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

“Don’t confuse cancellation with failure.” That, famously, was the line David Letterman, the bloke who actually built The Late Show, passed to Jon Stewart years ago. And it was the line Stewart hurled back across the Ed Sullivan Theater this week, voice catching, finger jabbing, as Stephen Colbert prepared the wake for America’s number-one late-night programme.

Read that again. Number. One. As in top of the bloody pile, comfortably ahead of Fallon and Kimmel, the most watched chat show in the United States. And tonight, somewhere around 11:35pm in New York, CBS will pull down the shutters, sweep the studio and try to convince us, with all the conviction of a teenager denying he’s been at the cooking sherry, that this was, and I quote, “purely a financial decision.”

Of course it was. And I am Beyoncé.

Let us be grown-ups about this. CBS euthanised its highest-rated chat show three days after its host called the network’s parent company, Paramount, out for paying Donald Trump a sixteen-million-dollar settlement over a 60 Minutes interview. Colbert called it, with the kind of plainness America used to specialise in, a “big fat bribe”. Seventy-two hours later, the man was told he was for the chop. The merger Paramount needed waved through by Trump’s pet FCC sailed merrily on soon after. If you don’t smell something on the breeze, you’ve no nose.

Letterman, never knowingly understated, called CBS executives “lying weasels” and signed off with a parting shot, borrowed from Ed Murrow and inflected with a vowel Lord Reith would not have approved, that I cannot quote in these pages without an asterisk. Quite right too. The man invented the franchise. He owns the moral high ground and he’s busy strewing it with broken set furniture flung from the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

For those of us who have written before about Colbert and the slow strangulation of political satire in the age of Trump, tonight is not so much a final episode as a final warning. The message coming out of West 53rd Street is now horribly simple: take the mickey out of the man in the Oval Office, embarrass the parent company in front of the regulators he appoints, and your career, Emmy-bedecked, network-leading, fifty-two weeks a year, is over before the band finishes the play-out.

That is not a financial decision. That is a precedent. And a vile one.

I happen to run businesses for a living. I have spent thirty years arguing that British plc should be tougher, braver, more willing to stick its hand up at the back of the room. So I am the last person to wring my hands when an American media giant decides it can no longer afford a hundred-million-dollar talk show. Late-night is unwell. Audiences are migrating to TikTok and YouTube faster than commissioners can flick the studio lights on. Even my dog has a podcast.

But that is not what happened here. What happened here is that a man told a joke about a man who cannot take a joke, and the bean counters folded the chair he was sitting on. As I argued when Trump’s tariffs began squeezing British exports, this White House treats business as an extension of grievance. CBS didn’t get cancelled by the market. It got cancelled by a sulk.

That is the bit that ought to terrify British boardrooms, not just American ones. Because the chilling effect does not stop at the Hudson. Every UK media business doing deals in the United States, every studio, streamer, format house, news brand, is now reading the body language. Don’t annoy the President. Don’t let your talent annoy the President. Settle, smile, soften the gag. It is, to borrow from another television creation I have written about, Jed Bartlet’s worst nightmare arriving on a Wednesday afternoon: the executive branch quietly dictating the punchlines.

We are British. We invented taking the mickey out of the powerful. From Spitting Image to Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You to whatever Charlie Brooker fancies doing next Wednesday, satire is, for us, a load-bearing wall of national life. A democracy that cannot laugh at its leaders is not a democracy in good health; it is a banana republic with better dental cover.

Colbert, for what it is worth, will be seen off in his final week by Jon Stewart, Tom Hanks and Barack Obama, hardly the send-off you stage for a man whose ratings have gone south. Letterman is right. Cancellation is not failure. The failure belongs to CBS, to Paramount, and to every executive who decided that the easiest way to grow up was to crouch down.

The joke, on this last night, is not on Stephen Colbert. The joke is on the rest of us, if we sit politely and watch.

Read more:
Colbert’s final bow: How CBS cancelled the king of late night to keep Trump sweet

Somewhere in a damp Parisian hotel in October 1977, a young Geordie schoolteacher called Gordon Sumner picked up his bass, glanced at a faded poster of Cyrano de Bergerac in the foyer, leaned out of the window at the working girls below, and rattled off a small reggae-flavoured number about a prostitute he had never met.

He called her Roxanne. He spent, by most accounts, an afternoon on the thing. Possibly a long lunch. Certainly less time than I will have spent writing this column.

That song, in February 2022, helped Sting hand his entire songwriting catalogue, some six hundred tunes, to Universal Music Publishing for a reported $300 million. Roughly £240 million in real money. For lyrics scribbled on hotel notepads, in the back of tour buses, occasionally in the bath. Even allowing for inflation, alimony and the eye-watering price of his tantric retreats, it remains, in cold commercial terms, the single greatest example of “sweating the asset” I have ever encountered in business.

Consider the original economics. A pop song in 1977 was a perishable: three minutes of grooves pressed into a slab of polyvinyl chloride, designed to be bought for 75p, played to death, scratched by a teenager and replaced by next week’s offering. The label took the lion’s share. The writer, if he was lucky and his manager was honest, he usually wasn’t, got a few pence per copy. And yet here we are, half a century on, and Roxanne is still earning. Every car advert. Every karaoke licence. Every Spotify spin in a Bangkok cocktail bar at two in the morning. Every nostalgic Boomer thumbing repeat in his Range Rover on the M40 to Bicester Village.

Sting is not alone. Bob Dylan flogged his songwriting catalogue to Universal in late 2020 for around $300 million, then sold his recorded works to Sony the following summer for another $200 million. Bruce Springsteen, the working-class hero from Asbury Park, lifted somewhere between $500 and $600 million off Sony for his life’s work. Bowie’s estate, Genesis, Neil Young, Pink Floyd. The numbers are positively obscene, and rising.

Why? Because, according to the IFPI’s Global Music Report 2025, recorded music brought in $29.6 billion globally last year. Streaming alone topped $20 billion, fully 69 per cent of the pie. There are now 752 million paying subscribers worldwide and ten consecutive years of growth. The very technology that everyone solemnly said would kill the music industry, Napster, file-sharing, the iPod, the internet itself, has instead resurrected it as the perfect annuity. Music doesn’t sell once any more. It sells forever, in fractions of a penny, every second of every day, while the writer sleeps.

Compare that to the rest of us. The plumber who fitted my boiler in 2018 invoiced me, paid his VAT and moved on. The barrister who drafted our new sponsorship contracts billed by the hour and that was that. The architect, the dentist, the accountant, the management consultant, all selling time, all watching the clock, all running flat out until the day they retire and the cheques stop. Even the great industrial fortunes of the twentieth century, your Wedgwoods, your Hansons, your Goldsmiths, required factories, foundries, lorries, lawyers, picket lines and the occasional hostile takeover. Whereas Paul McCartney dreamt the melody of Yesterday in his girlfriend’s spare room in 1965, scribbled “scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs” as placeholder lyrics, and has since banked north of £19.5 million on a single song — the most-covered tune in human history, with more than three thousand versions. The Beatles’ catalogue is now valued comfortably north of £1.2 billion and reportedly throws off £70 to £90 million a year for owners who, gloriously, include almost none of the people who actually wrote it.

This is the lesson British business has been embarrassingly slow to learn. It is not what you make. It is what you make that keeps making. The whole intellectual property economy, software, brands, patents, content, is built on this principle. Microsoft writes Office once and bills you forever. Disney drew Mickey before the Wall Street Crash and is still suing people about him. Coca-Cola scribbled a formula on a piece of paper in 1886 and has paid for four generations of dividend cheques. But none of them, not one, possesses the casual, narcotic genius of the songwriter who spent an afternoon humming and is still cashing seven-figure royalty statements in his seventies.

We business owners should be furious. And inspired. In November 2023, The Beatles even released Now and Then, a John Lennon demo from the late seventies, patched up with artificial intelligence and a bit of Peter Jackson studio wizardry, and it strolled to number one in the UK, fifty-six years after their previous chart-topper. The asset, sweated and sweated and sweated again, and now sweating for a fourth generation of listeners who weren’t born when their grandparents bought the original LP.

So the next time some private equity grandee bangs the boardroom table demanding “operational efficiency” and “recurring revenue streams”, remind him gently that the most efficient business model in the modern economy is a paunchy Geordie with a guitar humming nonsense about a Parisian prostitute in 1977 and banking nine-figure cheques in his seventies. The rest of us should be so lucky. Or, more usefully, so clever.

Read more:
Sweating the asset: How Sting wrote Roxanne in an afternoon and sold it for £240 Million

I am not, in the ordinary run of things, a man given to civic exhortation. Lecture another adult on what to do with their Thursday and you tend to end up wearing their coffee, quite rightly.

But indulge me, just this once, because tomorrow is local election day across great swathes of England, and somebody has to say something about the great British shrug that has come to define our relationship with the ballot box at the parish-and-pothole level.

In the last round of council elections, turnout in some wards crept south of thirty per cent. Thirty per cent. Sit with that for a moment. Seven in ten adults, in possession of a franchise their grandparents fought a war to defend, opted instead to put the kettle on, watch a man on YouTube fitting a gearbox, or sit there in a state of low-grade irritation about Westminster as though the council had nothing whatever to do with their lives.

As though the council did not run their bins, set their parking charges, decide whether the vape shop next door could open at seven in the morning, and quietly determine, through the dark art of the local plan, whether a four-storey block of flats will rise next year on the patch of brownfield where their children currently kick a football.

I run businesses for a living, and I can tell you, as readers of this magazine will already know in their bones, that the people who shape your operating costs are not, in the main, the slick young SpAds and ambitious junior ministers preening on the Today programme.

They are councillors. People with names like Peter, Paul and Jane, even I used to be one for over a decade. People with dreadful lanyards and, mostly, excellent intentions. They set business rates relief schemes. They grant, or refuse, your A-board, your awning, your application for a pavement licence so the punters can drink rosé in the rain.

They decide whether your high street will boast a half-decent bus service or a bewildered taxi rank flanked by three Costas and a Greggs. They sign off road closures that can cost a small retailer a fortnight’s takings in a single botched resurfacing job. They run procurement budgets through which billions are quietly dispensed every year, and from which, incidentally, your own firm could perfectly well be eating, were you ever to bother with the tendering portal.

In short, if you run a business, the council is your landlord, your regulator, your customer and your traffic warden, all rolled into one slightly damp Edwardian building with a malfunctioning lift. Ignore it at your peril.

Now. I am not going to tell you who to vote for. I have my views, strong ones, in fact, ones I will not bore you with here because, frankly, they are not the point, and you have yours. That is the splendid, frustrating, occasionally infuriating glory of the thing. You may be a lifelong Conservative who has finally had enough. You may be Labour through and through, a Lib Dem with a clipboard, a Green who cycles, a Reform man who shouts, or one of those magnificent independents who slipped in last time on a single-issue ticket about the duck pond.

I do not care. I genuinely, profoundly, do not care. What I care about is that you put on a coat tomorrow, walk to the church hall, the primary school or the slightly dispiriting community centre, take the stubby pencil they have thoughtfully provided, and put a cross in a box.

Because here is the awkward truth: democracy is a muscle. Use it badly, use it crossly, use it with a heavy sigh and a glass of red waiting at home, but use it. Leave it in the drawer for too long and it withers, and once it has withered the people who do turn up, and they always turn up, get to decide everything for the rest of us. That is not a left-wing observation or a right-wing one. It is simply how arithmetic works in a polling station.

I am told there is a fashionable line these days, much retweeted by sixth-formers and weary executives alike, that “voting changes nothing”. To which the only sensible reply is: marvellous, then you will not object to my vote counting double. Of course it changes things. Ask any small business owner who has watched a sympathetic council slash parking charges, or an unsympathetic one slap on a workplace levy. Ask the publican facing a three a.m. licence refusal. Ask the parent whose new primary school exists because three hundred neighbours bothered to turn out one wet Thursday in May.

So. Tomorrow. Coat on, pencil up, cross in. I am not telling you who to vote for. I am telling you to vote. There is, I promise, a meaningful difference.

Read more:
Local Elections 2026: Why you must go out and vote tomorrow

There is a particular kind of silence that descends on a once-busy restaurant when last orders have come and gone, the candles have guttered, and the chef is out the back having a cigarette and contemplating bankruptcy. It is the sound of a small dream dying. And right now, across Britain, that silence is becoming deafening.

I have just returned from dinner at a perfectly nice neighbourhood bistro in west London, where the owner, a man who quit a comfortable banking job to chase the romance of feeding people, confessed somewhere between the burrata and the lamb that he is closing in September. Not because nobody comes. They come. They eat. They tip. They order the second bottle. But the maths, he sighed, no longer mathses.

The story is the same in every postcode. UKHospitality reckons we lost roughly one pub or restaurant every single day last year. The Hospitality Rising figures are grimmer still: chefs walking away, dining rooms going dark, sites being flogged off to coffee chains and vape shops. And yet our Chancellor has decided that what this fragile, brilliant, world-beating sector really needs is a thumping great kicking.

Let us count the bruises. From April 2025, employer National Insurance jumped to 15 per cent. The threshold at which businesses begin paying it was slashed from £9,100 to £5,000, which is a fancy Treasury way of saying that every waiter, every glass-polisher, every Saturday-morning kitchen porter is now considerably more expensive to employ. Throw in the National Living Wage rising to £12.21 an hour, business rates relief shrivelling from 75 per cent to a measly 40 per cent, and a stubborn refusal to cut hospitality VAT to anything resembling our European competitors, and you have what UKHospitality calculated as an additional £3.4 billion annual hit on the sector. Three-point-four. Billion. With a B.

To which Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have essentially shrugged and said: tough. Get on with it. Be more productive. Use AI. Yes, really, the Prime Minister actually suggested artificial intelligence was the answer to the front-of-house labour crisis. Has the man ever tried to get a chatbot to recommend the Picpoul de Pinet over the Sancerre, or to deal with a four-top of accountants splitting the bill seventeen ways?

I am not, as a rule, a conspiracist. But I am beginning to wonder whether this is plain incompetence or something darker. Because if you sat down with a clean sheet of paper and deliberately tried to design a policy package guaranteed to incinerate independent restaurants, you would land more or less exactly where this Government has landed. Hammer the labour costs. Hammer the property costs. Refuse the one tax cut, VAT, that would actually move the needle. Drive away the high-spending non-doms who used to keep Mayfair humming, propose extending the smoking ban to pub gardens and pavement tables, then make it harder still to recruit from abroad. Magnifique.

The rationale, presumably, is that restaurants are a luxury, frequented by people who can afford it, staffed by people who do not vote Labour. Easy political target. Wrong, of course. Our sector employs 3.5 million people, more than half of them under 30, many in their first proper job, learning skills no classroom ever taught, graft, courtesy, and how to charm a furious German tourist out of a complaint about the size of the prawns. Killing restaurants does not punish the rich. It punishes the kid from Croydon who wanted to be a sommelier, the Polish chef who built a life here, and the landlady whose pub still kept her village alive.

And here is the bit Reeves seems incapable of grasping: hospitality does not just feed us. It powers tourism, it props up high streets, it fills supply chains from Cornish dairies to Yorkshire breweries to the Kentish vineyards her colleagues love being photographed at. When a restaurant closes, the butcher feels it, the laundry firm feels it, the cab driver feels it, the florist feels it. You do not just lose a place to eat. You lose an entire ecosystem.

I had hoped, fool that I am, that this Labour Government might understand that. Many of its members, after all, claim to enjoy the occasional supper out, although one suspects most of theirs arrives by Deliveroo on the public purse. But policy after policy has revealed either profound ignorance of how a small business actually functions, or active hostility towards anyone who took a punt on themselves rather than waited patiently for a public sector pay rise.

The lights are going out across our high streets. The chairs are being stacked. The wine is being sold off at cost. And our Chancellor, when asked, musters only the platitude that growth takes time.

So does dying, Rachel. So does dying.

Read more:
Last orders for British hospitality: Are Reeves and Starmer trying to kill the UK restaurant sector?

There is a particular kind of dinner I have, every couple of months, in a particular kind of place, a Soho members’ club that lets you bring more than three people without an interrogation, in this case, with a particular kind of British technology founder.

He is, by his late thirties, on his third successful company. He has, between them, raised something north of £180 million in venture capital. He has, currently, about 220 employees in London, with another fifty due to be hired in the coming twelve months. He has, last week, sold a further $40 million tranche of his Series C to two American funds.

And he has, somewhere between his second and third glass of red, told me that he is moving the company’s headquarters to New York. Not on principle. Not on tax. Not on regulation. Not even, despite the obvious temptation in this column, on the Chancellor. He is moving because the next $200 million he needs, in 18 months, is in New York, and the practical day-to-day life of a CEO in a series of monthly trips to a city eight time zones from his children is, frankly, too painful. So he is moving the family. The London office will remain. It will, over time, get smaller. A version of this conversation has happened, by my count, with at least twelve British founders I know personally in the last two years.

Britain does not, in 2026, have a start-up problem. We start-up exquisitely. We have, by any international comparison, more new technology businesses per capita than nearly any other developed economy. Cambridge is, on its own, one of the great clusters of the world. London’s software and fintech ecosystems are deeper than Berlin’s, deeper than Paris’s, comparable to New York’s on most measures, with a couple of exceptions. We have brilliant universities, a working tax-incentive regime in EIS, a meaningful angel community, and a steady flow of seed and Series A capital.

What we have is a stay-at-home problem.

The numbers are visible if anyone bothers to look. UK technology IPOs, by listed value, are running at less than 12 per cent of US listings adjusted for relative GDP. UK Series C and onwards rounds are dominated, by deal count, by American lead investors. The proportion of UK technology companies founded in 2018 that have, by 2025, relocated their corporate domicile overseas, to the US, to Delaware, to Ireland, to Singapore, is now over 22 per cent. The proportion of all UK-founded unicorns that listed on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, rather than the London Stock Exchange, is over 80 per cent for the last decade. Eighty.

Why? It is not, despite the City lobbying, primarily a tax problem. American capital gains rates are not, in any meaningful sense, more friendly to founders than British rates. It is not, despite a great deal of Treasury-led discussion, a corporate-tax problem. The US corporate tax rate, when you blend federal and state, is comparable. It is not, despite the political mood music, a regulatory problem in the technology sectors that matter, the FCA, where it counts for fintech, is a notably more friendly regulator than its American equivalent.

It is, primarily, a depth-of-capital-pool problem. The UK pension system, despite the most articulate efforts of the Edinburgh Reforms and the Mansion House Compact and a half-dozen subsequent initiatives, allocates an embarrassingly small proportion of its £3 trillion of assets to growth-stage British equities. Canadian pension funds are, statistically, more invested in British scale-ups than British pension funds. This is the absurdity of the present situation: the world’s ninth-largest pension industry, hosted in Britain, is not investing in British growth, and is being out-deployed, in British growth equity, by Canadians, Australians, and Americans.

Fix the depth, and the rest of the problem largely goes with it. There are about three things to do. First, get UK Defined Contribution pension money, which is, by the way, growing at over £100 billion a year, into a properly structured British scale-up vehicle, at a meaningful target allocation, with a proper governance overlay. Second, restore the pre-2008 status of the London Stock Exchange as a competitive listing venue for technology businesses, by reforming the dual-class share structures and the listing-rules architecture that has kept it stranded in the era of utilities and miners. Third, make the EIS reliefs permanent, generous, and unfussy at the seed stage, so that the early-stage capital remains the easiest tier to raise.

None of this is impossible. None of this is even, in the international context, particularly bold. The Australians did most of it in 2008. The Canadians did most of it in 2014. The Singaporeans built theirs in around six years. We are, in 2026, still pondering it.

And in the meantime, my Soho friend will, in the autumn, leave. He will take the family. He will keep the London office. The American round will close. The next British unicorn, and there will be a next British unicorn, will, on present trajectory, list, again, in New York. The Mayoral candidates will, on the day after, all denounce the loss to “Brand London”. And the bottle of red, in our particular Soho members’ club, will be uncorked, again, by someone else.

We start-up brilliantly, in this country. We just need, finally, to learn how to keep them. The May locals, it turns out, are not the only thing on the ballot.

Read more:
Britain doesn’t have a start-up problem, it has a stay-at-home problem

Tomorrow is May Day, and somewhere in the middle of the country, a married couple in their early forties is opening up a small bakery for the third Friday in succession on which they have not, between them, drawn a salary.

They started the business in 2022. They re-mortgaged the house. They missed two of their daughter’s school plays last term, including the one where she had a line. They have not, for nineteen months, taken a day off. They are, on the official ONS labour-market classification, “self-employed”, which is to say they are not, technically, considered workers at all.

I would like, on this particular May Day, to suggest that they are.

There is a particular sleight-of-hand in British political language that has, over the last fifty years or so, produced an increasingly narrow definition of the word “worker”. A worker, in current usage, is someone who is paid by an employer in return for doing a job, ideally with a contract, a payslip, and a pension contribution. The “workers’ movement”, in modern parlance, is the political and industrial movement representing exactly that figure. Anyone outside the definition is, by implication, something else, an entrepreneur, an investor, a self-employed person, a small-business owner, a family-firm founder. They get other ministries, other sympathies, other adjectives. They do not, on the whole, get celebrated on May Day.

This is, frankly, ridiculous. The bakery couple work, on the broad numbers, more hours than any of their employees. They take home, on average, less per hour than their employees. They have less holiday, less protection, less pension, less sick pay, less of everything. Their economic risk is total. Their political clout is somewhere between negligible and non-existent. Their public image, in much of British political discourse, is closer to that of the tax-avoiding non-dom than that of the sympathetic NHS porter, which is, when you actually meet either, a perfect inversion of reality.

There are, by the latest ONS estimate, just over 4.3 million self-employed workers in the UK. Of those, around 600,000 run businesses with employees of their own. They collectively contribute approximately £303 billion to UK GDP, which is more than the entire UK financial-services sector. They pay corporation tax, dividend tax, capital gains tax, employer NICs, business rates, VAT, and insurance premium tax. They keep more than three million Britons in PAYE jobs. They are, in any meaningful definition, the productive backbone of the country.

And, for at least the last decade, they have been treated by every successive UK administration with a mixture of mild benign neglect and occasional, almost incidental, cruelty. IR35 was a cruelty. Making Tax Digital is a cruelty. The narrowing of business property relief on inheritance tax has been a cruelty. The withdrawal of various small expenses and reliefs has been a cruelty. None of these things has been done because anyone in Whitehall actively dislikes the small-business owner; it is rather that, in the present political configuration, the small-business owner is too small to matter, too dispersed to organise, and too busy to march. The civil servants drafting the SI get the headline figures right, and the headline figures, individually, are small.

May Day, in its original conception, was a workers’ holiday, but, as anyone with any knowledge of the period will tell you, the “workers” it commemorated were not, exclusively, the wage-labour pay-packet figure of present-day usage. They were the broader productive class: artisans, shopkeepers, mechanics, makers, the journeymen in the literal sense who worked with their own tools to produce something useful. A baker in Walsall, in 2026, getting up at 4am to mix the dough, fits that older definition perfectly. The fact that she has, technically, incorporated herself as a private limited company should not, surely, exclude her from the holiday.

