Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed that British Steel will be taken into full public ownership, ending months of speculation about the future of the loss-making Scunthorpe plant and drawing a line under fraught negotiations with its Chinese owner, Jingye.

In a speech designed in part to head off a brewing leadership challenge after Labour’s bruising local election results, the prime minister told supporters that emergency legislation would be laid before Parliament this week to grant ministers the powers needed to take “full ownership” of the business, subject to a public interest test.

“Public ownership is in the public interest,” Sir Keir said, adding that he intended to prove his “doubters” wrong and that, for the British public, “change cannot come quickly enough.”

The decision marks a significant shift in approach. Whitehall had previously stopped short of full nationalisation, preferring instead to court private investors while keeping the blast furnaces alight through an emergency supervision regime. That regime was imposed last April after the government seized operational control of the Scunthorpe site amid mounting concerns that Jingye was preparing to switch the furnaces off, a step that would almost certainly have ended the United Kingdom’s ability to produce so-called virgin steel.

Virgin steel, smelted from iron ore rather than recycled scrap, is the grade used in heavy infrastructure projects, from new rail lines to large-scale construction. Restarting a blast furnace once it has gone cold is both technically forbidding and extraordinarily expensive, and the loss of that domestic capability has been viewed in Westminster as a strategic red line.

Talks with Jingye, the prime minister confirmed, had failed to produce a workable deal. “A commercial sale has not been possible, and now a public test could be met,” he said.

The response from the steel sector was swift and broadly supportive. Gareth Stace, director-general of trade body UK Steel, said the announcement offered “vital certainty” to the 2,700-strong Scunthorpe workforce, as well as the customers who rely on British Steel for rail, structural sections and specialist products.

“Maintaining domestic production capability for British Steel’s products is essential not only for economic growth but also for our national security and resilience,” Stace said.

However, he was clear that nationalisation alone would not be sufficient. “It is not an end goal,” he cautioned, urging ministers to use the moment as the “beginning of a clear and credible long-term plan for British Steel,” underpinned by a proper investment strategy.

The unions echoed that sentiment. In a joint statement, Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community union, and Unite’s Sharon Graham said they “fully support” nationalisation, arguing that British Steel had a “bright future, with a world class highly skilled workforce making strategically important steels for the UK’s rail and infrastructure.” The pair also pressed the Treasury to mandate that government-funded projects source British-made steel — a long-standing demand of the domestic industry.

Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, national secretary of the GMB Union, said it was “right the government does everything in its power to secure its long term future.”

The Exchequer’s bill for propping up the company has already proved eye-watering. The National Audit Office reported in March that £377 million had been spent in just nine months to fund operations, wages and raw materials at Scunthorpe. Should the present rate of spending persist, the NAO warned, the total could exceed £1.5 billion by 2028, “depending on policy choices that may be taken in the future.”

The BBC understands the government is currently spending in the region of £1 million a day to keep the business afloat. Jingye, for its part, claimed the site was haemorrhaging £700,000 a day and was no longer commercially viable before ministers intervened.

No headline figure has yet been put on the cost of full nationalisation. Officials say an independent valuation of the business will be carried out once legislation is in place, with any compensation due to Jingye to be determined on the basis of that exercise.

It is not the first time the state has stepped in. The Insolvency Service ran British Steel for nine months following its 2019 collapse, at a cost to the taxpayer of around £600 million, before its sale to Jingye.

For the SME supply chain, the fabricators, hauliers and engineering firms clustered around Scunthorpe and across the wider Humber industrial corridor, the announcement removes the immediate threat of a catastrophic shutdown. Many of these businesses operate on tight margins and would have struggled to survive the loss of their principal customer.

The broader question, however, is whether public ownership can deliver the modernisation that successive private owners have failed to fund. Decarbonising primary steelmaking, replacing ageing blast furnaces with electric arc technology, and securing reliable long-term contracts with British infrastructure projects will all require capital commitments measured in billions, not millions.

The public interest test required to complete the takeover will weigh national security, the protection of critical national infrastructure and broader economic considerations. On all three counts, the government appears to have concluded that the case for intervention is now unanswerable.

