI repeatedly identified as the most plausible lever for small firms to pull, programmes that lower the barrier to competent adoption are likely to attract growing interest.

Generation is running multiple cohorts throughout the year, with registration open via its website. Applications close on 10 June 2026.

Read more:
American Express opens free AI training to small firms as adoption gap widens

Amazon has quietly opened a new front in the battle for ultra-fast delivery, becoming the first retailer in Britain to drop parcels by drone after a limited launch in Darlington, County Durham.

The service, operated under the company’s long-gestating Prime Air programme, will see packages weighing less than 5lb (2.2kg) flown out from an Amazon fulfilment centre to homes within a 7.5-mile (12km) radius. Initial payloads are unglamorous but practical: beauty products, batteries, charging cables and the kind of small household items shoppers tend to discover they need only when it is already too late to drive to the shops.

For Amazon, which first promised drone deliveries more than a decade ago and has since watched the technology stutter through regulatory and engineering setbacks, the Darlington launch is both a proof point and a test bed. For Britain’s retail sector, including the small and medium-sized businesses that increasingly rely on Amazon’s logistics network, it is a sharper reminder still that the goalposts on customer expectation are moving once again.

The trial’s earliest beneficiary was Rob Shield, a Darlington farmer who let Amazon use an Airbnb on his land for its first test runs. The novelty, he admits, soon took over.

“Initially it was a novelty, so we were ordering everything under the sun,” he says. “Pens, paper, chocolates, anything to make it keep coming.”

Parcels arrive in shoebox-sized packages, released from a height of around 12ft onto the front garden. The spectacle, Mr Shield concedes, drew its own audience: “We’d have people come just to see it.”

What began as a curiosity has become, in his telling, a quiet utility. “You start realising, ‘I actually need something today’, like tape measures and stuff you’re always losing. We just order it and it comes.”

In the UK, Amazon’s drones currently promise delivery within two hours. The American benchmark is rather more pointed: David Carbon, vice president of Amazon Prime Air, says the average delivery time in the US is now 36 minutes.

“The certainty is people have never told us they want their stuff slower,” he says. “If you’ve got kids and you want fever medication, you want it. You don’t want to drive to the store.”

Amazon will cap operations at ten flights an hour and up to one hundred deliveries a day on weekdays, a deliberately modest cadence designed to satisfy regulators rather than sceptical shareholders.

The aircraft in question is the MK30, Amazon’s latest model, fitted with sensors intended to avoid trampolines, washing lines, pedestrians and other aircraft. GPS guides the drone to each drop-off, where it releases its load. “This is effectively an autonomous drone that can do what a pilot does in a flight deck. It can do what ground crews do, and it can deliver a package,” Mr Carbon says.

That autonomy is not absolute. The Darlington flights are conducted “beyond visual line of sight”, BVLOS in industry parlance, but every aircraft is monitored remotely by an operator who liaises with air traffic control at nearby Teesside Airport when required.

The choice of Darlington is, on closer inspection, a piece of careful corporate scouting rather than an accident of geography. The town offers a useful mix of residential streets, major roads and an airport in close proximity, allowing Amazon to stress-test its kit across multiple environments without travelling far. Crucially, it sits beside an Amazon hub with the deep stock needed to support the service.

It is also the only location outside the United States where the company is operating drone deliveries.

The Civil Aviation Authority has granted approval for a trial running to the end of the year, with temporary protected airspace, a regulatory prerequisite for autonomous flight under current rules, secured until mid-June and expected to be extended. Darlington Borough Council, which approved temporary planning permission for what it described as the “unprecedented nature of the scheme”, said it was “great to see Darlington at the forefront of such a pioneering scheme which highlights our borough as an area of innovation, development and investment”.

The limits of flying logistics

For all the choreography, the technology has obvious constraints. Eligible customers will need a garden or yard. Flats and terraces without outside space are excluded.

Dr Anna Jackman, an associate professor of geography at the University of Reading, says the Darlington trial illustrates both the promise and the limitations of the technology. “A lot of our demand for delivery services is in urban centres. They are very densely populated, very congested. And the reality is [drone deliveries] don’t work well in high-rise buildings.”