I do not, please understand, wish to undermine the more familiar version of May Day. The march, the bunting, the speeches, the flag, they are part of a recognisable British political tradition that I rather enjoy. I just would like, this year, to make a small modest plea for the inclusion in it of the people whose labour is no less skilled, no less hard-won, no less honest, and considerably less protected, than the labour the day was originally meant to celebrate.

So if you are in the bakery this morning, or the small workshop, or the family-run pub, or the consultancy that lives at the kitchen table, or the farm that has been in your name for thirty years, happy May Day. The country is, despite the available evidence, better off because of you. Take five minutes off, if you can. Drink a coffee. Watch the bunting. And, before you go back to it, remember that whatever the textbook says, and whatever the marching song goes, the work you do is, exactly, work.

Read more:
On May Day, spare a thought for the workers who took the risk and built the bloody company

I wrote, last year, about how worried I was for the British rural economy, and a few of you wrote back to ask, kindly, what I thought we should do.

The honest answer, I have realised over the intervening twelve months, is that the most important and most fragile thing we could do is keep the village pub open. I have been thinking about this, since the spring, almost every day. So allow me, this week, the personal column. I think it is the right week for it.

The pub I am writing about, and yes, of course it is a particular pub, is in a small village in Suffolk, on a road that the satnav lies about. It has been there in some form since the 17th century. The current building is largely Georgian, with a Victorian extension and a 1990s kitchen that I would generously describe as character-building. The current tenant has been in place for eleven years. The previous tenant for twenty-three.

It is, by the present trade body’s definition, a “community wet-led” pub. About 60 per cent of its trade is drinks; 30 per cent is food; the remainder is the upstairs rooms, which were converted in the 1990s for the kind of weekending Londoners we used to call “townies” and which we now call, less affectionately, “zoom refugees”. It employs four full-time and seven part-time staff. The full-time staff include the chef, who came up from Hackney during the pandemic and never left, and a young lad of 22 who started as a glass-collector five years ago and has just qualified as cellar-master. The part-time staff are mostly women from the village, two of whom would, in a different country, be working in a primary school that closed in 2019.

It is the wettest, most stubbornly British piece of social infrastructure I know, and it is, on the present rates revaluation, in a kitchen-equipment-replacement cycle that nobody saw coming, and in a year of unusually aggressive energy contracts, about £42,000 a year away from solvency. This is not a private detail. The publican, when I rang him on Monday, told me himself.

There are, in our village, no shops. There has been no post office for fourteen years. The bus runs twice a week. The primary school, in 2019, lost its Year 6 cohort permanently. The doctor’s surgery closed for new patient registrations in 2018 and is, now, more of a dispensing arrangement than a clinic. The church holds services once a fortnight. The mobile library, which had one stop here on a Tuesday afternoon, was wound up in the funding round of 2022. The pub is, in any meaningful sense, what the rest of the village now is.

Were it to close, the geography of village life would not be replaced by something else. There is no shop ready to take over the “community” function. There is no village hall with a working kitchen, it lost its Aga in 2017 and the trustees never raised the £6,200 to replace it. The Cubs, who use the pub’s back room on Wednesdays, would, on past form, drift to a town six miles away and, on past form, shrink. The Sunday lunches, which give an unmarried woman of 78 her main weekly social contact, would not happen. The wakes, and we have had four, this year, in a village of 273, would have to be held in someone’s living room.

I am aware, as I write this, of the metropolitan eyebrow being raised. The countryside has been moaning, the eyebrow says, for as long as anyone can remember, and the countryside is not what it once was. Both of those things, technically, are true. They are also evasions. The countryside is materially different from any other part of England in one specific respect: when its institutions go, there is, almost without exception, no replacement. London has, in any one square mile, three public houses, four cafés, a couple of pubs that aren’t very good, several restaurants and a handful of community spaces that do roughly the same social work between them. Suffolk does not. The English village, almost uniquely in the British Isles, has put all of its community infrastructure into a single building, and that building, increasingly, is the pub.

What would I, accordingly, do? Almost everything I have already proposed in this magazine: VAT at 12.5 per cent for hospitality; a community-pub-specific multiplier on rates; the “asset of community value” reform with the burden of proof reversed onto developers seeking to flat-pack a Grade II listed pub. Plus one more, which I have been quieter about until now: a small, ring-fenced national fund, perhaps £150 million a year, to provide low-interest loans to community pub buyouts in areas where the only alternative is closure. We have such a fund for cinemas. We have a far larger one for football. We do not, anywhere in our policy stack, have one for the rural pub.

We will know, in two or three years, whether we kept these places open. I’ll be in the Suffolk one as long as it’s open. So will, on present form, the village. The country, very quietly, would be better for the same.

Read more:
I worry for the rural pub, and yes, this one is personal too

I am, on the whole, in favour of strong workers’ rights. I have been a small-business employer for the better part of three decades; I have, in that time, seen the casual British employment market behave both better and worse than it ought. So no, this is not the column where I argue that the British worker is too much protected.

But the Workers’ Rights Bill, six months in, is now meaningfully damaging the British labour market, and I think someone has to say so before the present trajectory gets worse.

Let me give you the picture as it is on the ground. Day-one rights to claim unfair dismissal. Day-one rights to flexible working applications. New, more generous, statutory sick pay. Tightened restrictions on zero-hours contracts. New protections against fire-and-rehire. New duties on harassment. A fresh framework for trade-union recognition, with a lower threshold. A new “probationary” concept, the legal architecture of which has not, despite repeated industry pleading, yet been settled.

Each of these reforms, taken on its own, has a defensible policy case behind it. Each of them, taken in isolation, would probably do more good than harm. The trouble is what happens when you put them all together, in a single piece of legislation, with implementation rules that arrive in tranches over eighteen months, in front of a labour market in which around 96 per cent of all employment relationships are run by SMEs that do not have an HR department.

What happens is this. The SME owner sits down with her perfectly nice high-street solicitor in early March, walks through the new exposures, and concludes, quite rationally, that hiring an additional UK employee is now an exposure of approximately £80,000 to £150,000 over the first 18 months, on a tribunal-risk-adjusted basis. She doesn’t hire. She uses an agency contractor. She uses a part-time freelancer. She uses, increasingly, a Lisbon-based subcontractor on a B2B services agreement, because the legal architecture of that arrangement is, by happy coincidence, simpler in 2026 than the legal architecture of an employer-employee relationship in Britain.

Multiply this by the country’s 1.5 million SMEs, and you get the data the Office for National Statistics published last month. Net hiring in firms below 50 employees has fallen for the third consecutive quarter, the longest contraction in any non-recessionary period since records began. Use of contractors and consultants has risen 22 per cent year on year. Graduate hiring at SMEs, which was already declining for AI-related reasons, is down a further 14 per cent.

I want to be careful here. I do not blame the people who designed the Bill. The intentions are recognisably good. The impact on the worst-behaved British employers, the call-centre operators, the gig economy edge cases, the Sports Direct end of the warehouse industry, has, on the available data, been broadly positive, and I am pleased about that. The damage is being done in the middle: in the small office, the small studio, the small manufacturer, the small specialist consultancy, where the additional legal exposure is meaningful relative to revenue and the absence of an HR function makes compliance disproportionately expensive.

What would I do? Reverse, immediately, the day-one unfair dismissal right, and replace it with a six-month probationary period during which fair-process protection applies but no tribunal route exists. Couple this with a statutory cap on tribunal awards in firms below 50 employees, indexed to turnover. Give an unequivocal carve-out for under-25 employment to address the hidden graduate-hiring effect we are about to see in earnest. And, finally, set out, in plain English, the “probationary” framework that has been left, deliberately or otherwise, ambiguous.

There is nothing in any of this that compromises the worker who has been with a firm for years and has been treated badly, which is the case the legislators were thinking about when they drafted the original. There is, however, a great deal in it that lowers the legal exposure of taking on the next graduate, the next mother returning to work, the next 19-year-old leaving school in Stoke. We have, in the present design, made it materially harder for those exact people to find a foot on the ladder.

Labour came into office promising to be the party of work. The Workers’ Rights Bill, on its present implementation track, has begun to be the party of unemployment, by quiet accident. Six months from now, the data will be unambiguous. There is still time to fix it. There is, increasingly, not much time after that.

Read more:
Day-one rights, six-figure tribunals: how the Workers’ Rights Bill is killing hiring before it starts

Resilience is one of those words that gets used a lot in business. But when you strip it back, it’s not complicated. It simply means being able to keep moving forward when things don’t go to plan.

And if the last few years have shown us anything, it’s that plans rarely stay fixed for long. Markets shift, technology moves quickly and economic uncertainty can appear with very little warning.

For leaders, especially those running small and medium-sized businesses, the challenge isn’t avoiding change. It’s helping your team deal with it.

In my experience, resilient businesses are almost always led by resilient people.

Over the past 25 years working in fire safety and security at Chubb, I’ve seen plenty of organisations face disruption. Some adapt quickly and come out stronger. Others struggle because uncertainty unsettles the team and slows decision-making.

More often than not, the difference comes down to leadership. Resilient leaders create an environment where people stay focused, tackle problems head-on and keep moving forward even when things feel uncertain.

Why leadership matters more than ever

There’s growing evidence that the quality of leadership has a direct impact on how well organisations cope with change.

The CIPD Good Work Index 2025 highlights how strongly supportive leadership and good line management influence employee engagement, motivation and wellbeing. The report shows that when people feel supported by their managers and trusted in their roles, they’re far more likely to stay motivated and perform well.

For SME leaders, that’s an important point.

Resilience isn’t something that only large organisations with big HR departments can build. In fact, smaller businesses often have an advantage because leaders are closer to their teams and communication tends to be more direct.

That visibility means leaders have a real opportunity to shape how people respond when challenges arise.

Resilience is something you build

One of the biggest misconceptions about resilience is that it’s something you either have or you don’t. In reality, resilience is something that can be developed.

Teams become more resilient when they’re trusted to solve problems, encouraged to learn from mistakes and given the confidence to take ownership of challenges. For leaders, creating that environment starts with the way we react when things go wrong.

It’s easy in business to look for someone to blame when a problem appears. But resilient organisations tend to take a different approach. Instead of focusing on who made the mistake, they focus on what can be learned and how the issue can be solved.

That shift in mindset builds confidence across the team. People feel safer speaking up, sharing ideas and taking responsibility.

Give people the space to step up

Another key part of building resilience is trust.

Strong leaders understand that people grow when they’re given the chance to think for themselves. When employees are empowered to make decisions and solve problems, they build confidence and adaptability. Over time, that confidence becomes one of the organisation’s biggest strengths.

Transparency also plays a big role here.

Periods of change can easily create uncertainty. And when leaders stay quiet, people often assume the worst. Being open about challenges helps teams understand the bigger picture and encourages everyone to pull together.

It doesn’t mean having all the answers. It simply means being honest about the situation and focusing on what can be done next.

Leadership shouldn’t sit with one person

Another lesson I’ve learned over the years is that resilience doesn’t sit with one individual. The strongest organisations develop leadership across the whole business.

Future leaders often appear in unexpected places, which is something I’ve discovered at Chubb through Building Great Leaders – a framework we’ve created to help our people develop their leadership competency, no matter what their role is. Someone who shows initiative, supports colleagues or steps up during a difficult project may well become a great leader with the right encouragement.

Businesses that invest time in developing people early tend to cope better when challenges arise. When people feel capable and trusted, they’re far more likely to step forward rather than step back. And that makes a huge difference when change inevitably comes along.

Culture sets the tone

In many ways, resilience spreads through culture. Teams take their cues from the behaviour of their leaders. If leaders remain calm, focus on solutions and encourage collaboration, those behaviours quickly become the norm.

But the opposite is also true. If leaders panic or avoid difficult conversations, that uncertainty spreads just as quickly.

That’s why leadership development matters so much. It’s not simply about preparing someone for a management role. It’s about helping people develop the mindset and skills needed to navigate uncertainty.

Helping teams face whatever comes next

Change is part of business. Technology evolves, customer expectations shift and markets rarely stay still. Leaders can’t remove that uncertainty. What we can do is shape how our teams respond to it.

The most resilient organisations are the ones where people feel confident tackling problems, supporting one another and adapting when circumstances change. And that starts with leadership.

Because in the end, resilient leadership isn’t about having every answer. It’s about giving your team the confidence to face whatever comes next.

Read more:
How resilient leaders help their teams thrive through change

I have been having, all week, more or less the same telephone conversation with hospitality clients. It begins with a polite catch-up about the Easter trade.

It moves, after about ninety seconds, to the 2026 rates revaluation, which has, by some grim miracle, managed to fall on the same set of operators who have already been hit hardest by every other policy of the last five years. It ends, almost without exception, with the client saying some version of: “We may have to think about closing the Whitechapel site.” Or the Bristol site. Or the Edinburgh site. Or the High Wycombe site. The town moves; the sentence does not.

Business rates, in this country, are the levy nobody talks about until they are paying them, after which they are the levy nobody can stop talking about. They are the property tax on commercial premises that has, against all logic, become a sort of operational tax on the use of bricks and mortar in the productive economy, while the warehouse-and-fulfilment side of the same economy, Amazon, Ocado, the third-party logistics estate that fulfils the Boxing Day shopping, pays a fraction. We have, in essence, set up a tax system that subsidises the click and penalises the visit.

The 2026 revaluation, in its full and ugly bloom, has now landed. Pubs and restaurants, on the new ratings, will pay an average of 14 per cent more than they did. Hairdressers, dry cleaners and the residual high-street independents are paying between 9 and 19 per cent more. Hotels in central locations have been hit by between 18 and 26 per cent. The promised multiplier reform, which Labour campaigned on in 2024 and which has been the subject of three consecutive rounds of consultation, has not been delivered; the small-business multiplier remains slightly lower than the large, but the gap is too narrow to do meaningful work, and both have been ratcheted up by inflation.

Meanwhile, the same revaluation has handed substantial cuts to two categories: out-of-town warehouses, where land values, on the very technical basis used by the Valuation Office, have come off slightly; and the central London prime office estate, which, despite hybrid working, retains a bizarrely generous treatment in the new schedule. The very part of the economy that sucks employment out of high streets and fulfilment out of independent retailers has had its tax bill cut. The very part of the economy that we keep claiming to want to nurture, the visit, the room, the table, the till, has had its tax bill loaded.

This is not, I should say, a partisan complaint. The architecture of the British rates system is bipartisan in its absurdity, and every Chancellor since Geoffrey Howe has, with an air of regret, added another wrinkle. It is the perfectly imperfect example of a tax system that has been reformed for so long that nobody can now remember what it was originally for. The historic rationale, that local rates funded local public goods such as roads and lighting, has, for forty years, been replaced by a national pool, redistributed by the Treasury, with predictably poor results.

What, then, is to be done? Several things. First, the simple and overdue: a 12.5 per cent VAT band for hospitality, paid for in the medium term by the broadening of business rates to the warehouse and fulfilment estate. Second, the radical: a serious proposal to abolish business rates altogether and replace them with a simple commercial-property land value tax, which the Henry George Society is, at this point, almost too tired to keep proposing. Third, the boringly fundamental: a return to a meaningful local share of the rates collected, so that town councils have a direct interest in the prosperity of the businesses on their patch, and not merely a planning interest in their square footage.

Each of those proposals has been on the table for, at minimum, two decades. Each of them has been studied to death by a sequence of cross-Whitehall reviews, with the result that we have a vast, multi-volume archive of policy work and, on the ground, the same broken tax. The reason it does not change is the same reason any tax does not change: the people doing well out of the present arrangement are organised, articulate and represented; the people doing badly out of it are exhausted, dispersed and busy.

But the price of the present settlement is, finally, becoming visible. Closures of independents are at a record. Hotel occupancy in regional cities is below pre-pandemic levels. The high-street vacancy rate, as I wrote last week, is at 14.2 per cent. None of these numbers are sustainable in the medium term, and none of them will be reversed by another speech about “high-street renewal”. They will be reversed only by structural reform of the rates system. We are, after twelve years of rotating Treasury reviews, running out of time and out of the small businesses who could afford to wait.

The next move belongs to the Chancellor. So does the Whitechapel restaurant, on the present trajectory, by midsummer.

Read more:
Business rates: Britain’s most punishing levy on the very firms it claims to champion

There is a stage in entrepreneurship that many founders and senior leaders struggle to make sense of.

On paper, things are working, revenue is growing, the team is bigger, the business has momentum, and the organisation is beginning to mature beyond the intensity of the earliest build phase. From the outside, this should be the point where leadership starts to feel more stable. Instead, for many entrepreneurial leaders, it begins to feel cognitively harder than the stage that came before it.

In my work as a business psychologist and ADHD coach, I see this pattern repeatedly across entrepreneurs and senior decision makers. They come into the conversation convinced the issue is growth, complexity or leadership pressure. There are more people relying on them, more decisions to make, and less room for error. What they do not yet see is that entrepreneurship itself often exposes something more precise, the accidental structure that once kept their brain activated is no longer enough for the stage of business they are now leading.

This is where the conversation around ADHD and entrepreneurship needs to become more sophisticated. The same brain that makes someone exceptional at building can begin to create friction when the business starts demanding a different kind of leadership architecture. In the earliest stages of building something, the environment naturally provides activation. Every problem is immediate, cash flow creates urgency, new business creates novelty, and the emotional stakes are always high. For an ADHD brain, those conditions can produce extraordinary momentum because they align directly with how activation works.

This is why so many entrepreneurial leaders with ADHD thrive in the early stages of building a company. They are often exceptional at rapid pattern recognition, decisive action under uncertainty, opportunity spotting and moving before others are ready. What many people describe as entrepreneurial instinct is often a highly effective match between the ADHD nervous system and the conditions of early stage business.

The challenge emerges as entrepreneurship evolves from building into leading. The work shifts away from immediate visible problems and towards longer horizon thinking, systems design, delegation, financial planning, hiring and strategic decisions that may not come with natural urgency attached. The founder is no longer being pulled forward by external pressure. They are now responsible for creating clarity and momentum for an organisation that depends on them.

For many business leaders with ADHD, this is the point where performance starts to feel disproportionately expensive. The issue is rarely capability, they still know exactly where the business needs to go. The friction sits in activation, the ADHD brain does not reliably move on importance alone. It activates through interest, novelty, challenge, urgency and emotional salience. When the work required for the next stage of growth becomes abstract and self-directed, even highly capable leaders can find themselves trapped in reactive work while the decisions that would genuinely move the business forward remain untouched.

This is why so many founders can spend an entire day working while avoiding the single decision that matters most. They answer emails, resolve team issues and stay deeply busy, yet the hiring decision, pricing redesign, systems overhaul or market repositioning that would materially change the business remains delayed. From the outside, this can look like founder chaos or poor delegation, but more often, it is a missing leadership architecture.

In the early phase, survival itself generated activation. A payroll deadline, client pitch or cash flow issue created enough neurological urgency to make action inevitable. In a more established entrepreneurial environment, the most valuable work is often strategic rather than urgent. That means the leader now has to design those activation conditions deliberately rather than borrowing them from the business itself.

This is where many entrepreneurial leaders misdiagnose the problem and assume they need better tools. They invest in planning platforms, redesign their calendar, bring in operational support or install project management software. These tools can all be useful, but they often fail because they assume the leader can already determine what matters most, decide when to begin, define what good enough looks like and sustain focus until the work is complete. For many leaders with ADHD, that is the exact pressure point entrepreneurship eventually exposes.

This is a pattern I work on directly with founders, directors and entrepreneurial decision makers through my business psychology and ADHD coaching work. The focus is not on forcing generic productivity systems onto a brain that has already shown it works differently. The real work is designing leadership architecture around how the brain actually activates. That means decision rules that reduce cognitive drag, accountability systems that make strategic work real before pressure arrives, leadership rhythms that support consistent performance, and operational design that stops the business from depending on adrenaline as its primary fuel source.

This matters because businesses often begin to mirror the nervous system of the person leading them. If momentum only appears when urgency spikes, the team learns to wait for urgency too. If priorities live in instinct rather than systems, the company scales ambiguity. What first appears to be a personal leadership issue is often already becoming an organisational design issue.

For business leaders, this is why the conversation around ADHD has to move beyond the usual extremes. The question is not whether ADHD is an advantage or a drawback in entrepreneurship. The more useful question is whether the business has now outgrown the accidental systems that once helped the leader perform at their best.

The strengths that built the company remain enormously valuable. Pattern recognition, speed of synthesis, tolerance for complexity, fast reads on markets and people, and the ability to connect opportunities others miss are often extraordinary entrepreneurial assets. What changes is the level of architecture required around those strengths. As the business grows, instinct alone stops being enough.

For many founders and senior decision makers, this is the hidden growth lever nobody is talking about. The business has simply reached the stage where instinct must be translated into architecture. Once that happens deliberately, the same brain that built the business through speed, intensity and insight becomes fully capable of leading it through sustainable, strategic growth.

Roxana Tascu is a business psychologist and ADHD coach who works with founders, directors and senior business leaders to design leadership architecture that supports strategic growth, better decision making and sustainable high performance. Discover more at www.adhd-advantage.com, or connect with Roxana on Instagram @RoxanaTascu

Read more:
Why ADHD and entrepreneurship can drive success and create challenges in equal measure

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The April Cost Squeeze: Why Small Businesses Must Plan Ahead, Not Catch Up

Easter, in this country, has become a kind of trading-figures ECG: a thin grey line for most of the quarter, a sharp peak around the bank holidays, and then, on the day after, the slow flat-line that resumes for another six weeks.

We had the peak. The trade press, with its usual cheery instinct, called it “a strong four-day uplift in footfall”. Bunting was deployed on the front page of more than one daily newspaper. By Tuesday morning, the actual takings, which is what we should have been looking at all along, had returned, on the latest UK Hospitality and BRC numbers, to the trend rate they were on in February.

This is the rhythm of the British high street and hospitality sector in 2026, and the rhythm is not healthy.

I went, over the Easter weekend, to Bath. I have been going to Bath, on and off, for thirty years. The old ratio I used to associate with the city, independents to chains, around 60–40 — has flipped. The Pulteney Bridge end has gone the way of every English provincial centre: a Caffè Nero, a Greggs, a Boots, a Starbucks, a Tesco Express, a Joe & The Juice and an empty Carluccio’s with a ‘to let’ sign for the third year running. The independents are still there, just; but they are increasingly clustered in two streets, and the rest is corporate plain-text with bunny ears. We had a perfectly good lunch at one of the holdouts, who told me, at the till, that her landlord had increased the rent another 11 per cent at lease renewal in February. She was, she said, “seeing how the year goes”. Translation: she was eight months from closing.

This is not a story about Bath. It is a story about every English town and city outside the M25. The high-street vacancy rate, on the present LDC numbers, is sitting at 14.2 per cent, the highest non-pandemic figure on record. In the smaller towns, that figure rises closer to 19. The hospitality side is no better. The number of full-service restaurants registered for VAT has fallen for the third successive quarter. The number of independent cafés, which had been one of the few resilient categories through the last decade, fell for the first time on record.

