British farmers are already nursing input cost rises of up to 70 per cent, and the worst of the squeeze on the world’s food bill is still to come.

That is the blunt assessment from the boss of the Grosvenor Group, the 349-year-old property and farming empire controlled by the Duke of Westminster, who has warned that fertiliser shortages caused by the war in Iran will have a “dramatic” effect on global food prices next year.

Mark Preston, executive trustee of Grosvenor, told Business Matters that fertiliser prices were “already quite expensive” before the conflict, but had since climbed by between 50 and 70 per cent since hostilities began in late February. The trigger, he said, was the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow shipping artery through which a substantial share of the world’s fertiliser and the liquefied natural gas needed to make it must pass. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps indicated on Wednesday that the strait could shortly reopen, but with roughly 1,600 vessels still stranded, the damage to supply chains is already done.

For UK arable farmers, the immediate growing season has largely been insulated. Most fertiliser earmarked for this year’s crops was bought and applied before prices ran away. The problem, Preston explained, is the planting cycle that follows. “Farmers are not buying that fertiliser, they’re sitting on their hands and hoping things will improve, which they probably won’t,” he said. The likely response, he added, will be a swing from winter cropping towards spring cropping, giving growers a little more breathing room, but at the cost of yield, planning certainty and, ultimately, the price on the supermarket shelf.

Grosvenor itself is unusually well placed to weather the storm. The group’s flagship Eaton estate in Cheshire, the Duke’s traditional family seat since the 1400s, runs a large dairy and arable operation that supplies millions of litres of milk to customers including Tesco and Müller, and leans heavily on cow dung rather than bagged nitrogen. Its other rural holdings span Lancashire and Scotland, complementing the Mayfair and Belgravia estates that anchor the group’s central London portfolio.

The wider picture is considerably more alarming. “It’s going to be a very, very dramatic problem for the world, not just the UK in terms of food, just because so much fertiliser comes through those straits,” Preston said. He argued the food security risk now eclipses the energy story that has dominated headlines: “The concern is at least as much, if not more, around food and fertiliser than it is around oil, because there are alternative sources of oil. There aren’t very many alternative sources of nitrogen, for the production of fertiliser.”

His warning echoes that of Yara International, the world’s largest fertiliser producer, whose chief executive cautioned last week that the conflict could push some of Africa’s poorest communities into outright food shortages. Domestic sentiment is already turning: research by Opinium this week found that 80 per cent of Britons are anxious about grocery prices, with retailers continuing to pass cost rises through to the till.

Grosvenor’s wider results illustrate just how mixed the trading climate has become for diversified British groups. Underlying profits fell 18 per cent to £70.5m last year, dragged down by its North American operations, although the UK property arm proved a notable bright spot, running at 97 per cent occupancy. The group’s largest scheme to date, the redevelopment of South Molton Street near Oxford Street — taking in offices, shops, a hotel and 33 homes, is on course for completion next year. In the North West, work has begun on the first phase of an ambition to deliver 700 social homes; 69 have been built near Chester and Ellesmere Port, with a further 120 due this year.

Hugh Grosvenor, the 35-year-old duke and one of Britain’s wealthiest individuals with an estimated fortune of £9.56bn, received dividends paid to family trusts that crept up from £52.4m in 2024 to £53.7m. The group’s total tax bill more than doubled to £248m, of which £200m was paid in the UK, reflecting buoyant property disposals that lifted personal taxes on income and gains by £61m and corporate income tax by £71.9m.

The company has also been doubling down on flexible workspace, a segment it believes is becoming structurally embedded rather than a post-pandemic fad. James Raynor, chief executive of Grosvenor’s property arm, said roughly 23 per cent of the group’s London offices were now flex space, with occupancy “well over 90 per cent”. Last week, the company broke ground on its first directly managed flexible workspace outside the capital, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, a vote of confidence in the regional office market and in the appetite of SMEs for short-form, fully serviced space.

For owners of small and medium-sized businesses, particularly those in food manufacturing, hospitality and agriculture, Preston’s warning lands as a clear signal to lock in supplier contracts, hedge where possible and review pricing strategy ahead of what looks set to be a difficult 2027.

Read more:
Fertiliser shortages set to send global food prices soaring, warns Grosvenor chief

Britain’s high street is sounding the alarm. The country, retailers warn, is drifting towards a generation locked out of work, with the Chancellor’s tax and wage decisions accused of choking off the very entry-level jobs that young people rely on to begin their careers.

In a sharply worded intervention, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has urged Rachel Reeves to halt what it describes as a relentless climb in the cost of employing people. The trade body estimates that the combined effect of higher employer National Insurance contributions and a steeper minimum wage added roughly £6.5bn to retailers’ wage bills in the last financial year alone, a sum that, on the BRC’s reading, is now translating directly into hiring freezes, reduced rotas and shrinking opportunities at the bottom of the ladder.