Rooftop drop-offs and centrally located drone hubs are being explored, she adds, “but right now we’re not there yet”.

There is also the question of safety, where Amazon’s record is not unblemished. In February, an MK30 drone clipped the gutter of an apartment building in a Dallas suburb after losing GPS signal, falling to the ground and breaking apart. No one was hurt, and Amazon has since suspended deliveries to similar buildings. Mr Carbon describes it as one of the “things we learn as we go along”, noting that 170,000 drone flights have been completed safely.

Drones are not entirely new to British skies. The NHS is trialling them to ferry blood supplies across London, and Royal Mail is using them to reach remote communities in Orkney. Amazon’s intervention is different in character: this is a commercial play by the country’s largest online retailer, and the read-across for smaller businesses is significant.

Independent retailers and the SMEs that use Amazon’s marketplace will, sooner or later, face customers who have come to view sub-two-hour delivery as the baseline. The pressure to match, or at least mitigate, that experience will fall hardest on those without the logistics muscle of a global platform. At the same time, the gradual normalisation of BVLOS flight could open new commercial doors for British drone operators, software firms and aerospace suppliers servicing the sector.

For now, the residents of Darlington are the test market, and reaction has been mixed. The launch itself ran years behind Amazon’s original 2023 pledge to begin in 2024, a reminder that aviation regulation does not bend easily to Silicon Valley timelines.

Mr Carbon is unrepentant. “We wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t commercially viable,” he says. “It’s a business, right? Absolutely, it can be commercially viable, and that’s the goal that we’re going after.”

Whether it ends up reshaping British retail logistics or remaining an expensively engineered curiosity will depend on what happens next: the regulator’s willingness to widen the airspace, Amazon’s appetite to keep spending, and customers’ willingness to look up.

Read more:
Amazon’s drones touch down in Darlington in UK delivery first

Britain’s state-backed economic development bank has thrown its weight behind one of the country’s most enduring venture capital problems, committing an initial £1 million to co-invest with Angel Academe in female-led businesses across the United Kingdom.

The British Business Bank’s capital, announced today, will sit alongside private money raised by Angel Academe and its EIS fund, which is managed in partnership with crowdfunding-turned-fund-manager SyndicateRoom. The vehicle invests exclusively in high-growth companies with at least one female founder, writing cheques at seed and Series A. The first deals under the new arrangement are expected before the end of June.

The headline figure may look modest set against the sums sloshing around the wider venture market, but the symbolism is anything but. Female founders in the UK still receive less than two per cent of all venture capital deployed, a stubborn statistic that has barely shifted in a decade despite a procession of well-meaning initiatives, codes and pledges. Angel Academe was a founding signatory of the Investing in Women Code, and today’s commitment marks one of the more concrete moves yet from a state institution to put taxpayer-backed capital where the rhetoric has long been.

For an Angel Academe portfolio that already includes Béa Fertility, the at-home conception platform, supply chain transparency outfit Provenance and consumer data privacy business Data Wøllet, the British Business Bank’s involvement amounts to a meaningful seal of approval. Institutional money tends to follow institutional money, and the bank’s imprimatur could prove more valuable to the funds’ fundraising efforts than the cheque itself.

Graham Schwikkard, chief executive of SyndicateRoom, was unambiguous about the thesis. “It’s not a lack of talent, it’s a lack of access,” he said. “This £1m isn’t just capital, it’s a signal to the market that female-led businesses are some of the most undervalued assets in the UK right now. We’re looking for the next sector-defining companies that others are simply missing.”

Sarah Turner, who founded Angel Academe and serves as its chief executive, struck a similar note. “We don’t have a pipeline problem; we have a funding problem,” she said. “By partnering with the British Business Bank, we’re able to put more capital into the hands of women who are building the future of healthcare, data, and commerce.”

Nancy Liu, senior investment manager at British Business Bank Investments, framed the commitment in growth terms rather than purely as an equity question. “The gender investment gap isn’t just a matter of equality, it’s also a barrier to potential growth and innovation in the UK,” she said. “Female founders remain significantly underfunded and the British Business Bank aims to unlock potential across the UK by ensuring diverse entrepreneurs have access to finance, including female founders.”