What has happened? The same things that have been happening for a decade. Business rates have not been reformed. Energy is more expensive than in any comparable Western European market. The minimum wage has gone up, for sound reasons, but at a pace that has not been matched by labour productivity in the kitchen, the bar or the tills. Employer NICs, having gone up in 2025, did not go down. A flurry of well-meaning new costs around environmental compliance, single-use packaging, and the new tipping legislation have added another 1.5 to 3 per cent to operating costs in the typical mid-tier restaurant.

And, perhaps most damaging of all, the consumer has lost confidence. The Easter footfall numbers I mentioned earlier have a quiet B-side: average spend per visit was down 4 per cent year-on-year. People are coming, in slightly higher numbers than they did, and then spending less. The bottle of supermarket prosecco at home with the family on Sunday has, very quietly, replaced the kind of celebratory midweek dinner that used to keep a town centre alive between bank holidays. The middle-class disposable income is not what it was, and the middle-class hospitality habit is the first thing to go.

The strategic response, on the part of government, has been to commission another high-street commission. There have been, by my count, seven of these since 2010, all of them well-intentioned, all of them written by people whose professional time is mostly spent in places not on the high street, and most of them shelved within twelve months of publication. We do not have a high-street policy in this country. We have a high-street regret.

What would I do, again? VAT at 12.5 per cent for hospitality. A statutory presumption against above-inflation rent increases for shops below £75,000 a year in rateable value. A meaningful business-rates multiplier reform that taxes the warehouse, not the corner café. An end to the special pleading from the largest grocery chains for the planning treatment that has gutted the very high streets they now wring their hands about.

And — though this is the hardest of all — a quiet, urgent national conversation about whether the British public actually want to keep their town centres. Because the present consumer behaviour, which is to say, click-and-delivery from a warehouse fifty miles away with the occasional bank-holiday cameo at the local independent, will not, on its own, sustain a town centre. The market alone, when it has been left to it, has not solved this problem in any developed economy. We will need to choose, deliberately, to keep the rooms.

Or we will have to get used to the bunny ears, the empty Carluccio’s, the sympathetic ‘to let’ signs and the rest of the architecture of decline. Easter has, in the meantime, been and gone. The flat line, on the cardiac monitor, has resumed.

Read more:
Easter on the high street: bunny ears, empty tills and a hospitality sector running on fumes

It is now eighteen months into the second Trump administration, and the British exporter, that politely undervalued figure who keeps the country’s current account in any sort of order at all, has just been handed another tariff bill.

American duty on UK speciality chemicals went up another 5 per cent on 1 April. UK whisky, that grand old Scottish workhorse, is now being charged the better part of 25 per cent in some American import categories. UK premium engineering, particularly aerospace components, has been hit by a delightful new “national security review surcharge” of 12 per cent, the existence of which one of my friends in Washington explained to me, last weekend, with the air of a man explaining a particularly inventive parking ticket.

And the British government’s response to all this has been, to a first approximation, the silence of an administration which, having spent eighteen months treating Donald Trump as a kind of category error, has now run out of category. There is no transatlantic trade strategy. There is no minister for it. There is, instead, a series of polite communiqués from the Department of Business, the Foreign Office and the trade envoys, who, having spent the spring being warmly received in mid-Atlantic states, return to find that none of the people they met in those mid-Atlantic states are particularly relevant to the actual decision making in Washington.

I should say, before this becomes a column the present American administration will read with pleasure, that I am no fan of the Trumpist trade philosophy. The tariffs are, on every honest economic measure, bad for American consumers as well as British producers. The protectionism is largely incoherent. The administration is using national-security justifications for sectors that have, on closer inspection, no national-security implications at all. The whole programme is a mid-term industrial policy dressed up as a security policy and pursued, in the manner of all such things, with rather more energy than care.

But it is happening, and it is not going to stop happening, because the political coalition in the United States that supports it has not weakened. The British exporter must, in 2026, plan as if the tariff regime is permanent, because, on most plausible scenarios, it is. And the British government must, accordingly, decide what its actual transatlantic strategy is.

The instinct in Whitehall has been to play this game cool, hoping for a “mini-deal” on professional services or intellectual property that takes a few items off the tariff list while preserving the broader UK position. This is not, I am sorry to say, going to work. The Trump White House does not do mini-deals; it does deals. And the deals it does are bilateral, transactional, and visible. To get one, the British government would need to put something on the table large enough and visible enough to be worth a presidential signature. The list of things in that category is short: the digital services tax; pharmaceutical pricing on the NHS; agricultural standards; Chagos.

Each of those is politically expensive at home. Each of them has, somewhere in Whitehall, a reasoned defence. None of them have been seriously discussed in the present cabinet as bargaining chips, because the present cabinet has, broadly, decided that talking about Trump in those terms is undignified. The price of dignity, as ever, is paid by exporters.

What I would like to see is, frankly, an end to the dignity. Get serious. Identify, openly, two or three concessions that the United Kingdom is willing to make in exchange for the removal of tariffs on the four or five sectors where the British competitive advantage is greatest: speciality chemicals, premium engineering, premium spirits, biopharma. Do the deal. Survive the politics at home. Move on. The country could do with the £6 to £8 billion in re-opened export receipts that a serious deal would generate over a Parliament.

Then, more importantly, build out the missing market diversification. British exporters have been, for at least a decade, dangerously concentrated on the United States and the European Union. The world has, in the meantime, had a Mexico, an India, an Indonesia, a Vietnam, all of which are now larger and more dynamic markets than they were when the present trade strategy was last reviewed. UK Export Finance has the budget, on paper, to back this kind of diversification. It does not, on present operations, do so meaningfully. That is fixable in an afternoon, by changing its mandate.

The country that exports its way through a Trump tariff regime is the country that, at the same time, opens three other markets. We are, on present form, doing neither. The exporters I speak to are, in increasing numbers, talking quietly to their continental subsidiaries about whether to relocate production. They will, if we don’t move fast, take that conversation to its logical conclusion.

Westminster, please. Wake up. The plane to Washington takes off twice a day; somebody serious needs to be on it.

Read more:
Trump’s tariffs are squeezing British exporters – and Westminster is asleep at the wheel

It has been just over twelve months since Britain abolished the non-domiciled tax regime, and the political class which engineered the change has, in the manner of a man who has lost a bet, gone deathly quiet on the subject.

There has been no triumphant statement of revenue raised. There has been no celebratory press release on “fairness restored”. There has, instead, been a series of releases from rival Mediterranean and Gulf jurisdictions, each one trailing the arrival of another set of British residents who used, until recently, to be ours. Italy is now the largest single beneficiary. Dubai is second. Switzerland, despite the snow, is having a banner year.

I am not, before any reflexive ideological reaction sets in, an unqualified defender of the old regime. The non-dom system was, in places, indefensible. It allowed, for instance, multi-generational use of the resident-non-domiciled status by people whose families had not seriously been domiciled abroad for decades. The 2017 deemed-domicile reforms, the ones the previous government did, against considerable lobbying, get right, closed most of the worst abuses, and at the time I supported them.

What we have done in the last twelve months is something quite different. We have, in effect, told a large group of internationally mobile high-earners, many of them not Britons at all, but global figures who chose, in the way that talented people sometimes choose, to put their family lives, charitable foundations, art collections and businesses in this country, that we no longer particularly value their being here. They have, for the most part, taken us at our word.

The figures, where they exist, are sobering. HMRC quietly published, last month, a 9 per cent year-on-year decline in stamp duty receipts on properties above £5 million, predominantly in central London. Mayfair and Belgravia office rents, which had been holding up against general London weakness, have softened in the last two quarters in a way that estate agents are too professional to attribute publicly to anything in particular. London philanthropic giving, the donors’ list of every major arts institution and many of our hospitals, has shifted; one major teaching hospital trust I know of has lost 14 per cent of its annual donor income. The Treasury, of course, does not collect a separate line item for charitable receipt loss as a result of policy change, so this number does not appear in the Office for Budget Responsibility tables. It will, however, appear in the closure notice of any number of smaller charities by 2028.

Then there is the City salary effect. A surprising number of Goldman, JP Morgan, and Citadel London-based partners have shifted their booked location to Milan, Geneva, or, increasingly, Dubai. Their families, in many cases, follow. The schools they used to fill in central London have noticed; admissions to the major preparatory schools fell, last September, by between 4 and 7 per cent, the largest single-year drop in living memory. The London restaurant scene, which depends on the £200-a-head business diner more than it likes to admit, is feeling the absence in real time.

I write this not in defence of any particular individual, but because the cumulative effect, and this is the part the Treasury repeatedly underestimates, is large, slow, and politically unmeasurable. There is no rally for the loss of a non-dom. There is no by-election that turns on it. There is, however, a slow grinding-down of London’s appeal as a global wealth hub, and that appeal, like the appeal of a great restaurant, is built up over decades and lost in a matter of years.

What does the Treasury say to all this? Privately, and I have asked, it says, broadly, two things. First, that the absolute number of non-doms is small. Second, that the headline revenue raised by the abolition was “in line with forecast”. Both of these things may be true. They are also irrelevant. The non-dom system was never, primarily, a source of direct revenue. It was a magnet. The charitable giving, the property purchases, the cultural patronage, the wealth-management industry that grew up around it, the hedge funds that anchored in London because of it — these were the second-order effects. They are the things you cannot put back together once you have decided, in a fit of theoretical even-handedness, to dismantle them.

There is, finally, a political point. Nigel Lawson once observed that the difficulty with tax policy is that revenue has consequences and consequences have lag. The current Chancellor will not be the one paying the bill for the loss of the non-dom regime. That bill will land, in 2028 or 2029, on the desk of someone else, who will inherit a London that has lost, quietly, a meaningful slice of its global gravity. There will be no headlines. There will only, slowly, be fewer people in the room.

Italy, by the way, will publish its end-of-year statistics on incoming high-net-worth residents in a few months. I would put a small wager, and I am a sober man, that it will set a record. We have, between us, given Rome the most expensive Brexit dividend it never asked for.

Read more:
The non-doms have packed their suitcases and the tax base is going with them

It is the morning of 6 April, the first day of the new British tax year, and I have spent the last hour staring at a payroll spreadsheet that has, by some entirely legal arithmetic, just deducted another £1,360 a month from the operating margin of our smallest subsidiary.

We have not hired anyone new. We have not given anyone a pay rise. We have not bought a new piece of kit. The state has, simply, in the manner of a particularly assiduous Italian waiter, returned to the table to refill our glass with a wine we did not order.

Welcome to the British New Tax Year. It is a bit like a New Year’s Eve party, if New Year’s Eve had been organised, in a hurry, by your accountant.

Let us tot up what has actually changed today, on a payroll for a fifteen-person company with an average salary of £42,000. Employer National Insurance, having gone up to 15 per cent in April 2025, has not gone down. The threshold remains depressed. That continues to cost the company, on present figures, around £19,500 a year more than it cost two years ago. The minimum wage has gone up another 4.6 per cent. The apprenticeship-levy contribution, despite the “Growth and Skills” rebrand, still bites at the same point. The dividend allowance, having been £5,000 a few years ago, sits this morning at £200, with the Chancellor briefing, quietly, that she would like, eventually, to abolish it. The capital gains rate on shares has crept up by another point.

The business-rates revaluation, in its glorious 2026 manifestation, has now landed properly. For our hospitality client in central Bristol, the bill has gone up by 19 per cent. For our small manufacturer in Wiltshire, by 7. The promised reform of the rates multiplier, which Labour campaigned on in 2024 and which has been kicked, gently and apologetically, down a series of consultations, has not, in fact, materialised.

Inheritance tax on agricultural and business property, which used to be a relatively quiet corner of the British tax code, has been narrowed in three successive moves under different headings. The cumulative effect is that a perfectly ordinary family business, turnover under £10 million, two locations, twelve people, is now, on its founder’s death, a tax event that consumes between 20 and 28 per cent of the going-concern value. There is no reasonable way to plan for this without setting up structures whose primary function is to mock the spirit of the legislation, which is what every reasonable person now does, and which is, again, why the country has the productivity figures it has.

I am, before this column slides into pure complaint, not unsympathetic to the bind every Chancellor faces. Demographic pressure is real. Defence procurement is large. Adult social care is unsolved. NHS productivity is, by international comparison, an embarrassment. There are, eventually, only so many places to find money. I get all that, and I have written it before in this magazine.

What I object to is the silent, year-on-year, ratchet-and-pawl character of the way British SMEs and middle-tier earners now experience tax. There is no rally. There is no raised voice. There is no front-page coverage. There is just, every April 6, another spreadsheet, another silent £19,500 here, another £4,200 there, and the polite Treasury press operation insisting that no “tax rate” has been raised. Technically true. Practically a fiction.

I would also note, for any future Chancellor reading: there are limits. Limits to what fifteen years of stealth tightening can be done to an SME sector before that sector reorganises itself in ways the Treasury does not enjoy. Limits to the number of family businesses that will pay another generation’s worth of inheritance tax before they sell to a Dutch trade buyer. Limits to the number of British software founders who will spin up their next venture in Wilmslow rather than Wilmington. Each year, the limit moves a bit closer.

What this morning has reminded me, on its first cup of coffee, is that we are now in the part of the British tax cycle where stealth is the policy and the policy is denial. We will pretend, in newspapers, that nothing has changed today. We will pretend, on the Treasury website, that the changes are minor. We will, in the supplementary OBR fiscal note, find a footnote on page 87 that says the cumulative incidence on the SME sector in this Parliament has been the largest in any Parliament since 1976. Nobody will read it. Nobody, apparently, in Whitehall has.

Happy New Tax Year. The boot, if you were wondering, has been lifted only to come down again. The Italian waiter is back. The bottle, you’ll notice, is no longer free.

Read more:
Happy New Tax Year: same kicking, slightly higher boot

I have a friend who runs a glassworks in Yorkshire, third-generation, family-owned, the kind of business that produces, for not much money, the small clear bottles that sit on the shelves of the most exclusive perfume houses in Paris.

I rang him last week to ask how trading was. He answered the phone with a single word, which I cannot repeat in this magazine, and then explained, in a tone I have heard once or twice before in my life, that he had spent the morning working out at what point in the calendar he was going to have to extinguish his furnaces.

Extinguishing a furnace, in case you have not had cause to think about this before, is approximately the worst thing that can happen to a glassworks. Once a furnace is cold, the lining cracks; once the lining cracks, you are looking at six months of rebuild before you can produce a single bottle. It is, in industrial terms, the equivalent of a cardiac arrest. And yet several British manufacturing furnaces, in glass, in ceramics, in chemicals, in steel, have either gone cold this winter or are, on the present trajectory, going to.

The reason, in a single number, is energy. British industrial users in 2026 pay, on average, £196 per megawatt-hour for electricity. American industrial users pay around £52. French industrial users, who, for reasons the Treasury has never quite articulated, get to dip into a heavily subsidised national nuclear baseload, pay £64. Our German competitors have been forced down to about £80 by a series of emergency measures that are now, awkwardly, being extended through 2028. The British manufacturer is, as ever, the outlier.

We dress the situation up as climate leadership. We are, the Treasury insists, “front-running” the decarbonisation curve. Our prices reflect a “mature market” for renewables. The carbon-pricing mechanism “sends the right signals”. Each of these phrases has a kind of grim Civil Service music to it, and each of them is wrong. Our industrial energy prices are not high because we are decarbonising. They are high because we are decarbonising badly: with no domestic gas backbone, no serious nuclear build-out, no functioning interconnector strategy, and a wholesale market design that prices everything at the marginal gas plant even when the marginal plant isn’t running.

Each of those flaws is fixable. None of them is being fixed. The Energy Department is consumed, instead, with consumer-facing slogans about heat pumps. Heat pumps are fine. They will not, on their own or together, save my Yorkshire friend’s glassworks.

The macro picture is the part that ought to alarm Whitehall. Britain has lost about 18 per cent of its manufacturing capacity in the last six years. We have lost the third of our cement we used to make. We have lost most of our flat glass. We have lost two of our remaining four virgin steel sites. We are about to lose, by my reckoning, the bulk of our specialty chemicals. Each of these closures is announced individually, with a flurry of regret from the local MP and a politely worded statement from the trade body, and each is folded back into a national narrative about the “transition”. There is no transition. There is a substitution. We are substituting the British factory for the foreign factory.

We are also substituting the British job. The 50,000 to 60,000 manufacturing jobs lost in this Parliament are not, despite the warm words about “green retraining”, being replaced. The retraining schemes I have looked at, in detail, produce, mostly, lower-paid work in lower-skilled service sectors. The wage premium of British manufacturing, the reason a Yorkshire glassworker, on his late shift, takes home meaningfully more than the supermarket logistics worker on his, is, slowly, being smoothed away. The country is about to discover, in another decade, what every economy that has lost its industrial base discovers: that the social fabric of the place where the factory used to be does not survive the smoothing.

What would actually save the situation? A formal industrial energy price cap, indexed to French levels, paid for in the short run by an explicit ring-fenced borrowing facility, on the basis that this is what every other major Western economy has done. A long-overdue sit-down with the Office for Nuclear Regulation about the absurd timescales for British small modular reactors, where we are, somehow, behind the Romanians. A serious carbon-border adjustment that doesn’t allow Chinese steel to continue arriving, untaxed, into a country whose own steelmakers are paying every conceivable carbon premium.

And, while we are at it, a public statement from this government, and any other that may follow it, that British manufacturing is not, contra the present mood music, a regrettable hangover from the Industrial Revolution. It is, in any country with a serious view of itself, a strategic asset. Switzerland thinks so. Germany thinks so. Japan thinks so. South Korea thinks so. The fact that Britain has somehow let itself be persuaded otherwise is the policy mistake of the decade.

My Yorkshire friend, by the way, has another six weeks. After that the furnaces, in the nicest possible way, go out. He will not, when they do, blame the planet. He will blame the country.

Read more:
British manufacturing is being electrocuted to death, and we are calling it net zero

There is a particular conversation I have been having, more often than I would like, with senior partners at the big professional-services firms.

It tends to take place at someone else’s book launch, over a reluctant glass of warm white, and it always begins with the partner saying something like: “Oh, well, you know, we’re thinking very seriously about graduate intake this year.” The verb is usually “rationalising”. The number is usually “down 30 per cent”. The reason is, increasingly, the same. They have, between us, decided that the work that used to be done by a 22-year-old can now be done, mostly, by a model.

Each of them, on their own, has a defensible case. The AI tools available in 2026 are, frankly, very good at the bottom end of professional work. They will do you a first draft of a memo, a first cut of a financial model, a first read of a contract, a first marketing plan, and they will do it in a fraction of the time. The marginal economics, for any partnership, are unanswerable. So the partners answer them: graduate hiring goes down, AI licence cost goes up, this year’s P&L looks fine.

Multiply that conversation by, say, the eighty largest firms in the country, and you arrive at a number that ought to send the Treasury into a cold sweat. We are looking, on present trajectory, at a 30 to 40 per cent reduction in graduate hiring across the British professional-services sector by 2027. That is not a soft trend; it is already in published intake numbers. And we are doing it, collectively, without a single board having sat down and asked the obvious question, which is: where, exactly, does the next generation of senior partners come from?

Because here is the problem nobody at that book-launch wanted to discuss. The work that AI is now doing for £14 a month, per seat, was the same work that, for fifty years, served as the apprenticeship for everyone now sitting in a corner office. You learned how to write a memo by writing memos. You learned how to model a deal by modelling deals. You learned how to read a contract by reading them, badly, and being shouted at by a senior associate who had once read them badly, themselves. The output of that labour was secondary; the labour was the training. Removing the labour, in other words, is not just a cost decision. It is a strategic decision about whether you wish, in fifteen years’ time, to have any senior people at all.

I am, generally, a fan of AI. I run businesses that have used it well. I think the people howling about a robot apocalypse are, mostly, the same people who in 1995 were howling about the death of the bookshop, and the bookshop is, surprisingly, still here. But I think we are about to make a serious, system-level mistake, and I think we are about to make it because every individual board has the wrong incentive set.

Consider the unintended consequences. The first wave of casualties will be the regional university, the working-class graduate, the first-in-family-to-go-to-uni who took on £60,000 of debt on the understanding that there was a job at the end of it. They are about to discover that the job has, quietly, been replaced. The second wave will be the firms themselves, who, in eight to ten years, will look around their partnership rooms and notice a hole, a missing year-cohort of mid-level associates, the people who would have been promoted, who weren’t hired in the first place. The third wave will be the British professional-services brand itself, which has spent fifty years exporting expertise globally and which depends, fundamentally, on a domestic conveyor belt of talent.

What would I do? Make AI use a tax-allowable expense if and only if a firm holds graduate hiring constant, in real terms, for the same year. The HMRC mechanism for this exists; it is the same one used for R&D credits. Tie the carrot of AI deductibility to the stick of graduate retention. Watch the numbers stabilise inside one fiscal year. It is not as elegant as letting the market decide; it is, however, what governments are supposed to do when an entire profession is in the middle of a coordination failure.

There is a wider point about Britain’s labour market here. We have spent fifteen years gently informing our young people that they should be “entrepreneurial”, by which we mostly mean we have no jobs for them. The next chapter of that story, in which AI eats the bottom rung of the few employed graduate ladders we still have, will be very ugly indeed. We are running out of ladders. And, contra the AI evangelists, the country still requires people with the experience of having climbed one.

I would put the Lincolnshire electrician of last week in a long-running argument with the Magic Circle partner of this week. Both, in their different ways, are watching the same thing. The British training system, for plumber and tax barrister alike, has, very quietly, started to break. The right time to fix it is now.

Read more:
AI is quietly making graduates redundant: we will regret this inside a decade

I had a frankly demoralising conversation last week with a man who runs a perfectly successful family-owned electrical contractor in Lincolnshire.

Forty-eight people, mostly men over forty, a fleet of vans, a yard that smells of warm copper. He wanted, he said, to take on three apprentices this year. Wanted, please note: he had the work, the mentors, the kit, the customer demand. He had abandoned the attempt by Christmas. The reason, in his own words, was that the system designed to deliver him three apprentices in 2026 has been built, at every level, by and for people who have never tried to use it.

And we wonder, in this country, why we have a skills shortage.

It is a year since Labour’s much-trailed “Growth and Skills” rebadging of the Apprenticeship Levy, in which the original Levy, itself only nine years old, was tweaked to allow, in principle, more flexibility in spend, more shorter courses, more so-called modular qualifications. The substance, on the ground, has been less than impressive. Some 53 per cent of all Levy spend in 2025-26 still went on “senior leader” and “level 7” qualifications, the apprenticeships-in-name-only that have for years allowed the big four accounting firms and the giant consultancies to dress up their normal MBA training as a cost to the public purse.

Meanwhile, the share of Levy spend going to under-19s, which is to say to actual school-leavers learning an actual trade, sits at less than 22 per cent. It was 50 per cent when the scheme launched in 2017. The trend is, mathematically and morally, in the wrong direction.

Why? Because the Levy, as designed, is a tax on the largest employers, who are also the most administratively sophisticated employers, who are therefore the most likely to capture the spend back through their own internal training departments by relabelling existing programmes as “apprenticeships”. It is a near-textbook example of what regulators call “capture”: the institution being regulated has more lawyers than the regulator, so the regulation eventually serves the institution. KPMG’s graduates have not, on close inspection, become better trained than they were before the Levy. They have merely become, on paper, “apprentices”, which is now a word with as much real-world purchase as “synergy”.