Helen Dickinson, the BRC’s chief executive, did not mince her words, accusing ministers of allowing an upward spiral in employment costs and red tape that is pushing young workers out of the labour market. Opportunities, she said, are vanishing in real time as businesses absorb a level of cost inflation many smaller operators simply cannot pass on to shoppers.

The political backdrop is unforgiving. Polling for the BRC by Opinium suggests that 49 per cent of the public believes Labour must do more to help unemployed young people, a finding that lands awkwardly for a government already battling questions over its handling of the wider economy. In March, ministers extended a scheme offering taxpayer-funded subsidies to firms hiring under-25s who have been claiming benefits for more than six months. Retailers, however, regard the measure as well-intentioned but undersized given the scale of the problem now bearing down on the sector.

The numbers tell their own story. Office for National Statistics data shows that more than nine million people aged 16 to 64 were economically inactive between December and February, neither in work nor looking for it, an inactivity rate of 21 per cent. Vacancies have fallen by 18 per cent since Labour took office in July 2024, the equivalent of around 156,000 jobs disappearing from the economy. The pain has been concentrated in precisely those industries, retail, hospitality and leisure, that have traditionally given school leavers and students their first taste of the world of work.

For Britain’s under-25s, the squeeze is acute. The unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds reached 15.8 per cent in the three months to February, more than three times the overall jobless rate of 4.9 per cent. Behind that figure sits a generation of would-be Saturday-job applicants, gap-year workers and graduate hopefuls finding doors quietly closed before they have had a chance to knock.

Adding to the anxiety is the rapid arrival of artificial intelligence on the office floor. A survey by the Institute for Student Employers found that nearly nine in ten employers expect AI to reshape entry-level hiring, with almost a third anticipating significant changes to the way they recruit junior staff. Tourism and the legal profession are among the sectors expected to feel the impact first, raising the prospect of a double squeeze: rising employment costs at one end, technology displacing graduate roles at the other.

The Government has pushed back. Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, argues that the Budget steadied the economy and pointed to 332,000 more people in work than a year ago. Ministers maintain that lifting the minimum wage was the right call for households still wrestling with the cost of living. For SME owners watching their wage bills climb and their till receipts soften, it is a defence that increasingly fails to land.

The deeper risk, as Dickinson’s warning makes clear, is structural. Once a cohort of young people misses that critical first rung, the part-time shop floor shift, the warehouse weekend, the graduate scheme, the economic and social cost of bringing them back can stretch over decades. For Britain’s SMEs, the question now is not whether the Chancellor will hear the message, but whether she will act before the damage hardens into something much harder to undo.

Read more:
Retailers warn Reeves is creating a ‘jobless generation’ as hiring costs spiral

Retirement is meant to be the reward for a lifetime of corporate slog: long lunches, a forgiving handicap and the freedom to ignore a Monday morning inbox. For a small but growing band of senior British executives, however, the gilded sunset has proved rather less golden than the brochure suggested.

Bored, restless and quietly itching for a problem to solve, they have done what their younger colleagues might find unthinkable. They have gone back to work, and, more often than not, they are doing it for free.

The Sapient Foundation, set up last year, is the brainchild of Brendan Logan, a 72-year-old serial entrepreneur with three decades in telecommunications and four start-ups to his name. The trigger was a conversation with his old friend Larry Quinn, 69, who had reluctantly agreed to advise a local golf club on its governance, despite, as Logan tells it, having no interest whatsoever in the game. The reason? He had, in his own words, “nothing else to do”.

Quinn, who has co-founded and exited eight businesses, was clearly wasted on bunker disputes. Logan rounded up two more retirees of equal vintage: Eden Phillips, 61, formerly a software engineering manager at BT, and Mary Whatman, 62, a transformation specialist whose CV includes Bell Canada and Nortel. The Sapient Foundation was born.

In the year since, the quartet has worked with just over a dozen companies stretched across the UK and beyond. The model is unusual. Sapient looks at a client’s balance sheet, decides what the business can realistically afford, and charges accordingly. In several cases there is no upfront fee at all; instead, founders are asked to make a donation to one of the charities Sapient supports, but only once their company is generating revenue.

That arrangement suited DocComs, a London-based start-up developing an encrypted messaging platform for doctors. Co-founder Roseanna Jaggard, who runs the business with her husband Matt, had considered the various free online services on offer to founders, but found them generic. Sapient, by contrast, has been working with the team on an investment strategy tailored to the company’s clinical niche.