The funding gap is particularly pronounced in technology and healthcare, where ticket sizes are larger and capital intensity higher — and where, perhaps not coincidentally, the dearth of female cheque-writers on the other side of the table has been most loudly criticised. Whether £1 million of public money proves the catalyst for a meaningful shift, or simply another data point in a long-running debate, will depend on what the bank chooses to do next.

The Angel Academe EIS Funds form part of SyndicateRoom’s stable of tax-efficient investment vehicles, which also includes the Carbon13 SEIS Fund, the Access EIS Fund and the SR Carry Back EIS Fund. SyndicateRoom has now deployed capital into more than 200 British businesses since its launch.

Read more:
British Business Bank pledges £1m to close gender funding gap through Angel Academe partnership

British SMEs operating in one of the country’s fastest-moving aviation frontiers have been handed a significant vote of confidence, after the Government today committed almost £50 million to accelerate the rollout of commercial drones and flying taxis, while bringing in tougher rules to ground the rogue operators clouding the sector’s reputation.

The £46.5 million package, announced by the Department for Transport on 5 May, is designed to dismantle the regulatory bottlenecks that have long frustrated drone start-ups and advanced air mobility firms hoping to scale up their operations across the UK. Ministers believe the wider sector could be worth as much as £103 billion to the economy by 2050, supporting tens of thousands of skilled jobs in engineering, manufacturing, software and operations.

Of the total, £26.5 million will be channelled through the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to streamline approvals for commercial drone use, particularly in emergency response, medical logistics and infrastructure inspection, and to lay the groundwork for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, more commonly known as flying taxis, to enter UK skies from 2028. Operators will also benefit from a digitised application process intended to slash the time spent navigating red tape.

The remaining £20.5 million will fund the UK’s first bespoke drone identification system, effectively a numberplate for the skies. Using Hybrid Remote ID technology, the system will broadcast a drone’s identity and location during flight, enabling police and other authorised bodies to identify operators in real time and pursue those flying illegally or recklessly.

Aviation, Maritime and Decarbonisation Minister Keir Mather said the investment was about backing British innovators while keeping public trust intact. “We’re backing the next generation of British aviation innovators with nearly £50 million to drive drone regulation reforms, and unlock barriers to growth that will create jobs, lower emissions, and further the UK’s world-leading aviation reputation,” he said. “Innovation must go hand in hand with strong security, that’s why over half of our investment will develop a new ID system to track drones in real-time, supporting emergency services and building public confidence in an industry that could be worth up to £103 billion by 2050.”

Security Minister Dan Jarvis was blunter still on the enforcement angle. “This funding will create a numberplate system for the skies,” he said. “Law enforcement will be able to identify and take action against those who break the law, taking drones out of the sky, and protecting the public.”

For SMEs working at the sharp end of the industry, the announcement is being read as a long-overdue acknowledgement that regulation has lagged behind technology. Sophie O’Sullivan, director of future safety and innovation at the CAA, said the funding would help unlock routine drone deliveries, long-range inspections and hospital logistics. “Our work going on right now is laying the foundations for commercial operation in the future,” she said. “This vital funding supports the next generation of aerospace, strengthening safety and bringing economic growth for the UK.”

Industry leaders broadly welcomed the move. Stuart Simpson, chief executive of Bristol-based eVTOL firm Vertical Aerospace, said a regulator able to move at pace was essential if Britain hoped to lead in advanced air mobility. “The UK’s CAA has been a serious and constructive partner,” he said. “This investment is a further step towards positioning the UK at the leading edge of the eVTOL sector as it moves towards commercial operations.”

Stephen Wright, chairman and founder of autonomous cargo drone manufacturer Windracers, said the package combined the two ingredients smaller operators have been calling for. “Targeted investment alongside practical regulatory reform is exactly what is needed to unlock real world operations at scale,” he said. “At Windracers, we see first-hand how autonomous aviation can strengthen supply chains, support critical services and operate reliably in some of the most challenging environments.”