Read more:
Starmer moves to nationalise British Steel as commercial rescue collapses

The cost of UK government borrowing climbed to its highest level in nearly two decades on Tuesday, as mounting speculation over the future of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer collided with fresh inflation fears stoked by the Iran conflict, leaving the country’s small and mid-sized businesses staring down the barrel of yet another period of squeezed credit and weaker sterling.

The effective interest rate on 10-year gilts briefly touched 5.13% in morning trading, a level not seen since the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis. Yields on two-, five- and 30-year debt also pushed higher, with the 30-year benchmark hitting 5.80% — the steepest reading since 1998.

For Britain’s 5.5 million SMEs, already grappling with stubborn input costs and a softening consumer, the move in the bond market is no abstract Westminster drama. The two- and five-year gilt yields directly underpin fixed-rate mortgage pricing, and by extension the working capital pressures on owner-managers whose households and balance sheets remain tightly interwoven.

The FTSE 100 slid 0.5%, with the high-street banks leading the retreat amid chatter that any successor administration could green-light a fresh tax raid on the sector. Sterling weakened by the same margin against the dollar, slipping to $1.35.

A toxic cocktail of geopolitics and Westminster jitters

Markets have been on edge for weeks as the war in Iran has driven crude above $100 a barrel, threatening to reignite the very inflationary fire the Bank of England has spent two years dousing. But while peer economies have weathered the oil shock with comparatively muted moves in their debt markets, Britain’s gilts have been singled out for punishment.

The reason, according to City analysts, is political. With Sir Keir’s grip on Number 10 looking increasingly precarious, allies emerged from a cabinet meeting on Tuesday insisting the Prime Minister would “get on with governing”, investors are pricing in the very real prospect of a leadership contest that could deliver a Chancellor less wedded to fiscal restraint.

Sir Keir and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have spent the better part of a year repeating their commitment to “iron-clad” borrowing rules, a mantra designed to keep the bond vigilantes at bay. Yet a growing chorus of Labour backbenchers on the party’s left have begun openly questioning whether those self-imposed limits are “fit for long-term renewal”.

Capital Economics put the matter bluntly in a note to clients. “The UK’s already fragile fiscal position means that investors will be on edge for any signs of fiscal loosening,” its analysts wrote. “The likely replacements for Starmer/Reeves would probably not be as fiscally disciplined.” The firm flagged Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting, the names most frequently cited as potential challengers, as candidates who would “probably raise public spending”.

Why the City is nervous

Anna Macdonald, investment strategy director at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the gilts market had been “frazzled” by the prospect of a new occupant of Number 11 taking a more relaxed view of the public finances. “This would mean that investors, of which 25-30% are overseas buyers of UK government bonds, demand a higher risk premium,” she warned.

That risk premium matters far beyond the trading floors of the Square Mile. Governments raise most of their revenue through taxation, but routinely spend more than the Exchequer takes in. The shortfall is plugged by issuing gilts, IOUs sold to pension funds, insurers and foreign investors who, in exchange for parting with their cash, demand certainty above almost everything else.

When that certainty evaporates, the price of borrowing rises. And the bill for Britain’s existing stock of public debt, already swollen by years of crisis-era spending — now accounts for roughly £1 in every £10 the government spends. Each tick higher in yields translates directly into less fiscal headroom for the productivity-boosting investment SMEs have been calling for, from full-expensing reforms to business rates overhaul.

For owner-managers, the immediate read-through is threefold. Mortgage rates, already a drag on consumer discretionary spend, are likely to remain stickier for longer. Sterling weakness will sharpen the import bill for any business reliant on dollar-priced inputs, from manufacturers to hospitality operators sourcing food and drink from overseas. And the cost of business borrowing, whether through term loans or asset finance, is unlikely to ease until the bond market regains its composure.

Until Westminster offers a clearer answer to the question of who will be running the country by the autumn, that composure looks some way off.