Down at the bottom of the pyramid, where my Lincolnshire electrician sits, the picture is the inverse. Small firms get nothing meaningful out of the Levy because they don’t pay it. The “co-investment” route, in which a small firm pays 5 per cent of training costs and the government 95 per cent, is, on paper, generous, but the funding bands are too narrow for the trades that need them most. An electrical apprentice costs about £21,000 to train properly over three years. The funding band sits at £15,000. The shortfall lands on the SME, in addition to all the time spent supervising, teaching, marking, signing off and chasing assessment paperwork.

Then there is the assessment apparatus. We have, between us, built a national vocational training infrastructure of such breath-taking complexity that even the people running it cannot tell you, with confidence, the difference between a Level 3, a Level 4, a Level 4 with end-point assessment and a Level 4 with “gateway”. There are seven separate categories of approved provider; there are sixteen categories of assessment organisation; there are over 600 standards in current use. My Lincolnshire friend abandoned the attempt to take on his three apprentices in mid-November, when he was forwarded an email from his local college informing him that his preferred end-point assessor had had its registration paused “pending revalidation”. Which assessor was paused, and why? You guessed.

Reform is not, in fact, complicated. The Tony Blair Institute, of all bodies, set most of it out in a report last summer. Cap the share of Levy spend that can go on Level 6 or above at 20 per cent, with the balance ring-fenced for under-25s. Widen the funding bands for trades. Strip out the tiered-assessor pantomime and revert to a single, simple, employer-led qualification gate per trade. Restore a meaningful share of decision-making to local economic partnerships, which know who is hiring what.

None of this is foreign. We had something approximating this, broadly, between 1964 and 1981, under the Industrial Training Boards. We threw it away in the early Thatcher years on perfectly defensible ideological grounds, replaced it with nothing for two decades, then panicked back into the present hash. The most painful thing about the apprenticeship debate in Britain is the realisation that, every twenty years or so, we re-invent the same wheel and put it on a wonkier axle.

If Labour is serious, and the rebrand suggests, at the very least, that it would like to be, it has six months to land a real reform. The Lincolnshire electrician who would otherwise be doing useful national work training three teenagers is, frankly, watching. So am I.

Read more:
The Apprenticeship Levy is broken, and the ‘Growth and Skills’ rebrand won’t mend it

Neurodiverse workers could hold a distinct advantage as artificial intelligence reshapes the modern workplace, according to a UK technology entrepreneur who says businesses are overlooking a critical talent pool at a pivotal moment of change.

Josh Hough, founder of home care software firm CareLineLive, has argued that traits commonly associated with neurodiversity, including heightened focus, pattern recognition and unconventional problem-solving, are becoming increasingly valuable as organisations accelerate their adoption of AI-driven systems and workflows.

Speaking during Neurodiversity Celebration Week, Hough said many employers remain too focused on traditional hiring frameworks, despite the growing need for adaptability and innovative thinking.

“A lot of businesses still want people who tick every box,” he said. “The reality is, people who think differently often solve problems differently.

“In a world where everything is changing quickly, that’s a real advantage. You need people who don’t just follow a process, but can see a better way of doing things.”

His comments come as businesses across the UK and globally invest heavily in artificial intelligence to drive productivity, automate processes and unlock new growth opportunities. However, this shift is also redefining the types of skills and mindsets organisations require, placing a premium on cognitive diversity rather than uniformity.

Hough’s own approach to leadership and hiring has been shaped by personal experience. Born with a rare muscle-weakening condition that left him reliant on a wheelchair for much of his early life, he developed a mindset centred on adaptability and alternative problem-solving from a young age.

“When you grow up having to do things differently you don’t assume the standard way is the best way,” he said. “That carries through into business.”

Founded in 2014, CareLineLive has grown into a significant player in the digital care technology space, supporting more than 700 home care providers across multiple countries and used by over 25,000 carers. Its platform is designed to streamline operations across the care sector, from staff management and patient records to real-time communication between care providers, families and healthcare professionals.

At a time when the care sector is under sustained pressure from staffing shortages, rising demand and regulatory complexity, Hough believes technology, combined with diverse thinking, is essential to improving efficiency and outcomes.

“One of the biggest challenges in care is how information flows between people and services,” he said. “Too often, information doesn’t move between people in the way it should. That creates risk and wastes time.

“Our focus has always been on making sure the right people have the right information at the right time.”

Beyond operational efficiency, Hough’s comments highlight a broader shift in how businesses should think about talent in the AI era. As automation takes over routine and process-driven tasks, the ability to think laterally, identify patterns and approach problems from new angles is becoming more strategically important.

This has significant implications for recruitment, workplace culture and long-term competitiveness. Companies that continue to prioritise rigid skill checklists and conventional career paths risk missing out on individuals who may be better suited to navigating complexity and change.

Hough said the conversation around neurodiversity must evolve beyond compliance or risk management and instead focus on value creation.

“Not everyone is going to fit a traditional mould,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t be excellent at what they do.

“If anything, in the current environment, thinking differently is exactly what businesses need.”

As AI adoption accelerates and the nature of work continues to shift, his message is clear: the future workforce will not just be defined by technical capability, but by diversity of thought, and those who recognise this early may gain a decisive edge.

Read more:
Neurodiverse talent could be key advantage in AI economy, says UK tech founder

There is a particular look on a Chancellor’s face, in the closing minutes of a Spring Statement, that you only really see if you have watched a few.

It is the look of a person who has just got away with something. The eyes drift up; the shoulders drop; the back of the dispatch box gets a little lean-back; the well-rehearsed peroration about working people and stability and growth is delivered with the slightly distracted air of a person already rewinding for the live interviews on the College Green. We saw that look yesterday. It told you everything you needed to know.

Because here is what Rachel Reeves did not announce.

She did not announce a real cut to business rates for hospitality. She did not announce an end to the gradual erosion of inheritance tax relief on family business and farms, which has now been quietly tightened in three successive fiscal events under different titles. She did not announce a freeze on employer National Insurance, despite a year of pleading from every employers’ body in the country. She did not produce the long-promised reform of the apprenticeship levy. She did not, despite frantic pre-briefing about a “Cities of Growth” initiative, deliver anything to the medium-sized industrial heartland between Hull and Stoke that the country has been begging her to address.

She did do the following. She nudged the dividend allowance down, again, by a hundred pounds. She produced an additional bond issuance for the British Business Bank with a tag of £400 million, much of which will, on past form, end up subsidising tier-one consultancies operating as “delivery partners”. She extended Making Tax Digital to landlords below the £30,000 threshold, which will, by the OBR’s own number, raise £85 million while costing the affected SMEs about £350 million in compliance fees. She announced a new tax-incentivised vehicle for private-credit funds to invest in “regional infrastructure”, which, deciphered, means London and the South-East with a press release.

This was not a Spring Statement. It was an interest payment, in the currency of British political theatre, on a debt the Chancellor knows she will have to roll over again in the autumn. The “markets”, that great anonymous chorus before whom we all curtsey now, will give her a brief golf clap, gilts will hold steady, the Office for Budget Responsibility will publish a polite forecast, and the country will be back in this same chair in November.

What infuriates me, frankly, is the missed opportunity. The Chancellor had, in front of her, three measures any of which would have cost less than the Whitehall press operation already spends on her itinerary, and which would have changed the temperature of British business meaningfully. A single per-cent cut to employer NIC for firms below £10m turnover. A statutory commitment that no further changes to entrepreneurs’ relief or BPR would happen this Parliament. A 12.5 per cent VAT band for hospitality, paid for by removing the capital allowance on warehouse build-out. None of these things were taken. None of them were even seriously considered, on the evidence of the Treasury Red Book.

Why? Because Rachel Reeves, like every Chancellor who came before her, has discovered that the path of least resistance through any fiscal event is to find a fresh set of pockets in the upper-middle of the British economy and pat them down for change. Small landlords. Mid-sized employers. Family farms. Family pubs. The classic profile is unmistakeable: high enough to have something worth taking, fragmented enough not to organise, busy enough not to march. There are no rallies in Parliament Square for a £4,200 NIC bill. There ought to be.

I do not, before this column slips into pure complaint, suggest that the Chancellor’s constraints are imaginary. They are real. Borrowing costs are real. The bond markets are real. Demographics are real. Adult social care is real. Defence procurement is real, and large. I am not asking her to perform a magic trick. I am asking her to stop performing a different magic trick, the one where she pulls another £1.5 billion of revenue out of the SME hat each March without anyone noticing, and to begin actually framing fiscal policy around the question of how Britain produces the growth it requires.

Because if she carries on like this, the answer to that question becomes painfully simple. Britain doesn’t. It is produced for us, somewhere else, by economies which are, by accident of policy, more friendly to those who try to make things work.

We are not, I promise the Chancellor, an inexhaustible resource. There is a limit, even to British forbearance. Yesterday, in the gap between her sit-down and the Speaker’s standing-up, we got a glimpse of it.

Read more:
After the Spring Statement, Britain’s businesses know exactly what to expect: nothing

I write this on the eve of another Spring Statement and the great British SME, which is the part of the economy I happen to know, has the look of a man who has already been through Customs twice and is being asked to step into the side room.

There has been, somewhere along the way, a quiet consensus that this is not going to be the “fiscal event” the Treasury keeps insisting it is not. There has, equally quietly, been a consensus that, regardless of what they call it, we are going to be paying for it.

Let us take a moment, therefore, to lay out the road we already know we are on. Employer National Insurance contributions went up to 15 per cent in April last year. The threshold at which it kicked in fell to £5,000. The annual cost to the median ten-person SME, by our own modelling at Trends Research, runs to about £19,500. Business rates have been re-valued for 2026; the multiplier reform Labour promised in opposition has not, despite warm words, materialised. Capital gains tax has crept up. Inheritance tax on agricultural and business property has been narrowed. Pension contributions for higher earners have been clawed at. Energy subsidies for industrial users, which were the only thing keeping a third of British manufacturing on its feet in 2024, have been quietly withdrawn.

Against that backdrop, Rachel Reeves walks into the Commons next week with a set of fiscal headroom figures that have, in every Office for Budget Responsibility exercise this year, shrunk and not grown. She has, on present numbers, somewhere between £8 billion and £12 billion of room before her own self-imposed rule kicks in, and the gilt market, which, if we are being honest, is the only Whip in this Parliament with actual votes — is watching her pencil with intense suspicion.

The temptation, as ever, will be to find another revenue line. The Treasury, like all Treasuries, has a list of these as long as your arm. A small tweak to dividend taxation. Another fiddle on entrepreneur relief. A “temporary” levy on stamp duty for commercial property. A fresh sparkle of HMRC investigatory zeal aimed at the family-owned business and the self-employed. None of these moves will make headlines. All of them will, taken together, do meaningful damage.

What I would ask, if I had ninety seconds with the Chancellor and a strong cup of coffee, is this. First, no new taxes, at all, on the firms turning over below £10 million. We are the part of the economy that hires when others freeze. Tax is the wrong instrument for the wrong patient. Second, a serious rebalancing of business rates, with a full-fat hospitality and high-street multiplier cut paid for, in the medium term, by extending rates to the warehouse and logistics estate that has so far skated free. Third, a five-year freeze on tinkering with the EIS, the SEIS, and entrepreneurs’ relief, because what UK risk capital needs more than anything is the boring, unsexy gift of stability.

Fourth, and most importantly, Chancellor, if you really want to move a needle on growth, give me a serious skills package built around real apprenticeships and not the consultancy-flavoured “leadership levy” we currently endure. The British SME does not need another tax break. It needs a 19-year-old who can wire a junction box and turn up on time. The training infrastructure to deliver that died, slowly, between 1998 and 2018, and the country has been quietly paying for its absence ever since.

The grim Westminster smart money expects, instead, a “narrative event”. Another fiddle with the fuel duty escalator. Another £500m for some shop-window programme, ideally with a name that ends in -hub. Another speech about the “foundations of growth” which will be exhumed, like the foundations of an abandoned new town, by the next administration in due course.

I would love, on this particular Wednesday, to be wrong. I would love the Chancellor to walk out of Number 11 with a serious, unflashy, business-friendly Statement that puts a stable hand on the tiller and makes the first long-overdue gesture of trust in the firms that actually employ people in this country. There is a version of Rachel Reeves who could do that, and I would, in this column, be the first to say so.

But the begging bowl, on present trajectory, is already on the move. The British SME has heard the front door open. We are bracing. And, increasingly, we are looking at the back of the timetable for the late train to Lisbon.

Read more:
Reeves’s Spring Statement: brace yourselves, the begging bowl is on its way round again

We are heading towards a time where five generations share the workplace. From Baby Boomers to Gen Z, employees bring very different experiences, values and expectations.

For leaders, this is not a problem to solve. It is an opportunity to harness a range of perspectives in service of better outcomes for the business.

Yet the conversation around generational difference often starts in the wrong place. Narratives that younger generations do not want to work, that they lack resilience, or that they do not understand what it takes to succeed are deeply unhelpful. Leaning into these stories shuts down curiosity and listening. It reduces a complex human dynamic to a binary argument about who is right and who is wrong, and it feeds a wider societal tendency to focus on what separates us rather than what unites us.

Across all generations, the fundamentals are the same. Regardless of age, people need to feel seen, valued and heard and those needs do not change. What differs is how confidently people express them.

Gen X, for example, were often conditioned to feel grateful simply to have a job, and many were not encouraged to articulate what they needed from work. Younger generations, however, are far more comfortable voicing their wants and expectations, and what is sometimes labelled as entitlement is, in reality, valuable insight. There may even be an element of subconscious jealousy at play, as younger people are standing up for themselves in ways many of us did not feel able to. This is not laziness, but a different and often valuable perspective.

Younger employees want to achieve and they want to be successful. What they do not necessarily want is to replicate the exact path previous generations took to get there. When you look at the levels of burnout, stress and toxicity that have existed within many traditional working models, it is extraordinary that we would not pause and ask how might we do this differently?

From inputs to outputs

Too many generational debates become fixated on inputs, whether people are in the office, how many hours they are working or what sacrifices are being made. Inputs are highly visible, which makes them easy to focus on. However, they are not the true measure of performance. What ultimately matters are the outputs.

What does good look like for this business? What are we here to achieve? What impact are we trying to make? And most importantly why are we doing this? When leaders create clarity around outputs and what those outputs are in service of, they can then allow for flexibility in how those outcomes are delivered.

If leaders focus solely on systems, organisational design, operating models and processes, they risk overlooking the most critical factor in performance, which is their people.

While most leaders recognise that adaptability is essential in today’s environment and have evolved structures, technologies and strategies at pace, the real question is whether that same adaptability is being applied to how we engage, develop and support people.

Providing clarity about both the what and the why ensures that people, are set up to work autonomously. Autonomy enables individuals to feel a sense of personal agency, and that is something everyone needs, regardless of which generation they are.

Without this alignment and autonomy, even the most well-designed transformation efforts are unlikely to deliver their full potential.

Conflict as information not threat

Generational differences can sometimes surface as tension. What we often label as conflict at work is rarely true conflict. More often, it is a difference of opinion that has not been expressed clearly or resolved early. Lack of clarity creates the conditions for disagreement to escalate. The goal is not to avoid disagreements but to bring them to the surface and explore them. Conflict will exist because people care, they are passionate, and they see things differently. The question is whether it becomes healthy or unhealthy.

A difference of opinion is not a threat. Becoming more comfortable with the idea that multiple perspectives can coexist is often the key to avoiding full-blown conflict. Leaders play a vital role in shaping the conditions for healthy challenge. They create environments grounded in exploration and understanding and support open, constructive dialogue that strengthens teams and decision-making.

When handled constructively, conflict, especially that arising from generational differences, becomes an opportunity to improve collaboration, build understanding, and harness diverse perspectives to achieve better outcomes.

Enduring strength across generations

Generational collaboration cannot be one sided. There are enduring strengths within older generations, perspective, experience, clarity of standards and resilience developed through navigating challenge without constant scaffolding.

At the same time some younger employees may not yet have had the opportunity to build those muscles. Many have been highly supported and protected. That does not make them weak. It simply means certain skills need developing and that development requires guidance not judgement.

Equally, younger generations bring fresh thinking, technological fluency and a willingness to question assumptions. They have a right to help define culture and quality of work going forward. But that right comes with a responsibility to engage with the experience around them and to be open to learning from it.

When generations are placed together in positive contexts the exchange is powerful. You can see it in everyday life. Younger people who spend time listening to older generations’ stories often describe it as life enhancing. Perspective expands and the  same is true in organisations.

There is always value in the difference, neither generation is wholly right or wrong. The leader’s role is to find ways to use these differences proactively and work with the energy in the room rather than against it.

Leading from unity not division

The most powerful conversations in organisations are grounded in shared purpose. By focusing on what we as a business need to achieve and how we can work together to reach it, we can make the most of one another’s strengths and uncover issues that might otherwise go unnoticed.

That shift from assumption to inquiry changes everything. Leaders set the tone. They need to be available, approachable and grounded in positive intent. Supporting younger talent while maintaining clear expectations helps create cultures where clarity around what good looks like sits comfortably alongside adaptability in how it is delivered.

When we focus on what unites us rather than what divides us, generational diversity becomes an asset rather than a tension point. Harnessing these differences is not about smoothing everything into sameness. It is about recognising that diverse outlooks strengthen decision making, fuel innovation and deepen resilience.

By moving beyond unhelpful narratives, staying curious and prioritising outputs over inputs, clarity over assumption and unity over division, organisations can truly unlock all potential.

By Claire Croft, founder of executive coaching business Claire Croft Associates

For more information, visit: https://clairecroft.co.uk

Read more:
How generational differences can fuel growth

It is International Women’s Day, and my LinkedIn feed has the look of a small market town in Provence: lavender, pastel, and a great deal of self-congratulation.

There are sponsored breakfasts. There are sponsored panels. There are sponsored lanyards. And tomorrow, when the bunting comes down, we will go back to a country in which female-founded UK companies receive, depending on whose research you trust, somewhere between 1 and 3 per cent of all venture capital deployed.

I have, in the kindest possible way, had enough.

I do not, before any of the obvious counter-thrusts, doubt that the panels are well-meant. I know many of the women on them, and most of the men. I have spoken on a few of them myself, including one breakfast in 2019 which was so corporately catered that the smoked salmon was on a kind of pastel-pink mousse, and which produced, as far as I can establish, no detectable change in any UK funding statistic.

The problem is not that we are talking about female entrepreneurship. The problem is that we have managed to construct a thriving industry, events, books, breakfast sessions, Instagram accounts, chief diversity officers, podcasts, which exists primarily to discuss the fact that women do not get capital, while doing nothing in particular to change the fact that women do not get capital. The discussion has become the policy. And the policy, by every measure available to me, is failing.

Consider the figures. Of UK venture capital deployed in 2025, around 1.8 per cent went to all-female-founded teams. About 8 per cent went to mixed teams. The rest went to all-male teams. This is consistent with 2024, with 2023, with 2022, and indeed with most of the years going back to the founding of the British Venture Capital Association. None of the stickered Pride-of-Britain campaigns and IWD campaigns and 30%-Club campaigns have moved this number meaningfully in a decade.

Why? Because the cheque book is not on a panel. The cheque book sits in 22 firms, mostly within an Underground stop of Old Street, almost exclusively staffed by men in their thirties and forties, who, like all human beings, write cheques most easily for people who remind them of themselves. This is not, before anyone reaches for their lawyer, an accusation of malice. It is an observation about pattern recognition, which is what venture capital is. And until the people doing the pattern recognition look different, the patterns recognised will look the same.

What would actually move the dial, then, beyond the lanyards? First: get the British Business Bank, which is the largest single investor in UK venture capital, to write into its limited partner agreements a hard requirement on capital deployed to female-led teams, with a real reporting and clawback mechanism. The Bank already screens for ESG. It can screen for this. Second: widen the EIS scheme to give a higher relief rate, say 35 per cent rather than 30, for investments into female-led companies. Money moves; pre-seed capital follows tax incentives like a Labrador follows ham.

Third, and this is the one nobody in this debate ever wants to talk about, recognise that a meaningful share of the gender capital gap is in fact a maternity capital gap. Female founders raise less because, on the evidence, they are penalised for the years 30 to 40 in a way their male counterparts are not. A statutory founder maternity allowance, paid out of a small levy on EIS, would do more for female enterprise than ten years of pancake breakfasts. It would also, by the way, be cheap. We could fund it from the Treasury’s underspend on the dormant assets scheme alone.

I write all this not as a heroic ally, heroes are exhausting, but as a serial investor who has watched too many gifted women take their cap table abroad because the British funding stack made them feel like a marketing exercise rather than a portfolio company. We will not fix this with another lavender panel. We will fix it with cheques.

Happy International Women’s Day. Now: who in this room is signing one?

Read more:
International Women’s Day: spare us the lanyards and look at who’s actually got the cheque book

I was in a pub in Marylebone last Wednesday, a perfectly civilised, low-ceilinged, slightly damp London pub of the kind that ought to be impossible to ruin, and I watched a couple in their late thirties order, in entirely sober earnestness, two mocktails and a small bowl of edamame.

The man asked, with a straight face, whether the lime cordial was “refined sugar free”. The barman, a Pole called Marek who is approximately my age and certainly more dignified, did the thing with his eyes that hospitality professionals do when they are deciding whether to keep the lease or burn the place down. Marek, if you’re reading: I voted burn.

We have arrived, as a culture, at the apparent consensus that drinking less is uncomplicatedly good. I am not, despite the byline, going to argue otherwise. I have lived, all my life, in a country with a complicated relationship to alcohol, and the evidence on liver disease, on domestic harm, on the working week, is what it is. Drink less, by all means. Drink better, even better. But would somebody, please, sit down with the Treasury, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Centre for Social Justice, and explain to them that the British pub, the actual building, the actual job, the actual community, has been the quiet collateral damage of this turn, and that this matters?

The numbers tell the story. Trade in our hospitality clients drops by close to 18 per cent during Dry January. It drops again by another 7 to 9 per cent in Lent, in Lent, in 2026, in a country where most people couldn’t name three of the Apostles. Sober October, in slightly tongue-in-cheek alliance with Stoptober, dings the year by another four. Add in the steady ambient drift towards low-and-no, and the modern publican is running a business in which one in every four months is structurally worse than the same month a decade ago.

I am, again, not blaming the trend. I am asking what we propose to do about the building.

Because here is the thing about the British pub: it is not a vehicle for selling drinks. It is, despite our refusal to acknowledge it, the principal piece of social infrastructure in much of the country. There are 8,000 villages in England and Wales without a shop. There are 4,000 villages without a primary school. There are still, for now, 22,000 with a pub. The pub is where Cubs AGMs happen, where wakes are organised, where young men whose mothers are worrying about them sit on a Sunday afternoon in chair facing the door. It is a building Britain has, almost by accident, decided also to use as a bar.

Treat it as infrastructure and the policy debate changes. We don’t ask Network Rail to fund itself entirely from ticket sales. We don’t ask GP surgeries to break even on prescriptions. We accept, in the case of railways and clinics, that there is a public-good element to the institution beyond what its private business model can capture. The pub has the same character. It deserves the same imagination.