The announcement sits alongside a broader Government push to cement the UK as what ministers describe as an “aviation superpower”, including airspace modernisation, £2.3 billion for the development of greener aircraft and a further £63 million for sustainable aviation fuel. For the country’s drone and AAM SMEs, many of which have spent years burning runway waiting for regulation to catch up, today’s commitment may finally signal that the runway is clearing.

Read more:
Government commits £46.5m to fast-track drone industry and tackle rogue operators

GameStop, the American video game chain that became the standard-bearer of the 2021 meme stock frenzy, has stunned Wall Street with an unsolicited $55.5bn (£40.9bn) cash-and-stock offer for the online marketplace eBay, an audacious reverse takeover that would see a company worth roughly a quarter of its target attempt to swallow it whole.

The bid, pitched at $125 a share, represents a $20 premium on eBay’s closing price in New York on Friday. Ryan Cohen, GameStop’s chief executive and the activist investor who engineered the retailer’s improbable turnaround, has signalled he is prepared to take the offer directly to eBay shareholders should the board rebuff him.

Cohen, who has built a reputation for cage-rattling boardroom interventions since making his name as the founder of online pet retailer Chewy, told the Wall Street Journal that eBay “should be worth, and will be worth, a lot more money,” adding that the marketplace “could be a legit competitor to Amazon” under fresh ownership. Under the terms tabled, he would become chief executive of the enlarged group on neither salary nor bonus, taking remuneration solely on the basis of share price performance.

The proposal has been met with thinly veiled scepticism from the City and Wall Street alike. Morgan Stanley described the two companies as having “fundamentally different” business models, while analysts at Bernstein pointed to the yawning gap between GameStop’s balance sheet and the scale of the prize, saying they would be “surprised if anything became of it”. Sucharita Kodali, retail analyst at the research firm Forrester, was equally blunt in conversation with Business Matters, warning that the deal “would saddle eBay with GameStop’s debt” and noting drily: “The truth is, we are not necessarily putting two strong companies together.”

Even so, the financial architecture is in place. GameStop, currently capitalised at around $11.9bn, has secured a commitment letter from TD Securities for some $20bn of debt finance, and Cohen has earmarked $2bn of annual cost cuts within twelve months of completion, savings he intends to wring largely from eBay’s sales and marketing function, which he argues has failed to capitalise on what GameStop terms a “marketplace with near-universal brand recognition”.

For eBay, the approach lands at a delicate juncture. Founded in 1995 as a haven for hobbyists and collectors, the platform was once a defining icon of the early internet but has watched its active user base contract from 175 million in 2018 to 136 million today, ground steadily lost to Amazon, Shopify-powered direct-to-consumer brands and a new wave of social commerce upstarts. The board confirmed it would consider the proposal, though insiders have privately questioned whether a leveraged bid from a smaller bricks-and-mortar operator constitutes a credible route forward.

GameStop’s own story remains one of corporate theatre. Catapulted into the public consciousness during the pandemic, when an army of retail investors organising on Reddit forced a short squeeze that briefly rewrote market mechanics, the company has since used its inflated valuation to shore up its balance sheet and pivot under Cohen, who took the chief executive role in 2023. Net profit climbed to $418.4m in 2025, up from $131.3m the previous year, although top-line sales continued to slide, the familiar pattern of a retailer cutting its way to profitability rather than growing into it.

Investors delivered their verdict swiftly. eBay shares closed up 5 per cent in New York on Monday, while GameStop tumbled by more than 9 per cent, the market’s blunt assessment that any value created by the deal would flow firmly in one direction.

For Cohen, however, the strategic logic extends beyond the spreadsheet. GameStop’s network of roughly 1,600 American stores would, he argues, hand eBay a ready-made physical footprint for live commerce, authentication services and other ventures that have struggled to gain traction online alone. Whether that proposition is sufficient to overcome the structural and financial objections piling up against the bid is, for the moment, very much an open question.

What is not in doubt is that Cohen has, once again, ensured that the corporate establishment cannot ignore him.

Read more:
Gamestop tables shock $55.5bn swoop for eBay as Cohen sets sights on Amazon

Microsoft is to plant a fresh flag in central London, taking the entirety of Film House, an eight-storey Art Deco landmark on Wardour Street, to serve as the principal home of its rapidly expanding UK artificial intelligence operations.