Read more:
Uk borrowing costs spike to 18-year high as Starmer leadership crisis spooks markets

Mike Ashley’s retail empire has scored a notable courtroom victory after the Court of Appeal threw out a substantial damages award handed down in a protracted trademark infringement dispute, sparing the FTSE-listed group what could have proved a punishing financial blow.

The ruling brings to a head a long-running tussle between the Shirebrook-based discount sports chain, rebranded as Frasers Group in 2019, and Lifestyle Equities, the company that owns and licenses the Beverly Hills Polo Club marque. Lifestyle Equities had alleged that Ashley’s group infringed its trademark by flogging goods under the rival ‘Santa Monica Polo Club’ label, a claim it first lodged back in 2018.

Frasers had lost the underlying infringement case seven years ago but mounted a fresh challenge against the scale of damages it was ordered to stump up. At an appeal hearing in April, the retailer’s lawyers argued that the bill should be slashed because the third-party companies trading under the Beverly Hills Polo Club name, and on whose behalf Lifestyle Equities was attempting to recover losses, had never been officially registered as licensees in the United Kingdom.

The Court of Appeal duly sided with the high street giant, ruling that it was “too late” for Lifestyle Equities to retrospectively register the licences in question. With the original claim dating back to 2018 and the licensing arrangements stretching back nearly a decade, the court concluded that the additional claims “appear to be well out of time” and that allowing them through would amount to an “unprincipled windfall” for businesses that had not properly placed themselves on the public register.

Counsel for Frasers warned during the appeal that permitting such claims to succeed would expose accused infringers to ambush litigation, leaving defendants “suddenly confronted with a Trojan Horse full of licensees claiming damages” of whose existence they had no prior knowledge. Without strict adherence to public registration, the retailer’s legal team argued, the regime risked becoming “a charter of unjust enrichment”, allowing trademark owners to scoop up compensation for unregistered partners alongside their own losses.

The judgment represents a material win for Frasers, which has shrugged off a potentially eye-watering damages bill that, had it stood, would have set an awkward precedent for the wider retail sector. The decision is likely to be studied closely by intellectual property lawyers and brand owners alike, given the implications for how licensing arrangements must be formally documented to be enforceable in the British courts.

The legal win follows news first reported by City AM that the magic circle-adjacent law firm RPC has lost one of its highest-billing partners, Jeremy Drew, who represents Ashley personally, to Taylor Wessing.

The trademark victory comes hard on the heels of an extraordinary admission by Ashley, the man who founded Sports Direct in his native Burnham in 1982 and ran it as chief executive until handing the reins to son-in-law Michael Murray in 2022.

The 61-year-old billionaire has confirmed publicly for the first time that he engineered the downfall of his most prominent retail adversary, the former JD Sports executive chairman Peter Cowgill.

Cowgill stepped down from the FTSE 100 trainer chain in 2022 in the wake of a Competition and Markets Authority probe, triggered after leaked footage emerged of him in a clandestine car park meeting with Footasylum chief executive Barry Brown. The pair had been expressly barred from exchanging commercially sensitive information while JD Sports was attempting to acquire Footasylum, and the leaked footage led the CMA to impose fines of nearly £5m on the two businesses.

In an interview with the Financial Times last weekend, Ashley conceded that the footage had been obtained by one of his own employees and said he was “not hiding from the fact” that he was the architect of Cowgill’s removal, a candid acknowledgement that lifts the lid on one of the more colourful boardroom feuds in recent British retail history.

Read more:
Ashley’s Frasers group dodges hefty damages bill in trademark appeal victory

Britain’s largest poultry processor has handed supermarkets a £70m bill for the Chancellor’s tax-and-wage squeeze, in one of the clearest signals yet that Labour’s labour-cost reforms are working their way through the nation’s grocery aisles.

2Sisters Food Group, the West Bromwich-based business founded by Midlands entrepreneur Ranjit Boparan (pictured), confirmed it has passed on the entire additional cost to Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and other major retail customers. The increase, the company said, was the direct consequence of Rachel Reeves’s decision last spring to raise employers’ National Insurance contributions and lift the national minimum wage, measures the British Retail Consortium warned at the time would make price rises “inevitable”.