Concretely: a hospitality VAT cut to 12.5 per cent, which would funnel almost directly to the food side of the wet-led pub. A community-pub multiplier on business rates that recognises a difference between a rural free house and a Premier Inn carvery. A statutory presumption against “asset of community value” pub conversions to flats, with the burden of proof reversed, on the developer. And, while we are at it, a serious conversation about the alcohol duty escalator, which, in its present form, is taxing the pint at a rate that nudges yet another drinker towards the supermarket.

The wellness lobby, who I have learned not to take on lightly, will tell me that lower drinking is straightforwardly good and that the death of the pub is a price worth paying. The doctors’ groups will be in the same camp. I would gently observe that the same argument was used for the closure of the cinemas in the 1960s, the bingo halls in the 1980s and the high streets in the 2010s. We are slow learners, in this country, about what we lose when we lose the rooms.

Sober October is a fine campaign. Dry January is healthy and worthy. Lent is, I gather, theologically defensible. None of these things should sit at the foot of a long-term public policy that hollows out the actual building. The mocktail is not the future of British community life. The mocktail is, on the present trajectory, what comes between us and it.

And yes, I bought Marek a drink. He wouldn’t have one. He’s on day eleven.

Read more:
Lent, Dry January, Sober October: when did the British pub become collateral damage in the wellness wars?

When the Government’s entrepreneurship adviser, Alex Depledge, declared that Britain does not “need any more restaurants”, I’ll confess my first reaction was disbelief. My second was to reach for the data. And my third, after reading it, was a conclusion both simple and troubling: she has misidentified where entrepreneurship in this country actually lives and in doing so, is making it harder for it to survive.

Let me start with the basics. Hospitality employs 2.6 million people in the UK, 7.1% of the entire workforce. It generates £69.5 billion in gross value added. It contributes £54 billion in gross tax receipts annually. It is, by any reasonable measure, not a peripheral cottage industry but a cornerstone of the British economy. But here is the figure that should stop the Government’s entrepreneurship adviser in her tracks, one drawn from the House of Commons Library research briefing on hospitality, published in January 2026, which she may not yet have had the opportunity to read: 99.6% of hospitality businesses are SMEs, and 97.7% are small businesses. An adviser appointed to clear the path for more small enterprises might reasonably be expected to know that one of the most entrepreneurially dense sectors in the entire UK economy is the one she has just publicly dismissed.

But the argument I want to make goes beyond the statistics, important as they are. It goes to something more fundamental, something that Depledge, for all her intelligence and commercial experience, appears to have overlooked entirely.

Every business deal that gets done in this country, every investment secured, every partnership formed, every client relationship built, happens somewhere and through human contact. It happens over a coffee, over lunch, over dinner, at a networking event, at a conference, at a drinks reception. The hospitality sector is not separate from the high-growth economy that the Government’s adviser wants to build. It is the connective tissue of it. You cannot scale a clean tech company, close a venture capital round, or sign a manufacturing partnership without, at some point, sitting across a table from someone in a room that a hospitality business has made possible.

I want to give a concrete example of what smart support for hospitality entrepreneurship actually looks like, because it is already happening, just not by government. On our own university campus, we work with Aramark to provide catering for students, staff and events. Given the natural variation in demand across term time, Aramark does something rather clever: it brings in small, independent food truck operators on a rotating basis, giving them seven or eight hours a day of guaranteed footfall, exposure to a large and diverse customer base, and the kind of commercial experience that no business incubator programme can replicate. The result is a richer, more varied food offering for our community, and a genuine launchpad for small hospitality enterprises.

Pubs are doing the same. The Compton Arms in Islington, ranked in the UK’s Top 50 Gastropubs, has built its reputation on offering kitchen residencies to emerging independent food businesses, giving them a platform, a customer base, and the commercial experience to grow. It is not a charity model; it is a smart one. The chefs behind Four Legs did their residency at the Compton Arms and went on to open The Plimsoll. Walk into any good pub offering food, and you will find a similar story, Thai kitchens operating out of the back, independent suppliers stocking the bar, local producers on the menu. These are ecosystems of entrepreneurship that the Government’s own adviser appears not to have noticed.

Aramark and the Compton Arms have understood something that the Government has not: supporting small hospitality businesses is not charity. It is smart commercial strategy.

I would gently invite the Government’s entrepreneurship adviser to conduct a simple experiment. Consider a single working day. The morning coffee picked up on the way to the office supplied by an independent café, almost certainly an SME. The biscuits and drinks laid on for the first meeting of the day. Lunch, whether grabbed at a local restaurant or catered in. Networking event with colleagues or clients. A family dinner that evening. Count how many of those touchpoints involve a hospitality business. Count how many of the people who made those moments possible are employed in a sector she has suggested we do not need more of.

The Government says it wants to champion the industries of tomorrow. So do we. There is no disagreement about the importance of clean technology, advanced manufacturing, or the creative sector. But the framing of hospitality as somehow standing in the way of that ambition is a false choice and a damaging one. An economy that neglects its sixth largest employment sector, that has already seen restaurants shed 22% of their casual dining sites since 2020, and that continues to pile on costs through National Insurance increases and business rates reform, is not building for the future. It is hollowing out the present.

Britain’s hospitality sector does not need to be told it isn’t wanted. It needs a government and an entrepreneurship adviser that understands what it is and what it does well enough to support it properly.

Read more:
The Government’s entrepreneurship adviser says we don’t need more restaurants. She’s wrong and here’s why

I had a coffee last week with a woman who runs a small specialist engineering firm in the Black Country. She has 14 staff, an order book that runs into the autumn, and a fridge full of unpaid invoices from a household-name aerospace contractor.

The total, when she totted it up on the back of a Pret napkin, came to £197,000. None of it overdue by a few days. All of it overdue by between 60 and 110 days, against contracted 30. She had already, that morning, told two suppliers she would have to pay them later than agreed. The cascade has a name: it is called late payment, and it is the slow-motion mugging of British small business.

We have been talking about this for as long as I can remember writing about business in this country. Every government in turn produces a Prompt Payment Code, a Small Business Commissioner, an Annual Report on Payment Practices, and an op-ed by a minister congratulating themselves on having done something. And every year I sit down with another version of the same engineer, with the same fridge, and the same napkin. Nothing changes.

It does not change because the incentives, as ever, do not change. A FTSE buyer has every reason in the world to push its payable days out, and almost no reason at all to bring them in. Their finance director gets a bonus for working capital. Their procurement team gets a sticker for “supplier consolidation”. The small firm at the other end of the contract, meanwhile, gets a dunning email from HMRC about its VAT liability, regardless of whether the cash has actually arrived.

I have been an evangelist for the Prompt Payment Code, since it was discussed when I had the ear, of the then, Prime Minister David Cameron, but let’s be honest: it has the legal force of a strongly worded letter from your tennis club. Suspension is an embarrassment, not a sanction. A FTSE 250 board does not lose sleep over its prompt-payment ranking the way it does about, say, an SEC filing. Until late payment becomes a board-level personal exposure for company directors, the practice will continue, because the practice is profitable.

So make it personal. The single reform I would put in front of the Chancellor, and I will, should I ever meet Rachel Reeves, is statutory interest at the Bank Rate plus four, accruing automatically, with directors of large companies personally liable for any payable overdue by more than 60 days twice in any 12 months. Not the company. The directors. Watch your payable days improve in a week.

I would also, while we are at it, force every company over £100m of turnover to publish a real-time live dashboard of average days to pay, with the contracted rate, the actual rate, and the names of the buyers responsible. Not an annual PDF buried at the bottom of an investor relations page. A living, breathing public number, refreshed nightly, like a football score. There is nothing a procurement director hates more than visibility.

There will be the usual howling from the British Chambers of Commerce-via-CFO lobby, saying that all this will simply push pricing onto small suppliers, raising costs for buyers and consumers. To which the answer is: yes, marginally, and that is correct. Britain has under-priced its small suppliers for two decades by allowing big buyers to use them as an unsecured credit line. Re-pricing late payment is the correction, not the problem.

And the macro effect, if anyone is still listening over the noise of another City lunch, is enormous. Federation of Small Business estimates suggest late payment kills around 50,000 UK firms a year. Fifty thousand. That is more than were killed during the worst of the pandemic. Every single one of those firms had jobs, taxes paid, customers served, premises rented and apprenticeships started. We talk endlessly about a missing tier of mid-market British companies; here, in late payment, is one of the biggest single reasons we don’t have one.

Back in my Black Country engineer’s fridge, the £197,000 will, eventually, arrive. It will arrive on day 117, because a supplier-finance scheme has been waved at her by a polite man from a London bank, charging her three per cent of the face value to settle early on her own invoice. So the contractor pays late, the bank takes a clip, and she takes the haircut. That is, in a sentence, the British small-business economy in 2026.

Late payment is a quiet pandemic. The next Chancellor’s budget could end it in an afternoon. I am no longer holding my breath; but I am, very loudly, holding the napkin.

Read more:
Late payment is Britain’s quiet pandemic, and SMEs are still being told to take it on the chin

The government has announced a £4bn investment package aimed at transforming support for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), but sector experts have cautioned that the funding risks being swallowed by mounting backlogs and growing demand.

The package includes a £1.6bn Inclusive Mainstream Fund over three years, which will go directly to early years settings, schools and colleges to strengthen in-class support. A further £1.8bn will fund a new “Experts at Hand” service designed to create a local bank of specialists, including SEND teachers and speech and language therapists in every area.

Keir Starmer said the reforms would help families secure tailored support without having to “fight the system”.

“That means no more ‘one size fits all’ approach,” he said, promising provision built around individual needs and delivered locally.

However, some professionals and parents have questioned whether the scale of the funding will be sufficient to address systemic issues.

Gosia Dawson, director at Glade Financial and a parent of an autistic child, said the recognition of failings in the SEND system was welcome but warned that structural problems remain.

“£4bn sounds substantial, but spread nationally over three years, it risks being absorbed by backlogs and rising demand,” she said. “Funding alone won’t fix challenges around assessments, thresholds and accountability.”

She added that many children with moderate but genuine needs often struggle to access timely support. “Too often, help only comes once a child reaches crisis point. Early intervention is not a cost. it’s an investment.”

Riz Malik, director at R3 Wealth and a former chair of trustees at a multi-academy trust, described the announcement as a positive step but said it should mark the beginning of longer-term reform.

“Meaningful investment has been needed for years,” he said. “If this delivers earlier support and more specialist resources, it can improve outcomes, but it should only be the start.”

The SEND system has faced sustained criticism in recent years over long assessment delays, rising Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) demand and budget pressures on local authorities.

While the government says the new funding will strengthen local capacity and reduce the need for families to escalate disputes, observers warn that without parallel reform to assessment processes and accountability structures, additional funds may struggle to keep pace with demand.

For many families, the success of the programme will be measured not by headline figures, but by whether it reduces waiting times, improves early intervention and ensures children receive the right support before reaching breaking point.

Read more:
£4bn SEND funding welcomed as experts warn of backlog pressures

There is a particular kind of Friday-afternoon dread reserved for British company directors in 2026, and it goes like this. You sit down to do something blameless, file a confirmation statement, add your new finance director, change the registered address, and Companies House, in its infinite wisdom, asks you to “verify your identity”.

Forty-five minutes later you have uploaded a passport, a driving licence, a recent utility bill and a selfie that looks suspiciously like a hostage proof-of-life, only to be told, at the end of it, that the system “could not match” your face to your photograph and to “try again later”.

Try again later! This is not the DVLA renewing a moped licence. This is the central registry of the world’s fifth-largest economy.

I have lost count of the SMEs I know that are now several months behind on perfectly innocuous filings simply because some founder, usually one with two passports, a name with a hyphen or an unfortunate haircut in 2014, cannot get past the verification gate. The Treasury and the Department for Business will tell you that this is the price we pay for a cleaner register, and that the previous regime allowed shell companies to be set up by anyone with a laptop and a sense of humour. They are right about that. They are wrong about almost everything they have done in response.

Identity verification at Companies House should have been the opposite of what we have got. It should have been near-frictionless for the 99 per cent of directors whose passport, address and bank account already exist as a matched set somewhere in HMRC’s files, and forensic for the 1 per cent who present anomalies. Instead we got the photocopier-shop equivalent of a Soviet checkpoint, designed by a committee that has clearly never tried to use it on a phone in poor light with a teething toddler on its lap.

I am not, I should say, soft on company fraud. The phoenixing brigade, limited company, limited liability, limited shame, have done genuine damage to British creditors for decades, and the appearance of registered addresses at the back of a fried-chicken shop in Croydon was overdue for a tidy. But the fraudsters know what they are doing. They have hired the agents. They have the documents. They are not the ones quietly going non-compliant in Cheltenham because Mum’s passport doesn’t scan in evening light.

The wider issue is that Companies House has become symptomatic. Every time the UK state encounters a problem of trust, its instinct is now to push the cost of solving it down to the smallest economic units in the country. HMRC does this with Making Tax Digital. The Home Office does it with right-to-work checks. The pension regulator does it with auto-enrolment. The collective effect, on a small business, is that you spend an ever larger slice of your week being a junior compliance officer for somebody else’s policy ambitions.

And the cost is not trivial. Our own back-of-the-envelope estimate at Trends Research is that the average UK SME now spends 14 hours a week, fourteen, on regulatory administration that produces no output, no customer satisfaction, no employee training. A team of ten loses a person and a half. That is, mathematically, why productivity in this country has flat-lined.

What would I do? First, build a proper digital identity rail in this country, so that the same verification works for HMRC, Companies House, the DVLA and your bank. The Estonians did this in 2002. Second, presume innocence: most directors are who they say they are, and the system should treat them that way until something looks off. Third, give Companies House actual investigatory powers, and the staff to use them, to chase the genuine fraudsters, rather than penalising the easy targets who are already on the register.

I would also, while I am at it, suggest that the people who design these processes be required to use them. Spend a Saturday morning trying to verify your own identity on a six-year-old Android while supervising a teenager’s GCSE coursework. You will, I promise, redesign the form by Sunday lunchtime.

Until then, my own confirmation statement sits unsigned, my finance director is locked out of his own filings, and the country goes on talking about a productivity puzzle that is not, in fact, very puzzling at all.

Read more:
Companies House has turned every UK director into a passport-juggling pen-pusher

Let’s get something straight right at the outset: The idea of banning working from home is not merely daft, not a bit ill-advised, but a spectacular, full-on intellectual car crash wearing a stupid hat.

And the fact that this notion is being flirted with seriously in political circles tells you everything you need to know about how out of touch this country’s Westminster bubble has become.

If you’ve been reading my scribblings on this subject for the last decade, such as Why forcing a return to the office is a step backwards for business and Bodies, bums, cost money, can you go virtual, then you’ll know I’ve not exactly been shy about waving the flag for flexibility. I’ve argued that work isn’t a location; it’s a thing you do. Deadlines don’t care about Tube strikes. Creativity doesn’t flourish because you’ve got a corner desk with a view of Canary Wharf. Pencils don’t write better in the City.

And yet here we are, in 2026, watching the same fossils who championed touchdown desks as if they were a breakthrough in human civilisation roll out the same old chestnuts about presenteeism, ‘office culture’, and “We have to see people at their desks!” — as if productivity is directly proportional to proximity to a swivel chair.

What makes this iteration of absurdity particularly galling is the political context. The current political mood music suggests that Nigel Farage could well be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Now, I am not here to start a partisan fracas, but I am here to call out nonsense wherever it crops up, regardless of which side of the aisle it’s draped in. And when someone positioned to lead the country describes working from home as something to ban, you have to wonder whether they’ve ever, you know, worked.

If your understanding of remote working is limited to the fleeting glimpse you get when the BBC cuts to a home office with a bobble-head on a shelf, then yes, you might think working from home is an indulgence. A luxury. A mild form of leisure. But as anyone who has actually managed teams through screens, as I wrote in Managing your team through a small screen, will tell you, there’s nothing remotely relaxed about aligning global calendars, coaching through glitches, wiring up video calls while your dog thinks he’s invited, and delivering outcomes that matter.

One of the clearest articulations I’ve read on this came from Mark Dixon, founder of Regus, yes, the flexible workspace titan with a vested interest in desks existing everywhere, and yet unambiguously clear that banning remote working is idiotic. His comments, in an interview with The Times, pierced the usual fog of clichés: flexibility is not the enemy of collaboration; it is its enabler. People don’t want to be forced back into a dungeon of desks five days a week; they want meaningful connection on their terms. If that means meeting in person for ideation and spending the rest of the week where they can function best, then great. If it means satellite offices closer to where people live, brilliant. But banning WFH altogether? Only someone with a pathological affection for sepia-tinted office fantasies could back that.

Let’s unpack why this matters beyond the tedium of managerial turf wars, and to put my bona fides out there on this topic Capital Business Media – owners of Business Matters – has doubled turnover  in three years with not a single staff member being in the same ‘office’ as their colleagues.

First: productivity. The best evidence we have, from countless businesses large and small, is that output does not collapse when people work from home. The idea that remote work is synonymous with loafing is a myth lazy commentators cling to because it’s a convenient continuation of their own nostalgia for commutes on Tube trains smelling faintly of regret.

Second: talent. The modern workforce is not static; it does not orbit offices like electrons around a corporate nucleus. People prioritise flexibility, and talent migrates to where they find it. Companies that cling to “You must be here 9–5, no exceptions” do not become magnets for the best people; they become boarding houses for the most compliant. If banning WFH becomes legislation, businesses will reward political interference with a choice: move work abroad, automate it, or collapse under its own inertia.

Third: the economy. There’s a pernicious assumption among some policymakers that an office full of bodies equals economic vitality. But let’s be honest, the office economy is a facade propped up by overpriced coffee, sandwich chains with dubious pension plans, and pastry carts wheeled out of a desire to feel busier than we are. Real economic value is created by effective, sustainable work, whether it’s done in a studio in Sussex, a flat in Glasgow, or an airport lounge in Zurich during a layover.

Far from being a quaint perk, remote working is an economic force multiplier. It reduces carbon emissions from commuting, diminishes pressure on housing markets in overheated urban centres, and spreads spending power geographically. It’s not a threat to society; it’s an evolution of it.

So let’s be clear: banning WFH isn’t just about where people sit. It’s about control. It’s about a cultural insistence on seeing busyness as virtue rather than effectiveness. It’s about politicians pining for a world they half-remember through the filmy lens of “office culture” brochures from the early 2000s.

My suggestion? If anyone seriously proposes a ban on working from home, we should ask them this: “Have you ever delivered an entire quarterly business review over Zoom? Have you ever coordinated a multinational project without once stepping foot in an office? Have you ever actually assessed work by outcomes rather than appearances?”

Until they can answer yes, I’d be wary of taking their advice on the future of work seriously.

Because whatever happens next in Westminster, let’s not consign the world of work to a bunker called an office. That’s not progress. That’s nostalgia dressed up as policy. And in an era when adaptability is a competitive advantage, banning working from home isn’t just backward-looking, it’s lunacy.

Read more:
Banning WFH is lunacy, and the politicians out of touch enough to mandate it are too

Mark Dixon, the billionaire founder of IWG and architect of the Regus empire, has dismissed calls to ban working from home as “idiotic”, arguing that the future of productivity lies in better management, not compulsory office attendance.

Speaking to The Times, Dixon responded to remarks by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who recently declared that people are not more productive at home and pledged to scrap the practice if his party ever came to power. For Dixon, such thinking belongs to another era. “The idea that the only place you can work is in an office is idiotic,” he said. Advocates of five days a week in the office, he added, are “naive” and “Luddites”.

As chief executive and largest shareholder of IWG, the £2.2bn group behind the Regus and Spaces brands, Dixon is hardly neutral. The company promotes hybrid working as a core proposition and operates more than 4,400 locations across 122 countries. Yet his view is informed by scale and data as much as ideology. “Work can be done absolutely anywhere today,” he said. “The whole notion of offices has completely changed.”

The interview took place at Spaces Liverpool Street in the City, a recently refurbished location where corporate suits and start-up hoodies share communal tables. Dixon, 66, is softly spoken rather than bombastic, but unequivocal in his beliefs. “The key problem with work and productivity is how you manage people,” he said. “It’s not whether they’re at home or in an office.”

His approach is to manage outputs rather than presence. For his roughly 1,000 head-office staff, part of a global workforce of around 9,000, the emphasis is on delivery rather than surveillance. As for the oft-cited “water cooler moments” supposedly lost in remote working, Dixon believes they must be deliberately curated rather than left to chance. “You’ve got to schedule creative periods,” he said. “You can’t just rely on random encounters.”

Dixon’s own career has been anything but conventional. Born in Essex to a car mechanic, he began his entrepreneurial life selling topsoil to neighbours at the age of 12. After leaving school at 16 and travelling the world, he launched a sandwich delivery business in the 1980s before selling his bakery venture for £800,000. That capital financed his move to Brussels in 1989, where he spotted businesspeople conducting meetings in cafés, and identified a market for flexible office space. The first Regus centre opened later that year.

Expansion followed rapidly through Latin America, China and the United States. Regus listed in London in 2000 but narrowly avoided collapse during the dotcom crash. More recently, IWG has outlasted high-profile rival WeWork, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023 after a spectacular fall from a $47bn valuation.

Despite persistent speculation about shifting its listing to the US, Dixon said such a move is not imminent. While about half of IWG’s business is American, he cautioned that scale is essential before any transatlantic switch. “It’s important to be big there; you don’t want to be a minnow,” he said, suggesting annual earnings would need to exceed £1bn before the company could justify the effort.

On UK politics, Dixon was less restrained. He questioned whether successive governments have truly prioritised business competitiveness, arguing that long-term economic success depends on fostering strong companies and industries.

Now based in Monaco, Dixon retains a 27 per cent stake in IWG. Asked about succession, he acknowledged the inevitability of change. “The challenge for any chief executive-founder is succession,” he said. “This is a young man’s business.” He insisted he has no ego-driven attachment to the role, only to the company’s success.

For the time being, however, he remains focused on growth, and on demonstrating that hybrid working can deliver results. The day before our conversation, he had taken his team to a nearby pub after a long meeting. “We got quite a lot done in two pints,” he said with a smile. “It was very productive.”

Read more:
Mark Dixon: ‘Banning working from home is idiotic’

The UK government must overhaul its approach to public sector procurement if it is serious about backing British innovation, according to Justin Megawarne, managing partner at Megaslice, who has accused Whitehall of hiding behind rigid frameworks and “arbitrary scoring systems”.

Megawarne’s comments follow the decision to award Fujitsu a place on a government framework worth up to £984 million, despite the company’s central role in developing and supporting the Post Office Horizon IT system. The system led to the wrongful prosecution of 736 subpostmasters across the UK and has since become one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in modern British history.

Fujitsu had previously written to the government committing not to bid for new public contracts until the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal had concluded. Its inclusion on the framework has reignited debate about how the government selects suppliers — and whether it is doing enough to support genuine domestic innovation.

“If an organisation has performed so badly for its customers that it has become a national scandal and warranted its own TV drama, surely it’s time the government spent its money elsewhere,” Megawarne said.

“With so much public money wasted on technology that isn’t fit for purpose, and in this case fraudulently criminalised people, the budget for real innovation continues to shrink. We are failing to support the next generation of founders who are building genuinely innovative businesses, instead recycling contracts to the same organisations that have failed us before.”