The deal underscores how the world’s deepest-pocketed technology groups are doubling down on the capital as the AI arms race intensifies. Microsoft, alongside Meta and Amazon, is committing billions of dollars to compute, talent and real estate in pursuit of a slice of what is shaping up to be the defining commercial contest of the decade.

Film House carries no small amount of cinematic provenance. Built in the 1920s as the first British outpost of French film studio Pathé, complete with private screening rooms, the building later housed HMV before serving as Nike’s UK headquarters. Texas-based developer Hines acquired the property in 2023 and has since refurbished it to court the buoyant demand for premium workspace. Tenants will find a gym, a bar, a rooftop terrace, a so-called hidden courtyard, showers and changing rooms, and, in a nod to the building’s heritage, a cinema in the basement.

Even with Film House secured, Microsoft is understood to be hunting for a substantially larger London headquarters to consolidate its wider workforce in the capital. Property agents suggest the company has its eye on a 300,000 sq ft footprint, three times the size of the Soho building, somewhere along the Elizabeth Line, where transport connectivity has reshaped occupier appetite.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the Film House lease but said: “We are committed to the UK and have facilities across the country. We regularly review our portfolio to make sure it meets the needs of our people and our long-term business.” Hines also declined to comment.

The American group is far from alone. Last month OpenAI signed a lease for a larger base near King’s Cross, just around the corner from rival Anthropic, which recently confirmed plans to move into the same neighbourhood. The clustering effect is unmistakable, and is rippling through the wider SME ecosystem of AI start-ups, scale-ups and supporting professional services drawn to the gravitational pull of the majors.

Mike Gedye, head of European technology leasing at CBRE, said: “We expect London’s depth of talent and established tech ecosystem to continue reinforcing its position as a global hub for technology and AI. Tech and AI businesses are making a footprint in London on a relatively small or short-term lease, but upsizing significantly within 18 to 24 months.”

That trajectory has profound implications for the capital’s commercial property market. CBRE estimates AI companies could absorb close to half of all the speculative office space currently under construction in London. Between now and 2033, the firm’s analysts forecast that AI occupiers will take up to four million sq ft of workspace, the equivalent of roughly eight Gherkins.

Not everyone is convinced the boom will hold. Some in the property industry warn that AI’s productivity gains may ultimately translate into fewer jobs across the wider economy, eroding tenant demand. Landlords, however, are betting the other way, calculating that the explosive growth of start-up technology businesses will more than compensate for any contraction at more traditional employers.

For London’s smaller technology firms, the message from Microsoft’s Soho move is clear: the capital’s AI gold rush is gathering pace, and the postcodes around it are about to get very crowded indeed.

Read more:
Microsoft plants AI flag in Soho with Film House lease as London tech land grab accelerates

NatWest has cashed in on the surge in borrowing costs unleashed by the war in Iran, posting a 12.2 per cent jump in first-quarter pre-tax profits to £2 billion and lifting its revenue guidance for the year, the latest sign that Britain’s biggest lenders are reaping the rewards of a market that no longer expects the Bank of England to keep cutting rates.

The FTSE 100 bank comfortably outpaced the £1.9 billion pencilled in by City analysts, with results published on Friday showing total income up 9.5 per cent year-on-year at just shy of £4.4 billion. Crucially for shareholders, its net interest margin, the gap between what the bank charges on loans and pays out on deposits, widened to 2.47 per cent from 2.27 per cent a year earlier.

Buoyed by the stronger quarter, NatWest told investors it now expects full-year income, stripping out one-off effects, to land at the “top end” of its previously guided range of £17.2 billion to £17.6 billion, citing “our latest expectations for interest rates and economic conditions”.

The numbers complete a hat-trick of bumper updates from Britain’s high-street giants, following similarly strong figures from Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays earlier in the week. Together they underline how the higher-for-longer rates regime, re-imposed by the energy price shock that followed the outbreak of war on 28 February, has transformed the economics of UK retail and commercial banking, at least in the short term.