The disclosure lands in the middle of an increasingly heated debate over the cumulative impact of the Chancellor’s Budget on Britain’s productive economy. For a business that supplies roughly one in every three poultry products sold in the UK, slaughtering and processing 10.4 million birds a week from a network of more than 700 farms, even a marginal tweak to employment costs reverberates a long way down the till receipt.

2Sisters employs 13,500 people, making it one of the most heavily exposed companies in the country to changes in payroll taxation. Mr Boparan, long dubbed the “chicken king” of British food, has built a sprawling operation that touches almost every fridge in the land, and the group’s pricing decisions are watched closely by Whitehall and the Competition and Markets Authority alike.

Concern over the wider chilling effect of the National Insurance increase has spread well beyond the food sector. Malcolm Gomersall, chief executive of Grant Thornton’s UK business, said this week that the rise was “not great for businesses who are looking to grow”. He added: “There is a hidden cost of growth and if I could wave a wand, it would be to try and make it easy to employ more people with less related taxes on the employer. UK growth would be supported by lower national insurance contributions.”

It is not the first time 2Sisters has weighed in on government policy. Richard Pennycook, the seasoned retailer who chairs the group on a non-executive basis, warned last year that the curtailment of agricultural property relief would persuade many family farmers to “give up”. His intervention helped galvanise a rural revolt that ultimately pushed Sir Keir Starmer into diluting the inheritance tax measure earlier this year.

Yet for all the political noise, the underlying business is humming. Accounts for the twelve months to July 2025 show pre-tax profits soaring to £108m, up from £35.5m the previous year, helped by a 9 per cent rise in turnover to £2.38bn. The figures were also flattered by the sale of the group’s European poultry interests to the Boparan family’s private office, a transaction that has simplified the corporate structure and concentrated management attention on the home market.

Feed costs, historically the swing factor in poultry margins, fell by 5 per cent over the period. Mr Boparan’s team said those savings had been handed back to customers, partially offsetting the labour-cost increases pushed through elsewhere.

Looking ahead, the company describes itself as “cautiously optimistic”, but the outlook is far from straightforward. The escalating conflict in the Middle East threatens to send food and energy inflation higher, and the Food and Drink Federation has cautioned that grocery inflation could touch 10 per cent before the year is out. Some suppliers are already understood to be levying so-called “Donald Trump surcharges” on imported produce, reflecting the knock-on effect of the White House’s tariff regime on fertiliser and fuel costs.

Working in the group’s favour is a marked consumer pivot back to traditional animal proteins, accelerated by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda across the Atlantic, which has lent fresh momentum to demand for chicken, eggs and unprocessed meats.

“We remain committed to investing in our factories and utilising advanced technologies, helping to grow our core business while supporting our sustainability ambitions,” Mr Boparan said.

For Britain’s SME-rich food supply chain, and for the millions of shoppers who buy 2Sisters’ chicken without ever seeing the brand, the message from West Bromwich is unmistakable. The Treasury may have collected its National Insurance windfall, but the bill has not disappeared. It has simply moved further down the trolley.

Read more:
Poultry powerhouse 2Sisters lifts supermarket prices by £70m to absorb Labour’s National Insurance shock

The share of new-build homes snapped up “off plan” before a single brick is laid has tumbled to its lowest level in more than a decade, in a fresh blow to the government’s ambition of delivering 1.5 million homes by the end of this parliament.

Research published by estate agency Hamptons reveals that just 33 per cent of new properties across England and Wales were sold prior to completion in 2025, down sharply from a peak of 49 per cent in 2016. The slide reflects a perfect storm battering the housebuilding sector, with buy-to-let landlords beating a retreat from the market, stubbornly high interest rates dampening buyer appetite, and construction costs continuing to spiral.

Off-plan sales have long served as the lifeblood of housebuilders’ cash flow, allowing developers to bank deposits and secure financing well before a project reaches completion. Their decline now threatens to push up the cost of capital across the industry at precisely the moment ministers are pressing for an acceleration in delivery.