Megawarne argues that government procurement processes are fundamentally flawed, relying too heavily on mechanistic evaluation tools that struggle to identify real value.

“Current approaches to adopting new technology are overcomplicated and painfully slow,” he said. “Scoring sheets don’t capture innovation. If the government actually engaged with businesses instead of keeping them at arm’s length, we could save millions of pounds currently wasted on the wrong solutions.”

Rather than relying on civil servants to assess complex and novel technologies, Megawarne believes the government should enlist independent industry leaders with proven innovation credentials.

“Let experts judge ideas using their experience and judgement, not a spreadsheet,” he said. “Yes, some will say that sounds unfair, but it dramatically increases the chances of finding a genuinely game-changing solution. You simply need to ensure those experts have no conflicts of interest.”

He added that procurement decisions are too often driven by price rather than outcomes. “Spending less on the wrong solution isn’t saving money at all. Much of what’s been invested in so far has failed to solve the day-to-day problems government departments actually face.”

Megawarne also criticised what he sees as the government’s default preference for large, established suppliers, regardless of past performance.

“The mindset is still, ‘no one ever got fired for buying IBM’,” he said. “It’s a way of avoiding responsibility. If something goes wrong, you can always point at the big name.”

In the case of Fujitsu and the Post Office Horizon system, he said the failure was neither minor nor isolated. “This wasn’t a simple error. It destroyed lives. The company apologised only when it was forced to, and repeatedly resisted compensation. Yet here we are again, awarding more public contracts.”

According to Megawarne, the same pattern plays out repeatedly across government IT spending. “Huge consultancies win major contracts, fail spectacularly, and face no real consequences. It’s a cycle of failure with zero accountability.”

At the heart of the problem, Megawarne believes, is an institutional aversion to risk.

“True innovation exists in the UK, and much of it sits with founders who are building solutions that could genuinely transform public services,” he said. “But the government is fundamentally risk-averse.”

He warned that founders are being steered down the wrong path, optimising for procurement scorecards rather than solving real problems. “They chase perfect scores on frameworks that measure the wrong things, while innovation is sidelined in favour of cost-cutting and box-ticking.”

“If the government genuinely wants to unlock British innovation,” Megawarne added, “it needs to stop prioritising spreadsheets over people, and start backing ideas that actually work.”

Read more:
UK government must end its boycott of British innovation, says Megaslice

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) are often seen as “big company” issues – tied to boardroom pledges, large HR teams or investor reporting. But the reality is quite different. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), building a more inclusive culture is not just possible; it’s essential for sustainable growth.

At Chubb Fire & Security UK&I, diversity, equity and inclusion are embedded into the way we work. One of our core values is to “Win with integrity, together” – and that means creating a workplace where every individual feels respected, included and able to thrive. We don’t see DE&I as an initiative. We see it as a leadership standard.

And while large organisations may have dedicated resources for this work, smaller businesses have a unique advantage: they can make change happen faster, with closer teams and more direct influence from leadership.

Why DE&I Belongs in Every Business Strategy

In the UK, the legal case for inclusive workplaces is clear. Under the Equality Act 2010, businesses must ensure that people are not discriminated against based on protected characteristics, including race, gender, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation and more.

But DE&I is not just a legal requirement. It’s a competitive advantage.

Research shows that diverse teams are better at problem-solving, more innovative and more adaptable in times of change. Inclusive cultures encourage trust and psychological safety – two factors that directly support retention, productivity and performance.

At Chubb, we recognise that diversity, equity and inclusion are strong drivers of growth and innovation. We’ve seen how teams thrive when people feel safe to be themselves, share their perspectives and contribute without fear of judgement. It’s not about meeting quotas; it’s about unlocking potential.

Chubb’s Commitment: Creating a Culture Where Everyone Belongs

We take pride in marking cultural and awareness moments that matter to our people – from Pride and Eid to Baby Loss Awareness Week and National Inclusion Week. These moments help us build empathy, strengthen relationships and create space for conversation.

We also take care to reflect DE&I in how we lead. As our Chief Operations Officer, David Dunnagan, puts it:

“DE&I goes much further than just employing diverse people; it’s about creating an inclusive and equitable environment in which every employee feels valued and respected.”

That environment is shaped not only by formal policies, but by the everyday behaviours of leaders and colleagues. From how we run meetings to how we hire, promote and communicate, we aim to model fairness, transparency and respect.

We know that when people feel safe and seen, they perform better. They grow faster. And they stay longer.

A Practical Roadmap for SME Leaders

You don’t need a dedicated DE&I officer to make meaningful progress. Here are five actions any SME can take – starting today:

1. Start with Listening and Learning

Hold informal conversations, run anonymous surveys or simply ask your team: “What does inclusion mean to you?” You don’t need to have all the answers. Showing a willingness to listen and learn is the first step to building trust.

2. Build Inclusion into Everyday Culture

Create inclusive meeting habits to make sure everyone is heard. Avoid scheduling around cultural holidays to encourage diverse perspectives. Inclusive cultures aren’t created by policy – they’re created by people, every day.

3. Check Your Processes for Fairness

Look at how you hire, promote and recognise talent. Are your job ads inclusive? Are opportunities visible and accessible to all? Small changes, like removing biased language from a job post, can have a big impact.

4. Celebrate What Makes People Different

Recognise cultural celebrations, awareness days and life events. Invite your team to share stories or lead activities. These moments foster connection, compassion and belonging.

5. Lead by Example

Inclusion starts at the top. Leaders must model openness, fairness and humility. At Chubb, we empower our people to be their true selves – and expect leaders to create the conditions that make that possible.

Inclusion Supports Growth and Keeps People

An inclusive culture doesn’t just attract talent – it keeps it. People stay where they feel valued. They speak up where they feel heard. And they do their best work where they feel safe.

In fast-moving businesses, especially SMEs, that stability matters. It means fewer recruitment costs, stronger collaboration and more continuity for customers and clients.

As our People Playbook puts it: “We celebrate the fact that our diversity makes us strong – and, simply, it’s the right thing to do.”

The Bottom Line

Diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re must-haves for any business that wants to grow with integrity.

For SMEs, the opportunity is clear. You’re already close to your teams. You know your people. You move quickly. That means you can act – now – to create a more inclusive workplace where everyone feels they belong.

At Chubb, we’ve seen how inclusion strengthens our teams, our culture and our performance. We’ve still got work to do – but we’re proud of the journey we’re on.

Because when people feel safe to be themselves, they go further. And when they go further, so does your business.

Read more:
How SMEs can build diversity, equity and inclusion into their growth plans

I’ve been fortunate enough to walk the cavernous halls of a fair few of the world’s biggest trade shows in Las Vegas, they promised, and delivered, staggering innovation and energy.

Days of relentless discovery: robots pouring cappuccinos, AI so intuitive it seemed clairvoyant, and founders who spoke about change not as a cliché but as a lived reality. These were not just exhibitions; they were global marketplaces for ideas, capital and partnerships.

Yet back home, while Britain idles in Westminster’s fog of distracted policymaking, our competitors across Europe are not just showing up, they’re outshining us.

This year, Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association, the people behind CES, the annual technology conference held this week annually in Vegas, publicly criticised the UK government for lacking meaningful support for British businesses at the world’s most influential tech stage. His indictment is stark: the UK’s presence at the event is “spotty” and underwhelming compared with countries such as France and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, those nations send senior ministers, in some cases even royalty, and generously fund coordinated national pavilions for their firms.

Before we mince words about patriotism and global ambition, let’s be clear: this isn’t some petty squabble over flags and PR stunts. Trade shows like CES are strategic platforms where deals are forged, investment flows are unlocked, and international credibility is forged. It is precisely where the future gets bought, sold and broadcast.

And yet, Britain, despite having one of the world’s most dynamic tech sectors, is looking increasingly like an afterthought.

Consider the facts: French exhibitors now outnumber British ones; Germany and the Netherlands field strong contingents; even some smaller European states pack more visible, government-backed stands. The UK’s Tradeshow Access Programme, once a modest but valuable grant scheme for SMEs, was scrapped in 2021 and, despite repeated pleas from industry, has not been restored.

I have witnessed first-hand the pride and purpose with which other nations approach these events. The French pavilion, sleek, well funded and staffed with government representatives, felt like a declaration of strategic intent. British exhibitors, by contrast, often seemed to be fending for themselves, clutching their pitch decks and hoping for serendipity rather than being buoyed by a coordinated national effort.

There’s something faintly absurd about this situation. Post-Brexit, our leaders have consistently proclaimed a desire to “go global”, to boost exports, attract investment, and elevate the UK’s role on the world stage. Yet when the most visible arena for that ambition rolls into Las Vegas, one where 100,000 visitors convene and thousands of international companies exhibit emerging technologies, we treat it as an optional extra rather than a priority.

True, the government points to its Industrial Strategy and Small Business Plan as evidence of support for scaling firms globally. But warm words on paper are cold comfort on the exhibition floor. In contrast, targeted financial support and senior government engagement send a clear signal that Britain not only values innovation, but backs it when the stakes are highest.

You need only speak to the founders who travelled thousands of miles from the UK, many self-funding their trips, to hear a consistent refrain: without coordinated help, British firms are underexposed and under-networked. One CEO told me he felt “overshadowed” by a neighbouring European country’s pavilion that looked and felt like a national investment. Another confessed that, had it not been for private backing, they might not have made the trip at all.

This should trouble us. The future of British business growth is not solely in domestic policy tinkering, it is in international trade, collaboration and visibility. Trade shows are not merely exhibitions; they are signposts for global relevance. When your government isn’t present in a meaningful way, the world notices — and so do investors, partners and international customers.

Let’s not construe this as an attack on civil servants or ministers. The truth is simpler: the UK is juggling competing priorities, cost of living, health services, geopolitics, and a multi-billion trade show in Nevada can seem indulgent by comparison. But that is precisely the point. Innovation and global business growth cannot be an afterthought if we are to compete with economies that deliberately align industrial strategy with outward-facing support.

Last year I was talking to a French startup founder, and I asked what her government’s presence meant to her, she smiled and said: “It means someone believes in our success before we prove it.” That sort of confidence matters. It turns heads, opens doors and scales businesses in ways that a sterling-denominated press release never will.

Britain has all the ingredients to be a leader: world-class universities with their numerous spin-offs, inventive entrepreneurs, and a time zone that bridges East and West. But without visible, tactical governmental support at flagship global events, we risk these assets being underestimated or, worse, overlooked.

If the UK truly aspires to be a global tech and trade powerhouse, then it must treat trade shows like CES as what they are: frontline diplomatic and economic missions.
Because if we aren’t prepared to support our businesses on the world’s biggest stages, we shouldn’t be surprised when others step into the spotlight, and we’re left in the auditorium seats, polite but absent.

Read more:
Why Britain’s world stage presence deserves more than lip service

American men have lost their work ethic and increasingly feel entitled to a comfortable life without applying themselves, according to Wilbur Ross, who served throughout Donald Trump’s first term.

Ross, the Wall Street investor once dubbed the “king of bankruptcy”, said younger generations have been “coddled” by growing up in a wealthy society, weakening the drive to work that underpinned previous generations and threatening long-term economic growth.

“It used to be that the mantra for any young person was work hard and you can make progress and do better than your parents did,” Ross said. “It never occurred to anyone to not work, at least not anyone I knew. There’s been a whole change in that.”

He argued that a combination of state benefits and parental prosperity had created a sense of entitlement. “I think all these [benefits] programmes, and also the relative prosperity of the current generation’s parents, have created a feeling that they’re entitled to a nice lifestyle, independently of whether they perform any kind of meaningful work,” he said.

“If you’re an able-bodied person who’s not willing to even seek a job, why should you prosper?”

Overall labour force participation among Americans aged 25 to 54, the so-called prime-age workforce, fell sharply during the pandemic but has since recovered to 83.8 per cent, one of the highest levels in nearly a quarter of a century. However, Ross and other economists say that headline figure masks a profound long-term shift among men.

Prime-age male participation has been in structural decline since the 1960s, even as female participation has surged to record levels. The divergence is especially pronounced among younger workers.

Analysis by the Brookings Institution shows that labour force participation among 25-year-old men has fallen in every successive generation since 1969. For men born in the late 1990s, participation at that age stands at about 84 per cent, down from 93 per cent for those born roughly 45 years earlier.

By contrast, participation among women of the same age has climbed steadily, rising from 66.3 per cent to 76.6 per cent over the same period.

Ross said the trend among men was particularly damaging for economic prospects. “I think there are a lot of men who just don’t want to work that hard,” he said.

Workforce participation, he added, was one of the three critical drivers of economic growth. “One is growth in the population of working-age people — that’s something you have no control over in the near term. The other two are productivity and workforce participation. And of the two, for the moment, workforce participation is probably the more important.”

Economists have pointed to several factors behind the decline in male participation, including the loss of industrial jobs, the rise of service-sector roles traditionally dominated by women, higher incarceration rates leaving many men with criminal records, the expansion of disability benefits, and persistent weaknesses in education and skills training.

Together, they warn, these forces risk leaving a growing cohort of men disengaged from work — with long-term consequences for productivity, public finances and social cohesion.

Read more:
Men have lost their work ethic, says Trump’s former commerce secretary

There’s a particular sound that stays with you once you’ve lived in the English countryside. Not birdsong, that’s too obvious, but the deeper rhythm of things: the tractor coughing into life at dawn, Chameau boots crunching on gravel, the hooves of the horses going out for a hack, the soft murmur of a village pub where everyone knows exactly why you’re there even if they’ve never seen you before.

I had a house in rural Northamptonshire once. Not a fantasy “weekend retreat”, but a place where life actually happened. One evening, over a pint of ‘landlord’ and slightly judgemental, the village gamekeeper offered to teach me how to shoot. “You get good enough,” he said, “and maybe you can join us on a day at the estate.”

A few sessions at the clays with a beautiful Purdey side-by-side and I was hooked, not just on hitting the target – which I am told my hit rate was very impressive – but on the world around it. The quiet discipline. The sense of responsibility. The unspoken understanding that this was not about bloodlust or bravado, but stewardship. About knowing the land, respecting it, and earning your place within it.

Which is why, as 2025 limps to a close, I find myself deeply uneasy about the future of Britain’s rural economy, and the way of life bound up in it.

We’ve been told, repeatedly, that concerns about farming, shooting, gamekeeping and rural business are either nostalgic indulgences or political dog whistles. Watch a few episodes of Clarkson’s Farm and tell me that again with a straight face. Strip away the jokes and celebrity sheen and what you’re left with is a documentary about a sector living permanently on the brink,  one failed harvest, one policy tweak, one cost spike away from collapse.

That brinkmanship became painfully clear this year when the government set its sights on agricultural inheritance tax relief. What began as a plan to end long-standing protections for family farms triggered outrage across rural Britain. As reported by the Financial Times, the subsequent retreat, raising thresholds and softening the blow, was presented as a compromise. But uncertainty, once introduced, doesn’t politely leave again. It lingers. It freezes investment. It accelerates exits.

Family farms are not tax shelters. They are capital-intensive, low-margin, generational businesses whose value is tied up in land rather than liquidity. Treating them like dormant wealth piles rather than working enterprises is how you dismantle a sector quietly, without ever admitting you meant to.

And it’s not just farmers feeling the squeeze. Gamekeeping, shooting and countryside management support tens of thousands of jobs and underpin rural tourism, hospitality and supply chains. A stark warning was sounded recently in The Telegraph’s analysis of the decline of gamekeeping, which laid bare how rising costs, regulation and political hostility are pushing skilled rural workers out altogether.

This isn’t culture war fluff. It’s economics.

Add to that the sense, increasingly hard to shake, that rural Britain is culturally misunderstood by those writing policy. Labour’s proposals around animal welfare and trail hunting have reignited fears that legislation is being shaped through an urban moral lens, with The Guardian reporting warnings from countryside groups that rural voices are being marginalised rather than engaged.

Meanwhile, the data tells its own grim story. Farm closures continue to outpace new starts, with thousands of holdings disappearing under the weight of rising costs, labour shortages and unpredictable returns, as highlighted by FarmingUK. When a farm goes, it rarely goes alone. The contractor loses work. The feed supplier closes. The pub shortens its hours. The village hollows out.

What worries me most is that this erosion is happening quietly, politely, without the drama that usually forces political reckoning. There’s no single villain. No obvious cliff edge. Just a steady draining away of viability until one day we look around and wonder where everyone went.

The countryside isn’t a theme park or a television backdrop. It’s an economic ecosystem that feeds us, employs us and anchors communities. Once it’s gone, you don’t rebuild it with grants and slogans.

I learnt to shoot because a gamekeeper trusted me with his craft. That trust, between land and people, tradition and modernity, economy and culture, is what’s really under threat. If policymakers keep treating rural Britain as a sentimental inconvenience rather than a strategic asset, they may wake up one day to find the countryside still looks beautiful… but no longer works. And that, unlike a missed clay, is a mistake you don’t get to take another shot at.

Read more:
I worry for our rural economy – and yes, it’s personal

Let’s be absolutely candid: the siren song of easing off climate commitments is tempting the corporate class and it stinks.

If 2025 was indeed the year business quietly began retreating from net zero, watering down pledges or scrapping them outright, then 2026 must be the year UK firms rediscover backbone and purpose. After all, the alternative isn’t merely inconvenient; it is recklessly self-defeating.

The Guardian’s recent investigation suggests that, from retailers to banks, carmakers to councils, pledges once trumpeted from press release rooftops are being softened or shelved. The rhetoric of carbon-neutral economies now reads, all too often, like a relic of corporate virtue signalling rather than a serious business strategy.

Yet here’s the part no executive memo seems to state with enough clarity: net zero isn’t a fad. It is the defining economic transformation of our era, as seismic as electrification or the internet. Treat it as a mere box-ticking exercise and you will wake up in a world where markets and reputations have passed you by.

Let’s dismantle the fearmongering for a moment. There’s a narrative circulating among the financially cautious that climate action is a cost rather than an investment. That delivering net-zero targets detracts from near-term profits. That shareholders want dividends, not decarbonisation. And then there’s the grumbling about regulation: “not now, not yet, don’t you see we have bills to pay?”

Balderdash. Yes, there are genuine short-term costs to decarbonisation. But those are far outweighed by long-term economic opportunity. Research by credible bodies such as the British Chambers of Commerce and McKinsey shows the net-zero transition could be worth over £1 trillion to UK business by 2030, through innovation, exports and first-mover advantage. That’s not greenwash: that’s maths.

Indeed, if British business becomes the laggard rather than the leader, it won’t just cede moral high ground, it will cede market share. Markets today are global, and buyers increasingly demand sustainability from their suppliers. Investors are doing the same. Lenders, insurers and big pension funds are incorporating climate risk into pricing and capital allocation in ways that will only intensify. To flinch now is to risk being uninvestable in the very near future.

Some might counter that regulatory uncertainty, especially post-Brexit policy shifts or political swings, makes sustained net-zero commitments precarious. And yes, the political landscape has been fractious. But that’s exactly why business leadership matters. When politicians waver, when policy is debated, corporate resolve can act as the stable anchor for long-term strategy. Step back and someone else will fill the vacuum — and it won’t be challengers with sustainability at their core.

Let’s touch on those sectors where back-tracking has been most glaring in 2025. Finance, for instance, saw cracks in its climate alliance frameworks with departures from net-zero banking coalitions. Banks such as HSBC delayed parts of their climate goals, drawing sharp criticism.

The logical leap here, that commitments can be postponed when the going gets tough, is exactly where the sceptics win. But imagine the message it sends if UK banks, the very institutions underwriting corporate growth, say they will only play ball when profits are guaranteed. It instantly undermines trust in the entire system of environmental, social and governance (ESG) integration in corporate strategy.

Retailers, too, have delayed ambitions. Supply-chain complexities and cost pressures are cited as reasons. But shoving targets back a decade or more does not solve those issues; it merely kicks the problem into the future.

And let’s not pretend automotive and aviation are immune, areas where clear net-zero pathways have, in places, ground to a halt. Travelling for Business recently highlighted how even policy support has become ambivalent.

So, where do we go from here? First: reaffirmation, not revision, of net-zero commitments. Ambition must translate into actionable, transparent transition plans rooted in science — not adjustable targets that bend in the breeze of short-term pressures.

Second: collaboration over retreat. Businesses big and small should lean into frameworks like the Science Based Targets initiative, which offers rigorous, scientifically grounded pathways to emission reductions. These are not gimmicks; they are industry-agnostic roadmaps to resilience.

Third: innovate, don’t abdicate. Let’s double down on electrification, circular economy models, and zero emissions supply chains. And let’s bring SMEs along for the ride. Data from the latest UK Net Zero Business Census shows that a majority of larger firms still regard net zero as strategic — a sign of encouragement if acted upon.

Finally, let’s call out the folly of short-termism. I am no romantic, nor a climate activist by trade. But business is nothing without its reputational capital. The choice is simple: be remembered as the generation that met the challenge of our age with grit and ingenuity, or the one that blinked.

UK business must not water down its net-zero pledges in 2026. Not because it’s easy, but because it is the only credible path to sustainable growth, investor confidence and competitive advantage in a rapidly reshaping global economy.

Read more:
Net zero isn’t a luxury: why UK business must keep its nerve in 2026

To every business that cares about its reputation, customer conversations matter.

Providing great service has always mattered. Doing it brilliantly and consistently, is where things become hard, particularly for SMEs juggling growth, limited resources and rising customer expectations. At Moneypenny, we exist to solve that challenge. By combining unrivalled people and smart AI, we represent businesses seamlessly, delivering exceptional conversations that protect reputation and drive growth.

That mission has never been more relevant. Customer expectations have shifted dramatically in recent years, changing how people want to engage with businesses of every size, from retail and hospitality to trades, tech, healthcare and property.

Customers now expect the best of both worlds: speed and simplicity for everyday tasks, and real human expertise for the moments that matter. This shift is forcing companies to rethink how they deliver service. Hybrid-service models, which blend human connection with intelligent technology, are fast becoming the new standard. For SMEs, this isn’t just another trend to navigate; it’s a genuine opportunity to compete more confidently with much larger players.

Customers want both: personal expertise and digital convenience

Today’s customers expect seamless experiences. They want reassurance, empathy and expertise when a situation is sensitive or complex, but they also expect quick answers, instant access and zero friction for simpler interactions.

We see this every day across the thousands of businesses we support. Routine enquiries don’t need to wait in a queue, and customers don’t want to repeat themselves or struggle through clunky processes. At the same time, when something really matters, a billing issue, a legal query, a health concern, people want to speak to someone who listens and understands.

Hybrid-service models make this possible. At Moneypenny, our AI Voice Agent can handle routine calls instantly, 24/7, while our people step in for conversations that require judgement, nuance or care. Crucially, the experience is designed around choice. Some customers are perfectly happy to engage with AI for quick answers; others want to speak to a human straight away, and they shouldn’t be made to fight the system to do so. It’s not about choosing between automation and humans. It’s about using both intentionally, and transparently, to create better, more meaningful customer experiences. For SMEs in particular, getting this balance right, and respecting customer preference, can be a powerful point of difference.