Paul Thwaite, chief executive of NatWest, was at pains to play down any suggestion that the bank was simply riding a geopolitical wave. “It’s a good set of numbers but the numbers are driven by doing things for customers,” he said, pointing to deposits up 2.5 per cent year-on-year at £445.5 billion and net lending 6.6 per cent higher at £396.4 billion.

For the millions of households and small businesses on the receiving end, however, the numbers tell a more uncomfortable story. With inflation expectations climbing, swap rates, the wholesale benchmarks that lenders use to price fixed-rate mortgages, have jumped sharply. The average two-year fixed residential deal stood at 4.83 per cent before the conflict, according to data provider Moneyfacts, but has since climbed to 5.78 per cent. The Bank of England held its base rate at 3.75 per cent this week but warned that borrowing costs may need to rise “significantly” if price pressures persist.

Higher rates, of course, cut both ways. They flatter margins, but they also stress-test the loan book. NatWest set aside a £140 million charge to reflect the war’s likely drag on the economy, taking its quarterly impairment for expected credit losses to £283 million, up from £189 million in the same period last year. The bank is now modelling UK economic growth of just 0.4 per cent this year, with unemployment peaking at 5.7 per cent.

Thwaite was candid about the limits of forecasting in the current climate. “None of us know exactly how it’s going to pan out over the course of the rest of the year; a lot of that will depend on the duration of the energy shock,” he said.

For now, though, NatWest’s books are holding up. Katie Murray, the bank’s finance chief, said the lender had “not seen significant shifts in customer behaviour or signs of stress”, a guarded but pointed reassurance for investors mindful that today’s fatter margins could quickly be eroded if SME borrowers and mortgage holders begin to buckle under the weight of dearer debt.

For Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses, already navigating tighter credit conditions and weaker demand, the read-across is sobering: the banks may be thriving on the new rate environment, but the cost of capital for the rest of the economy is heading in only one direction.

Read more:
Natwest profits jump to £2bn as Iran conflict drives mortgage rates higher

Britain’s reputation as Europe’s cleantech powerhouse is being undermined by a brutal funding drought at the very bottom of the pipeline, with new figures showing investment in the country’s youngest low-carbon and renewable energy companies has collapsed to its lowest level in five years.

Research published by Cleantech for UK (CTUK) reveals that the value of early-stage deals halved in 2025, while the number of transactions plunged from 188 in 2024 to just 94 last year. The slump comes despite the broader sector pulling in £7.2 billion of investment overall, comfortably outstripping Germany’s £1.7 billion and France’s £1.4 billion.

The headline figure may flatter to deceive. Strip away the late-stage mega-deals and a far more uncomfortable picture emerges of an industry whose seed corn is being eaten before it has chance to germinate.

“If we allow the pipeline to dry up now, it means we’ll have no new innovation in cleantech coming through in five years’ time,” warns Sarah Mackintosh, director of CTUK and a former head of innovation at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. “Funders will be sitting there waiting for scale-ups and none will come.”

CTUK, established in 2023 to bridge the gap between Whitehall and the venture community, attributes the early-stage collapse to what it terms a “triple squeeze”: punishingly high industrial energy prices, the quiet closure last year of the Government’s Net Zero Innovation Portfolio without a successor, and investor caution rooted in higher interest rates.

Westminster’s recent decision to decouple gas and electricity prices, severing the link that has long allowed expensive gas to set the price for cheaper renewables, is expected to deliver what Mackintosh calls a “fairly immediate impact”. Yet it does little to address the underlying reality that British industrial energy costs remain among the dearest in Europe, a particular handicap for the capital-hungry sectors at the heart of the energy transition such as battery manufacturing and carbon capture infrastructure.

To these domestic headwinds has been added a fresh geopolitical shock. The US-Iran conflict and tensions around the Strait of Hormuz have rekindled fears of an oil and gas price spiral, with the International Monetary Fund warning that Britain faces the sharpest growth downgrade in the G7 and one of the highest inflation rates as a consequence.

Mackintosh notes that higher rates and the increase in employers’ national insurance contributions have also dulled the appetite of venture capital firms, whose money, she says, “doesn’t go as far as it used to”.