In its inaugural year, the foundation donated a four-figure sum to the Solidarity Teacher Training College, part of the Solidarity with South Sudan charity. Logan says other educational causes will follow.

The retirees are unapologetically picky about whom they help. Projects must genuinely interest them, and venture capital firms hoping to use the foundation as a back door to discounted consulting have been politely shown the door. Logan says one or two have “tried to pull a fast one”.

The recurring themes among Sapient’s clients are the trio that haunt almost every British SME: funding, technology and governance. Logan and his colleagues have used their address books to introduce founders to investors and capital sources they would never otherwise have reached.

One beneficiary is Oraczen, an agentic artificial intelligence company with offices in London and Texas. Co-founder Raghu Prasad credits Sapient with steering the business away from chasing broad AI opportunities and towards a more practical commercial wedge in contracts, procurement, supplier management and spend leakage. The intervention, Prasad says, helped the team “sharpen our focus very quickly” as they plan an expansion across the UK and Europe.

“In a traditional setting, advice of this depth and quality from senior telecom and enterprise experts would likely have cost us ten to twenty times more,” Prasad adds. “As an early-stage AI company building for enterprises across Europe and the UK, that level of access and strategic guidance would have been difficult to justify financially.”

The foundation operates under what Logan calls the “no heavy lifting” rule. Phillips, who spends a few hours a day on Sapient projects, still has time to tend his allotment, take guitar lessons and volunteer for Citizens Advice. The point, Logan insists, is that the work must remain enjoyable, the charities well funded and the queue of grateful founders steadily growing.

Britain’s SMEs have long complained about the cost and accessibility of senior strategic advice. It turns out the answer may have been sitting on the patio all along, quietly bored and reaching for the secateurs.

Read more:
The retired executives swapping the golf course for the boardroom – and charging next to nothing

The company’s McValue menu doesn’t mean what it used to.

Modella Capital, the private equity owner of the rebranded WHSmith high street chain TGJones, is to shutter up to 150 of its 480 shops in a sweeping restructuring exercise that places hundreds of retail jobs in jeopardy.

The closures, confirmed to the BBC, mark the latest blow to a high street already battered by stubbornly weak footfall, mounting cost pressures and a string of high-profile collapses. They come barely a year after Modella swept up WHSmith’s loss-making bricks-and-mortar arm in a £40m deal struck in March 2025, with the WHSmith name itself excluded from the transaction and retained by the listed group, which has pivoted to its more lucrative travel concessions in airports and railway stations.

A Modella spokesperson said the decision had “not been taken lightly”, citing what it described as exceptionally tough trading. “While we continue to believe in the strength of the core business, TGJones has experienced highly challenging trading conditions over the past year, along with many other brick-and-mortar retailers,” they said.

The firm laid the blame squarely at the door of three culprits: the “forced” rebrand from the trusted, 233-year-old WHSmith fascia, which it said had dented brand recognition almost overnight; rising operating costs “as a direct result of government policy”, a thinly veiled reference to the increase in employer National Insurance contributions and the higher national living wage that have hammered labour-intensive retailers; and unspecified “geopolitical events”.

The restructuring plan, the spokesperson added, is “designed to protect the substantial core of the store estate and create a stronger, more sustainable business that can continue to serve customers for years to come”.

Modella has not yet specified how the cuts will be apportioned across its workforce, but conceded the plan “may result in the closure of some stores and the loss of some roles”. The owner said it would attempt to preserve “as many jobs as possible” and acknowledged the toll on staff, adding: “We recognise the impact this uncertainty will have on colleagues, their families and the communities we serve.”

The TGJones retrenchment lands less than a month after Modella’s stewardship of another high street stalwart ended in collapse. Claire’s, the teenage jewellery and accessories chain, ceased trading in the UK and Ireland in April, closing all 154 standalone stores and making 1,300 staff redundant. Modella had bought the British arm of the chain out of administration only last September, before placing it back into insolvency proceedings after what it called an “alarmingly” weak Christmas. The firm also owns Hobbycraft, the arts-and-crafts retailer, raising fresh questions in the City over the durability of its high street portfolio.

For the SME owners and independent traders that share Britain’s high streets with TGJones, the planned closures are a sobering reminder that scale offers no immunity. The combination of post-Budget cost increases, persistent shifts to online spending and the loss of anchor retailers continues to thin out town centres at pace, with knock-on consequences for footfall and the smaller businesses that depend on it.

Whether Modella’s pared-back TGJones estate can find a sustainable footing without the WHSmith name above the door, and without the cross-subsidy once provided by stationery, books and Post Office concessions, will be the defining test of its turnaround thesis.

Read more:
TGJones owner Modella Capital to shut up to 150 former WHSmith high street shops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The limits of flying logistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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