Designing a hybrid experience that still feels premium

One common concern for smaller businesses is whether hybrid service will dilute their personal touch. The reality is that it doesn’t, not when the experience is designed with intention.

High-value moments, onboarding calls, consultations, problem-solving and relationship-building, should always feel personal. These are the interactions customers remember and talk about. Meanwhile, routine tasks such as appointment booking, updates or FAQs can often be delivered remotely or through technology without reducing quality.

What customers dislike isn’t the fact that a service is hybrid; it’s confusion. Unclear communication, inconsistent tone and uncertainty about who is handling what quickly erode trust. Setting expectations early, explaining how your service works and being transparent about the customer journey all build confidence. And confidence builds loyalty.

A well-designed hybrid model allows SMEs to deliver a premium experience consistently, even as they scale.

Restructuring teams to support hybrid delivery

Hybrid service doesn’t just change how businesses serve customers; it changes how teams operate internally.

Many SMEs simply don’t have the headcount to manage multiple communication channels or provide round-the-clock responsiveness, but they don’t need to. Outsourcing services such as lead qualification, appointment booking, payment taking, live chat or administrative support is often far more sustainable than hiring in-house. It also frees internal teams to focus on the work that truly drives growth.

When repetitive tasks are removed, people can concentrate on customer care, problem-solving and strategic work, the areas where human expertise really shines. Hybrid models also encourage more specialised roles, improving both efficiency and job satisfaction.

That said, hybrid raises the bar on communication. Clear messaging, consistent tone of voice and strong documentation are essential to delivering a seamless experience across both digital and human touchpoints. Businesses that invest in this groundwork are the ones that see the greatest return.

Pricing differently in a hybrid world

Customer expectations around pricing are evolving too.

Businesses can position high-impact, specialist support at a premium, while tech-enabled or remote elements can be priced more predictably. This opens the door to clearer packages, subscriptions or retainers, models that are particularly attractive to SMEs looking for stable, recurring revenue.

Hybrid delivery can also improve margins. When routine tasks are automated or outsourced, costs become more controllable without compromising service quality. Transparency is critical here. Customers trust businesses that clearly explain where efficiency is gained and where expertise is being applied. When people understand the value, they are far more willing to pay for quality.

Technology should make life easier, not harder

With so many tools on the market, it’s easy for SMEs to feel overwhelmed. But technology adopted for its own sake rarely delivers results. The most successful hybrid businesses start with the outcome they want to achieve for their customers, then select the technology required to enable it, not the other way around. By designing the customer journey first and choosing tools that genuinely enhance it, businesses avoid unnecessary complexity and focus investment where it delivers real impact.

The right technology should reduce admin, integrate smoothly, simplify service delivery and complement your people. If it doesn’t make life easier for your team or your customers, it isn’t the right fit.

At its best, technology fades into the background, enabling businesses to focus on what really matters: building relationships, protecting reputation and delivering great service, every time.

Hybrid isn’t a buzzword, it’s a competitive advantage

For SMEs across every sector, hybrid-service models are no longer optional. They are a strategic advantage. Done well, they improve customer satisfaction, increase operational efficiency, reduce pressure on teams and allow businesses to scale sustainably without losing their personal touch.

At Moneypenny, our role is simple: to be a trusted partner, always in our clients’ corner, helping them deliver exceptional customer conversations that drive growth. By combining brilliant people with smart AI, we empower businesses of all sizes to compete, grow and protect the reputations they’ve worked so hard to build.

Most importantly, hybrid brings together what customers value most: the speed of technology and the humanity of real people. And that combination will define the businesses that thrive in 2026 and beyond.

By Mark Finlay, Chief Commercial Officer, Moneypenny

Read more:
Why hybrid-service models are the future for business in 2026

Every January, millions of people resolve to get healthier. They join gyms, hire trainers, and put themselves in environments engineered for progress. The formula is obvious: the right expertise, the right structure, and the right people make improvements inevitable.

Yet when it comes to our businesses, the engines that employ people and shape industries, we often operate in isolation. We grind away alone, convinced that needing input is somehow an admission of weakness. And after building multi-million-pound companies, we tell ourselves we should have all the answers by now.

But the founders who scale fastest understand something important. Business health requires continuous investment, expert insight, and a community strong enough to hold you accountable to your ambitions.

Running a scale-up company means facing decisions that are rarely simple and never something you can solve through a quick internet search. Should you expand internationally? How do you keep a key hire who is wavering? What capital structure will get you through the next phase of growth?

Is now the moment to acquire, or the moment to be acquired?

These are not questions you eventually figure out through trial and error. They are questions that grow heavier the longer you hesitate. Meanwhile, competitors who seek support, challenge their thinking, and move with speed advance.

I have watched exceptional founders spend months debating a move that a peer, someone who has already navigated the same crossroads, could have helped them resolve in a single afternoon. That lost time is not hypothetical. It is lost revenue, lost positioning, and lost momentum. And momentum, once gone, is incredibly difficult to regain.

When you consistently engage with other founders who operate at your level, everything shifts. Problems that felt overwhelming shrink down to size. Blind spots become visible. Opportunities you would have missed suddenly come into focus. You begin to recognise patterns because you are learning from the lived experience of others who have already paid the price for those insights.

This is not networking in the traditional sense. It is not swapping business cards over canapés. It is about building a trusted circle of people who carry the same weight, face the same pressures, and understand the stakes in a way no investor, adviser, or team member ever can.

Inside our community at Helm, I have seen founders cut their time to decision on major strategic calls by more than half. Not because they rush, but because they move with clarity. They pressure test assumptions, tap into collective intelligence, and learn in hours what would have taken years to uncover alone.

The gym analogy is more literal than it sounds. Turning up once changes nothing. Showing up consistently changes everything. The founders who get real value treat peer engagement as a discipline. They block time for Forums the same way they block time for investor meetings. They show up prepared. They contribute. They understand that a community only works when every member is committed to the health of the whole.

As you set your priorities for the year ahead, ask yourself a simple question: are you investing in the health of your business with the same intentionality you invest in your own?

If you want to accelerate in 2026, working harder in isolation will not get you there. Surrounding yourself with the right people will. Founders who have overcome the challenges you are facing. Founders who challenge your assumptions and push you to think bigger and execute better.

The businesses that will dominate the next decade will not be led by lone wolves. They will be led by founders who understand that speed comes from shared intelligence, and growth accelerates when you stop solving every problem for the first time.

Your business deserves the same commitment, discipline, and care that you give your body every January. Make 2026 the year you invest in its health properly.

Read more:
Treat Your Business Like Your Body This New Year 

Each December, the festive season seems to arrive sooner than expected. As employees strive to meet year-end deadlines, the responsibility of organising the annual Christmas social arises without warning.

Although securing a venue may appear straightforward, the complexities of balancing budgets and schedules can render an additional strain on already demanding workloads.

However, these end-of-year gatherings hold more significance than most people realise.They represent one of the few opportunities for teams to pause and reconnect before another year begins. When executed effectively, these events remind employees why they enjoy working together.

Drawing on my experience organising social events through StreetHunt Games, for over 4000 teams, I’ve seen what separates a good event from one that people talk about long after it’s over.

Why does connection matter?

With stress levels and burnout continuing to rise across workplaces, employee recognition should remain a central priority for organisational leaders. Researchers from People Management Insight suggest that acknowledging employees’ individual talents can play a crucial role in preventing burnout and enhancing well-being. Beyond this, the desire for authentic connection often becomes even more pronounced during the holiday season.

A thoughtfully planned Christmas event can offer employees a valuable opportunity to step away from their daily responsibilities and decompress. More importantly, well-executed corporate socials can serve as a meaningful expression of appreciation. Moments of validation can strengthen workplace culture in ways that quarterly check-ins or corporate slogans fail to.

Don’t overthink it

When the event finally arrives, there can be a tendency to overfill the schedule in an effort to make the experience feel substantial. However, the most successful events are rarely the most elaborate; rather, they feel effortless and authentic.

Employees often seek opportunities to relax and reconnect beyond their regular work environment. Simple Christmas team activities tend to foster the most memorable nights for colleagues. In these settings, motivation and enjoyment stem from genuine social engagement rather than the intricacy of the event.

For example, corporate groups participating in a StreetHunt experience frequently describe their favourite moments not as the structured elements of the game itself, but as the spontaneous interactions that emerge during it. Such as witnessing quieter team members gain confidence and actively contribute. These small, unscripted connections often become the highlight everyone remembers.

After playing one of StreetHunt Games outdoor escape rooms, the director of a global recruitment company said: ‘Competing as a team is great fun – the degrees of competitiveness and the problem-solving approach style of each member shines through. Everybody’s skills and experience help shape the result. It’s a fun process and part of why working with people sharing a common goal is fun.

Building a strong culture as a team is super important, though – taking time as a leader to get to know individuals and help foster connections is like walking a tightrope. Team culture can mean and be lots of different things, but when aligned well, it helps drive people forward and build future success.’

Focus on shared experience

Ultimately, it is not the physical setting that determines the success of a Christmas party, but the quality of the shared experiences it brings. Whether it’s a collaborative challenge, a city-based adventure, or a shared meal, the objective is to embrace connections among team members.

At StreetHunt Games, this has been observed repeatedly; the location quickly becomes the background to the collective experience. Getting a team out of their office and into a different physical location helps to create moments of teamwork, laughter, and shared discovery, which resonate far more deeply. And not just a different physical environment, but also the purpose of what they’re doing, changing – from working together on a consulting project to bonding over a fun challenge.

Activities that promote movement, a different type of problem-solving, and light-hearted competition often generate a stronger sense of engagement and cohesion. In this way, creative alternatives can leave a far stronger impression than a perfectly decorated venue or a three-course dinner.  Research from Bamboo HR stated that colleague communication improves after team-building activities and 61% said morale is improved.

A genuine thank-you

End-of-year socials should not be perceived as obligations but as a genuine celebration for your team’s collective achievement. A moment that conveys, “Thank you, your efforts make a difference.” Employee recognition remains one of the most influential factors in loyalty and retention among employees. Research from People Management Insight indicates that authentic expressions of appreciation significantly enhance employees’ sense of value and motivation. Ranging from personalised notes to thoughtful words are sincere gestures of gratitude, leaving an impact well into the new year.

When employees feel genuinely seen and appreciated, the overall team dynamic transforms. What might otherwise be an end-of-year obligation instead becomes a meaningful celebration of contribution. These activities can reinforce morale and strengthen the organisation’s collective work culture.

Common pitfalls to avoid

Even the most well-intentioned organisers can encounter challenges when planning end-of-year socials. Several common pitfalls can diminish the overall impact of an event:

• Over-planning: Allow space for spontaneity. Some of the most meaningful interactions occur organically rather than through a structured itinerary. Simplicity often enables more genuine engagement.
• Focusing too much on expensive venues: Employees are more likely to remember how they felt during the event than the details of the surroundings. Resources are best invested in experiences that facilitate connection rather than extravagant venues.
• Forgetting hybrid or remote employees: Inclusivity matters; consider how to make everyone feel a part of the celebration. Failing to do so can induce feelings of disconnection and contribute to burnout in the year ahead.
• Losing sight of purpose: Remember, this isn’t just another corporate event, but an opportunity to thank your team. Keep this experience personal and expand connections between colleagues.

From stress to success

The most effective Christmas team event doesn’t have to be something extravagant; it has to be intentional and meaningful. Their purpose is to remind employees of what they have accomplished collectively and to send them into the new year with a renewed sense of connection and belonging.

At StreetHunt Games, we have consistently observed the balance of laughter, collaboration, and light-hearted competition that can transform colleagues into genuine collaborators.  When an event feels human rather than corporate, it resonates more deeply to create memories long after the festive season has ended.

Overall, the most valuable approach to planning corporate socials is to prioritise authenticity over complexity. Keep the experience simple and filled with genuine appreciation. In doing so, the great gift leaders can offer their team is recognition that their effort and dedication truly mattered.

Read more:
From planning to applause – How to run a Christmas team event they’ll talk about in January

There was a time – not so long ago, though it already feels sepia-tinted – when London was the sort of place that tourists arrived in with stars in their eyes and left with shopping bags cutting off circulation at the fingers.

Harrods bags, Selfridges bags, Mulberry bags, the bright yellow of Fortnum’s peeking out of a suitcase being sat on in a hotel lobby. Europe’s favourite grown-up playground; Manhattan’s chic transatlantic sibling; Tokyo’s idea of European swagger with better tailoring and more chaotic restaurants.

And somehow, somewhere between the end of the pandemic and the beginning of whatever this new national habit of self-sabotage is, we decided that this was all terribly inconvenient.

Because now, instead of rolling out the red carpet to high-spending visitors who fund vast swathes of our hospitality and retail industries, we appear determined to trip them up with a series of policy banana skins. A kind of bureaucratic Mario Kart, except instead of cartoon plumbers skidding off Rainbow Road, it’s Andrea Baldo at Mulberry watching millions evaporate from his London tills.

First came the abolition of tax-free shopping, what the press politely calls the “tourist tax”, but business leaders now refer to in much the same tone one reserves for a wasp nest in the loft. It was, in the gentle phrasing of one retail boss, a “massive global disadvantage”. He’s not wrong. France woos Chinese visitors with instant VAT refunds at Charles de Gaulle, Italy practically hands tourists a Prosecco as they process theirs. Meanwhile, we greet them with the fiscal equivalent of a traffic warden in a foul mood.

Retail chiefs have been patient – or at least, as patient as you can be when pointing out, month after month, that the maths simply does not work. Tourists want the thrill of a VAT-free splurge. If we don’t offer it, they simply go elsewhere. Hence the growing chorus from the likes of Mulberry’s Baldo, who has watched London sales tank while Paris boutiques hum along nicely. It doesn’t take a PwC report to see what’s happening: shoppers follow value, and value has emigrated.

You might think the lesson here is obvious. If you want tourists, the big-spending sort who treat a long weekend as an Olympic sport, then don’t whack them with a levy the moment they land. You’d imagine, perhaps naively, that the next step would be to reverse the damage, or at least stop adding new obstacles.

But no. This is London. And in London, when there’s an opportunity to make a bad idea worse, we seize it with both hands and a press release.

Step forward Sadiq Khan, announcing with great flourish the potential introduction of a second tourist tax – a nightly levy on hotel stays that would, we are told, “supercharge London’s economy”. Which is an interesting definition of “supercharge”, unless we’ve started using the word to mean “ask people for more money so they spend less of it elsewhere”.

This proposed hotel levy, trumpeted as bringing the capital in line with other global cities, is the second punch in a one-two assault that the hospitality sector absolutely did not ask for. Because let’s be clear: London is not Barcelona, drowning in stag dos stripping in fountains. Nor is it Amsterdam, declaring war on the Hen Party Industrial Complex. London’s issue is not too many tourists — it’s that we are making ourselves unattractive to the ones we need.

Which is why the hospitality sector is looking a bit like a boxer in the 11th round, wobbling slightly, blood in the eye, muttering “Really? Another one?”

Hotels have only just crawled out of the Covid crater. Staffing costs up. Energy bills up. Supply chain madness. Then a visitor economy still recovering from the years when the only people checking into hotels were essential workers and couples pretending they were “working from home”. Revenues are fragile. Margins are thin. And now a city-hall-branded surcharge?

The timing is astonishing. Just as business travellers, the holy grail of midweek occupancy, begin to return… just as American tourists rediscover the joys of London theatre and pubs with carpets… just as Asia resumes sending coachloads of shoppers armed with Amex and enthusiasm… we decide to hand them a bill for having turned up at all.

What message does this send? The same as the VAT-refund fiasco: London is becoming the most expensive city in Europe to visit, and the least rewarding.

It is fundamentally a failure of imagination. Instead of asking “How do we compete?”, policymakers seem content to ask, “How much can we get away with before someone books Berlin instead?”

The answer, increasingly, is: not much.

Because tourists talk. They compare. They calculate. And when your long-haul holiday already costs thousands, and the pound is weak, and hotels are pricier than ever, that extra nightly charge isn’t symbolic – it’s irritating. Add in the lack of VAT refunds and suddenly a weekend that once felt like a treat becomes an exercise in fiscal masochism.

All this might be palatable if the revenue raised were earmarked for something dazzling — a transport revolution, a cultural renaissance, a hospitality uplift so extraordinary that visitors would queue to pay. But the rhetoric is vague, the benefits theoretical, and the impact on the ground immediate.

The truth is brutally simple: London thrives when it is welcoming, frictionless, rewarding and – crucially – competitive. What we have instead is a creeping perception that our leaders view tourists not as valued guests, but as walking wallets from which to extract just a bit more because, well, they can.

The hospitality and retail sectors don’t need another tax. They need policymakers who understand that the visitor economy is not a tap that can be turned on and off at whim. It is delicate, reactive, easily diverted.

Right now, we are steering it away.

London doesn’t need a second tourist tax. It needs a second thought.

Read more:
Is the government intent on killing London’s hospitality sector with a double-whammy tourist tax?

When Britain’s adopted steel king Lakshmi Mittal, gala-favourite philanthropist and one of the country’s most visible billionaire residents, quietly announced he was shifting his tax residency to Switzerland, it barely caused a ripple in Westminster.

Another wealthy non-dom heading for more forgiving fiscal pastures, shrugged the commentariat.

But for anyone paying attention to Britain’s charitable sector, Mittal’s departure is more than a footnote in a tax-policy debate. It is a red flag. A warning. A canary collapsing in the philanthropic coal mine.

Mittal is not leaving because of boredom with Belgravia. As Business Matters reported, his exit follows the dismantling of the non-dom system and, critically, the looming threat of UK inheritance tax on his global estate. He is not alone. Norwegian shipping billionaire John Fredriksen, German investor Christian Angermayer, and tech founders Herman Narula (Improbable) and Nik Storonsky (Revolut) have already slipped out of Heathrow with one recurring reason circled in red: UK tax policy.

And this, however we try to frame it, poses an awkward question.  One the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, hasn’t quite acknowledged in her rush to tighten the fiscal screws: if Britain is pushing out the very people who fund its museums, universities, research institutes, and children’s hospitals, could UK charities be the biggest losers of her brave new tax world?

Let’s be honest. Charities don’t live on wishful thinking. They live on cheques. And while the British public is generous in spirit, it is the handful of ultra-wealthy donors, people like Mittal, who quietly bank-roll the big stuff: endowments, buildings, specialist medical equipment, entire research departments. Mittal himself has given millions over decades to Great Ormond Street Hospital, to public libraries, to the arts, to humanitarian causes, to Oxford University. When such people stay, Britain wins. When they leave, Britain loses.

This isn’t a defence of tax privileges for the wealthy. Reeves is right to say the system needed reform. But there is a difference between fixing a loophole and creating a deterrent. Between modernising policy and frightening away those who play an outsized role in keeping Britain’s charitable landscape afloat.

The truth, and it feels almost unfashionable to say it aloud, is that major philanthropy is highly sensitive to tax signals. Wealthy donors don’t just give out of generosity; they give within systems that make generosity rational. Alter the incentives, tighten the inheritance-tax net, abolish the regime that made London competitive, and suddenly Dubai or Zug begins to look less like a holiday bolthole and more like a sensible postcode.

And when donors exit, charities suffer twice. First, through the immediate loss of multimillion-pound gifts. Second, through the long-term shift in their funding model: fewer large, flexible philanthropic donations and greater reliance on small public gifts that, while admirable, rarely pay for the expensive or unglamorous parts of a charity’s work, the electricity bill, the IT system, the nurses’ salaries, the safeguarding training. The things no one wants their name on.

It is too simple and too glib for ministers to argue that “fairness” trumps all. Fairness to whom? A tax system that chases out philanthropists may technically be fairer, but it may also leave the nation’s most vulnerable without the funding safety-net that government has neither the budget nor political appetite to replace.

What’s more, philanthropy carries a reputational weight. Billionaires giving large sums in Britain sends a signal that the UK is still a place where causes flourish, research advances and culture thrives. When they relocate, the narrative shifts: from “Britain, philanthropic powerhouse” to “Britain, too expensive to care”.

Charities know this. They’ve known it for years. But they also know something uncomfortable: you can’t replace a Mittal with 10,000 £20 donations. Not when you’re funding MRI machines, scientific breakthroughs or entire children’s hospices.

So where does this leave us? Ideally, with a little honesty. The government must recognise that smart tax policy is not only about fairness but about outcomes. If Reeves wants to avoid turning charity CEOs into professional beggars, she may need to pair her reforms with targeted incentives for high-impact giving or risk watching the voluntary sector shrink in real time.

Charities, meanwhile, must prepare for a new era: flatter donor lists, heavier dependence on domestic donors, and more resource-intensive fundraising just to stand still. The days of relying on a handful of loyal billionaire patrons might be ending, and not because the donors changed their hearts, but because the government changed the rules.

If the exodus continues  if more Mittals, more Fredriksens, more Narulas pack their bags the question will not be whether Reeves’s tax shake-up was principled. It will be whether the price was too high, too blunt and too blind to its collateral damage.

And the greatest losers may not be the wealthy at all but the charities who depend on them, and the people those charities exist to help.

Read more:
The rich are fleeing and our charities may be left holding the bill

Chancellor Rachel Reeves should use the Autumn Budget to spell out how the government plans to deploy the £2 billion earmarked for the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, according to leading audit, tax and advisory firm Blick Rothenberg.

Evelina Panchal, a director at the firm, said businesses urgently needed clarity on how the funding would be allocated, arguing that proper investment planning could unlock transformative gains for the economy.

“Research from Microsoft suggests AI represents a £550 billion opportunity for the UK over the next decade,” she said. “To support the tech sector, Rachel Reeves should confirm how the £2bn commitment will be used.”

The AI Opportunities Action Plan, announced in the 2025 Spending Review, aims to strengthen the UK’s national AI infrastructure and includes proposals for AI Growth Zones, where planning rules would be relaxed to speed up the development of data centres and compute facilities. Panchal said tech firms needed specifics around timelines, locations and access if they were to benefit from the programme.

The tech sector contributed £71bn to the UK economy in 2023 and employed 1.77 million people in 2024. Panchal said the potential impact of the £2bn investment depended heavily on how fast the money was released and whether the government delivered a detailed roadmap.
“Infrastructure gaps, skills shortages and slow business adoption remain the biggest challenges,” she warned. “Reeves must set clear timelines and implementation plans.”

Panchal also urged the Chancellor not to introduce changes in the Budget that could undermine the UK’s attractiveness as a hub for digital entrepreneurship.

She said share-based incentive schemes such as Enterprise Management Incentives (EMIs) — widely used in the tech and AI sectors — must not be restricted, as they are critical to attracting specialist talent in a competitive global market.

“Rachel Reeves should not introduce any further changes to Capital Gains Tax, exit taxes or wealth taxes,” she added. “If she does, it risks killing off the remaining entrepreneurial spirit in the tech sector, with negative consequences for innovation and economic growth.”

She said the UK needed to remain “a supportive and fair environment for tech companies and their founders” to ensure they continue to operate in Britain, bringing essential investment, jobs and revenue.