The picture is rather rosier further up the funding ladder. Total equity investment in cleantech rose by 58 per cent year-on-year to £3.9 billion, though the bulk of that capital flowed to software businesses and proven, late-stage operators. Among the standouts was a £750 million raise by Kraken, the energy technology platform owned by Octopus Energy Group, and a £130 million round for energy infrastructure specialist Highview Power. The total nevertheless sits well shy of the £11.9 billion peak struck in 2023.

CTUK is now urging the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank to deploy their firepower more aggressively to help young firms cross the so-called valley of death between a laboratory breakthrough and a commercial factory. The National Wealth Fund signalled in January that it intends to channel up to £5 billion a year of taxpayer money into green energy projects, but the question for SMEs is whether any of that will reach companies still trying to prove their technology at scale.

Mackintosh points to British innovators such as battery-tech firm Anaphite, materials specialist Immaterial and carbon-removal venture Supercritical as the sort of “world-leading” businesses now in jeopardy. “These are the sorts of companies that are going to put the UK on the map,” she says. “It would be a travesty if we didn’t even start the ideas because they haven’t got the backing to scale up.”

For a Government that has staked much of its industrial strategy on green growth, the warning lights are flashing. Without urgent intervention to rekindle early-stage investment, ministers risk presiding over a clean-energy economy that imports tomorrow’s breakthrough technologies rather than exports them.

Read more:
Britain’s green start-ups face ‘triple squeeze’ as early-stage funding crashes to five-year low

Christina Ong’s Como Group has emerged as a key shareholder in the lossmaking SL6, the holding company behind The Fat Duck and the Hinds Head, handing the celebrity chef the firepower to expand.

The Singaporean billionaire long credited with turning London’s Bond Street into a luxury catwalk has set her sights on a rather more idiosyncratic British institution: the country kitchen of Heston Blumenthal.

Christina Ong, the 78-year-old fashion mogul and hotelier dubbed the “Queen of Bond Street”, has emerged as the new financial backer of the celebrity chef’s lossmaking restaurant empire. Filings lodged this week show that her family’s Como Group has become a key shareholder with significant control of SL6, the holding company behind Blumenthal’s culinary ventures.

The deal hands the Ong family a foothold in one of British gastronomy’s most distinctive brands and offers the chef the financial muscle to push into new markets. It is understood the cash injection will underpin the expansion of Blumenthal’s award-winning operations, headed by The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant that almost single-handedly placed British “molecular gastronomy” on the world map when it opened in 1995. Blumenthal, 59, also operates the nearby Hinds Head pub close to Maidenhead.

“Como’s international experience in the hospitality sector opens up new doors for what comes next,” Blumenthal said, adding that the partnership would allow the group to “explore new possibilities”.

The investment arrives at a delicate moment for SL6. In its most recent set of accounts, the company conceded it was in talks with potential investors to secure long-term funding “to help overcome the current economic challenges [and] provide a foundation for future growth”. For the 12 months to the end of May 2024, revenues fell to £8.9 million from £9.5 million while pre-tax losses widened to £2.1 million, up from £1.4 million the previous year.

A spokeswoman for the company sought to balance the picture, insisting that demand for reservations across both restaurants remained robust and that the Hinds Head had delivered consistent month-on-month growth over the past 18 months, putting it on course for a record year.

Ong’s arrival comes only weeks after Blumenthal confirmed the closure of Dinner by Heston, his two-Michelin-starred ode to historical British cookery housed within the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge. The London site, which opened in 2011, will shut once the hotel tenancy expires, although a sister Dinner by Heston, opened in 2023 inside the Atlantis The Royal hotel on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, continues to trade.

For Como Group, the deal extends a hospitality and lifestyle empire that already spans 15 countries. Headquartered in Singapore and controlled by the Ong family, it operates 11 restaurants, the bulk of them in its home city, alongside a portfolio of 19 luxury hotels and resorts in markets including London, Italy, France, the Maldives, Bali, Australia and Thailand. The group’s first foray into food and beverage came in 1989, when it opened the Armani Café in London.

Ong herself is a fixture of British retail and luxury. She founded the Club21 fashion boutiques in 1972 and, through Challice, the investment vehicle she runs with her 80-year-old husband Ong Beng Seng, holds a 56 per cent stake in Mulberry, the British leather goods house. Her interests also include a string of fashion franchise stores running brands such as Emporio Armani.

“We see this partnership as the beginning of something very special,” Ong said. “We look forward to supporting that continued evolution of these iconic restaurants, while unlocking new opportunities for thoughtful growth in the years ahead.”

The deal also marks a public reappearance for the Ong family on the corporate stage. Last year, Ong Beng Seng was fined S$23,400 after pleading guilty to a charge linked to a gift scandal involving a former Singaporean government minister. He had faced a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment, but a judge granted “judicial mercy” in light of his poor health.

For Blumenthal, who has spent three decades coaxing Britons into eating snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream, the message to the dining public is more prosaic. With Como’s chequebook now within reach, the chef has the runway to refresh, and quite possibly enlarge, an empire that, for all its critical acclaim, has been struggling to make the books balance.

Read more:
Singapore’s ‘Queen of Bond Street’ takes a seat at Heston Blumenthal’s table

Britain’s biggest winemaker uncorks a record-breaking year as chief executive James Pennefather sticks to his audacious target of capturing 1 per cent of the global champagne market by 2035.

Chapel Down, Britain’s largest winemaker, has sold more than a million bottles of English sparkling wine in a single year for the first time, a watershed moment in its bid to seize 1 per cent of the global champagne market by 2035.

The Kent-based producer, listed on London’s junior Aim market and backed by the billionaire Lord Spencer of Alresford, said the million-bottle haul equates to roughly 0.4 per cent of champagne’s worldwide market share. James Pennefather, who took the helm as chief executive last year, expects that figure to climb to 0.7 per cent by the end of the decade.

Pennefather said the company’s long-term ambition was anchored in the available acreage across its native Kent. “We certainly do have options to get there faster, but it also slightly depends on what happens to the wider champagne market,” he said.

While champagne has historically been the preserve of formal celebrations, Pennefather argued that English sparkling wine was redrawing the boundaries of the category. “One of the real strengths of Chapel Down and English sparkling wine is that we’ve expanded the number of occasions on which people are drinking high-value sparkling wines,” he said. “That gives us confidence that we are also expanding the category as a whole.”

The company farms more than 1,000 acres of vineyards across the south-east of England, producing both still and sparkling wines. Its growing brand profile has been bolstered by partnerships with Ascot, The Boat Race and the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Results for the year ending 31 December 2025 lay bare the appetite for home-grown fizz. Group revenues climbed 19 per cent to £19.4 million, fuelled chiefly by a 38 per cent surge in off-trade sales through supermarkets to £9.4 million on the back of a 5 per cent rise in listings.

On-trade sales, those flowing through pubs, bars and restaurants, edged up 5 per cent to £2.6 million, helped by new account wins. International revenues jumped 49 per cent to £1 million, lifted by the firm’s tie-up with Jackson Family Wines in the United States and a higher profile at British airports and St Pancras International station.

The performance pushed Chapel Down back into the black, with pre-tax profits of £469,000 compared with a £1.4 million loss the previous year. Buoyed by a strong start to 2026, the board reaffirmed guidance for net sales of £22.1 million, in line with City consensus.

Pennefather conceded that the conflict in Iran was a watch-point for the business, although the Middle East accounts for only a “small” share of revenues. “We haven’t seen any immediate impact,” he said, “but a sustained increase in fuel costs could have an impact on profitability.”

Elsewhere, investors raised a glass to Carlsberg after the Danish brewer posted its first quarterly volume rise in a year, helped by its push into soft drinks. The world’s third-largest brewer, which counts Kronenbourg, Skol and Somersby cider among its stable, reported a 2.8 per cent lift in total organic volumes during the first quarter, with growth across every region. Soft drinks volumes leapt 10 per cent, driven in no small part by its £3.3 billion takeover of Britvic, while beer volumes nudged 0.4 per cent higher.

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Chapel Down toasts million-bottle milestone in race to challenge champagne