Read more:
Reeves urged to set out how £2bn AI investment will be spent in Autumn Budget

When I first started taking clients out for dinner, you could sit under the copper dome of Le Gavroche, order a bottle of claret you’d never dare drink at home, and—after a couple of courses, a soufflé, and a few discreet nods from the maître d’—leave only mildly lighter in wallet and spirit.

Today, on the same site, you can do much the same thing at Matt Abé’s new venture Bonheur. Only now, the bill for two will come in at £250 before you’ve even blinked at the digestif list.

I’m not one for false nostalgia—restaurants must evolve, chefs must be paid, and if anyone’s earned the right to resurrect a Mayfair temple of gastronomy it’s Abé. But there’s a creeping sense that fine dining has priced itself into absurdity. And for once, it’s not just about greedy restaurateurs; it’s about the country we’ve built around them.

Energy bills have soared. Not just yours or mine, but those of restaurants that rely on gas ranges, endless refrigeration, and enough light to flatter every banker’s jowls. Add to that the cost of labour in an industry already haemorrhaging staff post-Brexit, and suddenly that tasting menu looks less like an indulgence and more like a desperate act of financial survival.

The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, would like us to believe that things are finally “stabilising”. I’ve seen more stability in a soufflé during a Tube strike. Her Treasury may be trying to keep business afloat, but when small restaurants are seeing energy costs double, the effect is akin to throwing a life jacket to a man who’s already under the water.

Fine dining, long the glitzy tip of the hospitality iceberg, is the first to feel the cracks. It was never about volume or turnover; it was about art. A kitchen like Abé’s depends on precision, patience, and prodigiously expensive ingredients that can’t be bought in bulk. When your butter alone costs more than most people’s rent, “value for money” ceases to be a meaningful phrase.

Once upon a time, £160-£180 for two was a generous way to mark a birthday or sign a contract. Now it’s merely the entry fee for breathing the same air as a Michelin inspector. And before the chorus begins: yes, I know what goes into it. I’ve sat in enough stainless-steel kitchens to appreciate the choreography of twenty cooks plating thirty dishes in silence. I know the rent in Mayfair. I know what happens to a menu when olive oil triples in price.

But—and forgive the sentimentality—I also know what a restaurant used to mean. At Le Coq d’Argent or Claridge’s or Marcus Wareing’s at the Berkeley, you could justify the expense as part theatre, part negotiation. It was business done in a place that made everyone feel like someone. You weren’t buying food; you were buying atmosphere, attention, and a tiny square of London’s self-confidence.

Today, that same dinner feels faintly transactional. The food is exquisite, the wine list terrifyingly precise, and yet something human has been lost. When you know a single starter costs as much as the average family’s weekly shop, the pleasure sours slightly. The magic evaporates with the steam from the consommé.

Reeves’ problem—indeed, the country’s problem—is that we’ve stopped treating restaurants as part of the cultural ecosystem. When energy prices bite, when VAT hovers at the same rate as fast food, and when landlords charge what they like, the effect isn’t just fewer Michelin stars; it’s fewer apprentices, fewer suppliers, fewer reasons for tourists to bother crossing the Channel for dinner.

You can’t build an “innovation economy” on empty stomachs. Yet that’s what we seem to be trying. The government talks endlessly about growth while allowing one of Britain’s finest export industries—its hospitality scene—to suffocate under the weight of its own bills. Paris subsidises its bistros. Copenhagen practically canonises its chefs. In London, we just raise the price of the tasting menu and pretend everything’s fine.

Of course, there will always be those for whom £250 is a rounding error. The same crowd who will book Bonheur weeks ahead and post filtered shots of their langoustine tartlets. They’re not the problem. The problem is the steady disappearance of the middle ground—the diners who once treated a grand restaurant as a reachable luxury. Those people are now in bistros, if they’re out at all, calculating the cost of bread service.

When I took clients to the Savoy or Claridge’s, it wasn’t just about indulgence; it was diplomacy. Deals were signed over lamb cutlets and laughter. You can’t do that if your guest is nervously Googling “how much to tip on £500”. Fine dining relied on aspiration, not intimidation.

Perhaps we should stop pretending fine dining is for everyone. Let it be what it now is: haute couture, admired from afar. But if we do, we must also accept that Britain loses something. Our restaurants have long been the quiet stages of our national life—places where ambition met artistry, where even a tax accountant could feel momentarily glamorous.

Reeves can’t control every gas bill, but she can recognise that hospitality is not a luxury to be tolerated; it’s a craft to be preserved. Energy relief for small restaurants, tax breaks for training, a re-think of VAT for the sector—none of it would cost much compared to the cultural value at stake.

Because once the £250 dinner becomes the norm, it stops being dinner. It becomes a ceremony for the few, performed behind heavy curtains while the rest of us eat at home and wonder when exactly Britain forgot how to go out.

Read more:
Fine dining’s death by a thousand cuts, and at least a £250 bill

As a sustainable business owner, I’ve always believed that every choice we make, from the suppliers we trust to the packaging that carries our products, reflects our values.

But the conversation around packaging sustainability is evolving quickly, and 2025 is shaping up to be a defining year for anyone in this space.

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) will soon change how every business that uses wood or paper packaging operates. Whether you export into the EU or source materials that pass through European supply chains, you’ll soon need to prove exactly where your wood came from, right down to the plot of land where the tree grew. On paper, this is a hugely positive step. It’s designed to prevent deforestation and ensure that every pallet, crate, box, or sheet of
paperboard comes from responsibly managed forests. But for small and medium-sized sustainable businesses like mine, this new legislation brings both validation and significant challenges.

For larger corporations, compliance may simply mean hiring dedicated teams or investing in advanced traceability systems. For smaller businesses, the impact is more personal and more complex. Many packaging suppliers, particularly those sourcing globally, aren’t yet ready to provide the level of GPS traceability that EUDR demands. As buyers, we’re several steps removed from the original forest. That makes collecting origin data extremely difficult.
The reality is that small businesses don’t have the same resources as large corporations. Gathering, verifying, and documenting the source of every piece of packaging takes time, money, and capacity that many SMEs simply don’t have. Even for companies like mine, built on sustainability from day one, the administrative burden is significant. There’s also a clear imbalance of power. When small businesses ask large suppliers for detailed traceability information, we’re often met with delays and a lack of data, yet we’re still held to the same legal standards as much larger companies.

The scale of work involved in becoming compliant is immense. Every box, tag, and piece of paper now requires a documented chain of custody which for a packaging company means the majority of our products. For a small business, this isn’t just a quick compliance exercise, it’s an ongoing operational project that touches almost every department. Teams that were once focused on creative design, marketing, or customer experience now find themselves deep in
due diligence, spreadsheets, and certification systems. It’s exhausting work, but it’s necessary if we want to maintain the integrity of our sustainability commitments and continue to trade responsibly in the years ahead.

At Tiny Box Company, we’ve been reviewing what the EUDR will mean for us for months now. We’re working closely with our suppliers to ensure the data we need is being captured at source, and we’re doing our best to gain information that is verifiable. It’s a huge effort, and at times it feels like we’re trying to rebuild the foundations of something we already thought was sturdy. But we also know that doing this groundwork now will set us up for a stronger, more transparent future.

Despite these challenges, the EUDR represents a powerful opportunity for businesses like ours. It’s a chance to demonstrate what we’ve been advocating for years: that transparency and traceability are not just ideals, but achievable and necessary goals. For those already committed to sustainability, this regulation provides a platform to prove it. Having verifiable data about our packaging doesn’t just satisfy compliance requirements, it builds trust with our
customers, who increasingly care not just about what a product is made from, but where it came from.

The EUDR is also encouraging more meaningful conversations between businesses and suppliers. To meet these requirements, we’ll need closer collaboration and greater openness, which can ultimately strengthen relationships and lead to more resilient supply chains. Over time, this transparency can help shift the market, rewarding those who operate responsibly and pushing lagging suppliers to catch up.

Another positive outcome is that it’s forcing all of us to reconsider how much packaging we really need. When every gram of wood or paper must be traced to its origin, using less suddenly makes both environmental and financial sense for a lot of businesses. At Tiny Box Company, we’ve already begun rethinking our designs and processes to reduce complexity, choosing materials that are easier to trace and verify. It’s a continuous process to improve what we’re doing and how we work.

It’s easy to see why some small businesses might feel overwhelmed- the paperwork, the data management, the coordination across global suppliers. But once these systems are in place, the benefits will start to show. We’ll have cleaner data, fewer weak points in our supply chains, and greater confidence in the materials we use. In time, the hours invested now could translate into reduced risk, smoother audits, and a stronger story for customers who value transparency.

The EUDR may feel daunting, particularly for small sustainable businesses that are already trying to do the right thing. But it’s important to see this as an opportunity to align values with verifiable action. It’s a reminder that sustainability is something that can be measured, proven, and improved upon.

Knowing where our packaging comes from isn’t just about compliance. It’s about integrity and accountability, about running a business that truly understands what it’s selling and where its products come from.

Read more:
The EUDR: A Challenge and an Opportunity for Small Sustainable Businesses

Aviva chief executive Dame Amanda Blanc has urged the chancellor to rethink plans for a major clampdown on salary sacrifice schemes, warning that the move would penalise both employers and workers while damaging long-term pension saving across the UK.

Speaking ahead of Rachel Reeves’ 26 November budget, Blanc said Aviva was “very concerned” about the Treasury’s intention to cap the amount workers can sacrifice tax-free to just £2,000 a year — a change expected to raise around £2 billion annually.

Salary sacrifice allows employees to give up part of their gross pay in return for pension contributions or other benefits. Because the contribution is taken before tax and national insurance (NI), both individuals and employers save on NI payments. At present, workers can contribute up to £60,000 a year into pensions tax-free under the system.

But pensions experts warn that Reeves’ proposed cap would sharply increase NI bills for employers and employees, likely leading many companies to reduce the generosity of their pension contributions.

“What you’re effectively doing is penalising those employers that actually contribute more to employees’ pensions,” Blanc said. “And you’re also signalling to people who save for their pension that perhaps they shouldn’t do it. That is bad news long-term for the UK, particularly when 15 million people are already not saving enough for retirement.”

The move would also represent a second NI blow for businesses in just over a year. Reeves increased employer NI in her first budget last October — a decision that drew strong criticism from business leaders.

Blanc warned that removing the NI benefit entirely would impose a meaningful cost on firms: “The actual cost to employers of removing that NI benefit from salary sacrifice is not going to be insignificant.”

Her comments came as Aviva delivered a strong third-quarter update. The FTSE 100 insurer said it now expects to realise £225 million in annual cost savings from its £3.7 billion acquisition of Direct Line — almost double the £125 million previously forecast — by 2028.

Aviva also expects to generate operating profit of £2.2 billion this year, excluding any contribution from Direct Line. That means the company is set to hit its 2026 profit target two years early. It also unveiled new three-year goals, including delivering a return on equity of more than 20% by 2028.

Analysts at Bank of America reiterated their “buy” rating on Aviva, saying they expect the insurer to beat its newly updated financial targets.

Despite the strong guidance, Aviva shares fell 42.5p — down 6.1% — to close at 650p. The stock has risen around 40% since the start of the year, with analysts suggesting that many of the upgrades announced on Thursday had already been priced in by investors.

Read more:
Aviva chief warns Reeves that salary sacrifice tax cap would be ‘bad news’ for Britain

There is something exquisitely British about watching a government try to sweet-talk the very people it is about to fleece. Like putting out the good biscuits before the bailiffs arrive.

And so we have Sir Keir Starmer — a man whose natural habitat is somewhere between a Select Committee hearing and an apologetic queue at Pret — inviting the grandees of British business to No 10 for what Downing Street insists on calling an “informal reception”.

NatWest, Sage, Marks & Spencer, Taylor Wimpey, Octopus Energy… all the familiar names trooped dutifully through the famous black door, like polite wedding guests who know full well that the groom is a wrong ’un but have still bought a gift from the list because, well, it’s tradition. And what did they get for their trouble? A drink, a handshake, and the creeping realisation that Rachel Reeves is sharpening her fiscal guillotine for 26 November.

Because let’s be honest: corporate Britain is not stupid. It can smell a tax raid long before it hits. Businesses up and down the country have been braced for this budget ever since Reeves’s first go at the Treasury last year, when she hiked employer national insurance and the minimum wage so aggressively you could practically hear the collective groan from every payroll director in the land. That budget, you’ll remember, destroyed in about nine minutes the painstaking courtship Labour had undertaken in the years after Corbyn — a sort of political couples therapy designed to assure business leaders that yes, the party had changed; no, nobody was coming for their yachts; yes, they could come out from behind the sofa.

Starmer’s reception this week was meant to be a soothing gesture — a warm hug before the cold reality of a £30 billion black hole in the public finances is unveiled. But the whole thing had the atmosphere of a GP offering you a lollipop moments before telling you they’re going to remove your leg “just to be safe”.

What Reeves is reportedly considering next would make even Gordon Brown blush. A manifesto-scrambling rise in income tax (because who needs promises, really?). A full-blown assault on limited liability partnerships (sorry, lawyers; sorry, accountants; most people won’t be sorry at all). And, my personal favourite, a raid on salary-sacrifice pension schemes — those clever little mechanisms businesses use to keep costs down without asking employees to start living on tinned tomatoes.

So yes, the mood in the room was not exactly “Christmas at Liberty”. It was more “annual meeting of people who know the bill is coming but haven’t yet decided who’s paying”.

The tragedy here — and it is a tragedy, in the classic British sense of being entirely foreseeable and yet still somehow depressing — is that Labour really had the business community on side. For a hot minute, Starmer and Reeves were the sensible grown-ups. The ones who wouldn’t crash the economy in a fit of ideological pique. The ones who wouldn’t treat FTSE companies like enemies of the state. The ones who, we were told, “understand how wealth is created”. (And then, three months later, taxed the people who create it.)

But credibility, like a good steak, is hard won and easily ruined. And Starmer’s government appears determined to prod it to death with the sharp end of a policy fork.

The prime minister’s great hope is that business leaders are, at heart, desperate for stability — so desperate that they will swallow any number of tax increases as long as they are announced in complete sentences rather than the fever-dream scribbles of their predecessors in government. There is a degree of truth in this. Business likes predictability. It likes grown-ups. It likes the lights to stay on when it flicks the switch.

But there is a limit to how much “doing your bit” people can be told to do before they start seriously contemplating the joys of Dublin. And Reeves’s recent speech, in which she solemnly informed us all that “each of us must do our bit for the security of our country and the brightness of its future”, felt a bit like being told to wash up someone else’s dishes because “we’re all a family here”.

Downing Street declined to comment on the guest list, naturally, which is Whitehall code for “everyone involved is furious but nobody wants to go first”. But I suspect that behind the forced smiles and the warm white wine, Britain’s top executives were quietly tallying up just how much this government is about to cost them — and whether any of it will actually be worth it.

Because while Starmer may believe that a few canapé-laden evenings can repair the damage, business leaders know better. Trust in politics is not rebuilt with receptions; it is rebuilt with policy that doesn’t change direction every time the wind blows across Horse Guards Parade.

And unless Reeves pulls an economic rabbit out of her red box later this month, the only thing hopping out of No 10 will be Britain’s most mobile — and most taxed — businesses.

Read more:
A canapé and a tax raid: Labour’s new love letter to business

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, integrity is “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.” In theory, it’s a simple word. But in the workplace, it can be one of the hardest qualities to sustain – especially in leadership.

Between urgent decisions, conflicting priorities and day-to-day pressures, how do leaders stay true to their values? How do they balance what’s easy with what’s right – and make integrity part of everyday operations?

At Chubb Fire & Security, integrity is one of our core values. In fact, it’s built into the way we lead. “Win with integrity, together” is one of five guiding principles that shape how we show up for our customers, our colleagues and our communities.

For SME leaders, leading with integrity is more than a personal virtue; it’s a business strategy. Done well, it builds trust, strengthens culture and creates the conditions where teams and businesses thrive.

Why Integrity Matters in Business

When we think of integrity, we often think of character. But in business, integrity has real commercial consequences – for performance, reputation, and resilience.

A 2023 Forbes article1 put it this way: “Integrity is not just a moral compass. It’s a business differentiator.” It fosters trust, credibility and long-term loyalty – all qualities that are essential in high-pressure leadership roles and entrepreneurial environments.

For SMEs in particular, trust is currency. With smaller teams and closer customer relationships, any lapse in integrity is felt more quickly – and often more personally – than in a larger organisation.

Integrity creates consistency. It sets the tone for how people interact, how decisions are made, and how conflict is handled. And when employees trust their leaders to be honest and fair, they’re more likely to stay, engage and give their best.

Chubb’s Approach: Leading with Values Every Day

At Chubb, integrity isn’t a leadership style. It’s part of our culture.

Our value “Win with integrity, together” is more than words on a wall. It shows up in how we collaborate, how we make decisions, and how we empower one another to perform at our best – together.

This is part of our wider philosophy of Building Great Leaders – a belief that everyone is a leader, and everyone deserves a great leader. That means creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up, take accountability and make decisions with confidence.

We don’t expect perfection. But we do expect people to own what they do, think steps ahead and lead with integrity at every level.

Four Ways SME Leaders Can Lead with Integrity

You don’t need a corporate handbook or a values committee to lead with integrity. In fact, the most powerful displays of integrity often happen in the small, everyday moments.

Here are four ways SME leaders can put integrity into practice:

Be Honest, Even When It’s Uncomfortable

Integrity starts with honesty, especially when delivering difficult news or admitting you don’t have all the answers. Avoid overpromising. Communicate with transparency and keep your commitments. If plans change, explain why.

Lead by Example, Not Just Instruction

People follow what leaders do, not just what they say. Your daily behaviour sets the tone for the team. If you expect accountability, model it. If you value collaboration, be seen doing it.

Apply Standards Consistently

One of the quickest ways to erode trust is by making exceptions, especially for senior leaders or long-standing employees. Ensure your rules, policies and recognition are applied fairly. Integrity is about doing the right thing, even when it’s inconvenient.

Welcome Challenge and Invite Feedback

Integrity isn’t about always being right. It’s about being open to feedback and willing to act on it. Create a culture where employees can raise concerns or offer ideas without fear. Then show that their voices lead to action.

How Integrity Strengthens Trust and Culture

Culture is shaped by what leaders reward, tolerate and ignore. If leaders cut corners, others will follow. But when leaders consistently act with integrity (owning mistakes, communicating honestly, and acting fairly) it creates psychological safety and strengthens team cohesion.

For SMEs, where people work closely and often wear multiple hats, this sense of trust is critical. It makes teams more resilient, more collaborative and more loyal.

At Chubb, we’ve seen this first-hand. Leaders who model our values create stronger teams – not just in output, but in how people feel about their work. When integrity is lived, not just talked about, it becomes part of the company’s DNA.

The Bottom Line

Integrity is one of the most powerful qualities a leader can have – and one of the most visible. People notice when leaders show up consistently, tell the truth, admit mistakes and make decisions based on shared values.

For SMEs, leading with integrity builds more than a good reputation. It builds trust, attracts talent and creates long-term cultural strength.

At Chubb, integrity is how we work together, with purpose and accountability. Because when leaders lead with integrity, they don’t just win. They bring others with them.

Read more:
How Leaders Build Trust by Leading with Integrity

The head of one of Britain’s best-known law firms has warned that Rachel Reeves’s reported plan to raise taxes on limited liability partnerships (LLPs) could drive professionals and entrepreneurs out of the UK, undermining London’s status as a global business hub.

James Libson, managing partner of Mishcon de Reya, said proposals to align LLP taxation more closely with standard employment rules risked punishing professionals who take on business risk and contribute significantly to the economy.

“Most people using LLPs are middle-class, upper middle-income people,” Libson said. “It means the attractiveness of living here is diminished. I’m not talking about the millionaires or billionaires — normal people will look for opportunities to work elsewhere.”

The Chancellor is said to be considering measures that would raise the overall tax burden on partnerships, following reports that senior Treasury officials believe the reforms could raise up to £1.9 billion by bringing LLPs in line with employer National Insurance contributions.

However, Libson described the potential changes as “dangerous and potentially destructive”, warning that they would worsen Britain’s brain drain just as rival financial and legal centres were growing more competitive.

“To equate partners and investors who operate through LLP structures as employees is to sell the proposition in completely the wrong way,” he said. “The reason the system works is because these are people investing in their business — they take risk, they put in capital.”

The Treasury has declined to confirm or deny that LLPs are being targeted in the November 26 Budget, though sources told the Financial Times that any increases would be “less severe” than first feared and may include exemptions for partners earning below a certain threshold.

The LLP structure, introduced in 2001, allows professionals to operate as partners rather than employees, offering both flexibility and tax efficiency. According to Companies House, there are now more than 50,000 LLPs across the UK, spanning law, accountancy, architecture, consultancy, and other professional services.

Critics argue that the system gives high earners an unfair advantage, but supporters say it underpins one of Britain’s most globally competitive sectors. A London School of Economics report found that the top 0.1% of taxpayers earned nearly half of all partnership income in 2020.

Libson insists the perception of LLPs as tax shelters for the ultra-wealthy is misleading. “These are not hedge fund billionaires,” he said. “They’re professionals building practices, employing hundreds of people, and keeping Britain competitive in legal and advisory services.”

Mishcon de Reya — founded in 1937 and known for representing Princess Diana in her divorce from the then Prince of Wales — reported £332 million in turnover and £111 million in pre-tax profits last year. The firm now employs more than 1,400 people, including 650 lawyers.

Reflecting a wider trend among professional service firms, Mishcon recently opened offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, joining rivals Addleshaw Goddard and Simmons & Simmons in expanding into the Gulf region, where lighter regulation and tax advantages are attracting international talent.

“With the strategies we are pursuing — private wealth, innovation, disputes — [the UAE] is an absolute hub,” Libson said. “More and more we’ve felt that London’s magnetism has diminished, while other centres of gravity are growing around the world.”

Libson said Mishcon’s immigration practice had seen a marked increase in professionals relocating to the Middle East — a reflection, he argued, of growing frustration with the UK’s tax and regulatory environment.

“From our own internal barometer, we’ve seen very significant traffic to the Gulf,” he said.

The warning comes as economists estimate that Britain’s top 1% of earners now contribute more than 30% of all income tax receipts, making their mobility a key fiscal risk.

Libson added that, while the government’s industrial strategy rightly highlighted professional services as a growth priority, policies targeting partnerships would send the opposite message.

“London is still the greatest city in the world — but the issue, as always, is execution, productivity and cutting through the bureaucracy that holds us back,” he said. “Other countries are doing that really well.”

Mishcon de Reya’s board recently appointed Dame Alison Rose, former NatWest chief executive, as non-executive chair, building on her advisory work in diversity and inclusion. Libson praised her appointment as a signal of the firm’s long-term vision.

“Alison is one of the most impressive people I’ve ever worked with,” he said. “Our diversity push has never been tokenism — it’s about creating an environment where people want to work. It’s a business decision as much as anything else.”

With the Budget just weeks away, City leaders remain anxious over the scale of Reeves’s planned tax rises. For firms like Mishcon de Reya, the outcome could determine whether London remains the beating heart of global professional services — or whether, as Libson warns, “normal people” begin to follow their wealthier clients abroad.

Read more:
Mishcon boss warns Reeves that LLP tax hike risks exodus of professionals