The contraction has been driven, in large part, by the steady withdrawal of buy-to-let investors who have historically been voracious purchasers of off-plan stock, particularly flats in regeneration areas. The introduction of the 3 per cent second-home stamp duty surcharge in 2016 began the rot. That surcharge was hiked to 5 per cent at the end of 2024, and the Renters’ Rights Act, which came into force this month, has prompted a further wave of landlords to head for the exits rather than wrestle with rising costs and ever-tightening regulation.

First-time buyers, the other traditional mainstay of the off-plan market, are similarly hamstrung. Chain-free and typically flexible on timing, they have historically been natural candidates for purchases months ahead of completion. But higher borrowing costs, coupled with the closure of the government’s Help to Buy equity loan scheme in 2023, have squeezed many of them out of the picture entirely.

The pain is most acute in the flats sector, where investor and first-time buyer demand traditionally overlap. Just 22 per cent of new flats were sold off plan last year, a startling drop from 54 per cent in 2007.

Investors who remain in the game are increasingly looking north, where rental yields comfortably outstrip those available in the southern counties. In Oldham, Greater Manchester, an extraordinary 94 per cent of new flats were sold off plan last year, the highest share of any local authority in the country. London, by contrast, managed 65 per cent.

David Fell, lead analyst at Hamptons, warned that the structural shift away from high-density flats was creating fresh obstacles for ministers. “This move towards lower-density, house-led development is likely to make it harder for the government to significantly ramp up housing delivery,” he said.

Housebuilders, increasingly wary of carrying large blocks of flats on their balance sheets while they wait for buyers, are instead pivoting towards suburban housing schemes that sell more rapidly and limit exposure to rising financing costs. A Ministry of Housing assessment published at the end of March predicted the government would fall short of its 1.5 million target by some 400,000 homes.

The financial mathematics is becoming increasingly punishing for developers. Interest rates on construction loans are typically far higher than those attached to standard residential mortgages, meaning that every week a property sits unsold during the build phase adds materially to the cost base. Hamptons calculates that additional finance costs added £3,125 to the build cost per home last year, up from £2,934 in 2024. Roughly half of that increase, it says, is directly attributable to higher interest rates.

Material costs have piled further pressure on the sector. “Many of the materials needed to build new homes are highly energy-intensive, meaning their costs have risen far faster than wider inflation,” Fell added.

Separate research from the Home Builders Federation underlines the scale of the squeeze. The trade body calculates that the cost of building a new home has risen by an average of £76,000 since 2020, equivalent to 20 per cent of the total cost of constructing the average UK home. Some 40 per cent of that increase, it says, is attributable to government regulations and taxes, with the balance accounted for by material inflation and labour costs.

The financial consultancy RSM UK is among those calling for ministers to act decisively to revive momentum, with a particular focus on planning reform, lighter regulation and lower taxes on new construction.

Stacy Eden, partner and national head of real estate at RSM UK, said the picture was set to deteriorate further without intervention. “With costs set to escalate further due to the economic impact of the Iran conflict, the real estate industry urgently needs further support from government to make housebuilding more viable,” she warned.

For SME housebuilders in particular, who lack the deep balance sheets of the volume players, the squeeze on off-plan sales risks tipping marginal sites from viable to uneconomic, threatening both jobs and the government’s headline housing ambitions.

Read more:
Off-plan new home sales slump to 12-year low as landlords retreat and rates bite

Britain’s labour market is bracing for its sharpest contraction in years, with more than 160,000 roles forecast to vanish over the course of 2026 as anaemic growth and stubbornly high energy bills combine to squeeze employers across the country’s industrial heartlands.

The grim assessment comes from the Item Club, the independent forecaster that runs its projections through the very same economic model used by the Treasury to stress-test government policy. According to its latest analysis, a net 163,000 jobs will disappear this year, representing a 0.4 per cent decline in total employment and dealing a fresh blow to a workforce already feeling the strain of 18 months of cooling demand.

For Britain’s small and medium-sized employers, the report makes for sobering reading. The pain, the Item Club warns, will fall disproportionately on energy-intensive manufacturers, the construction trade and the high street, three sectors that between them prop up tens of thousands of SMEs and the supply chains that orbit them. As disposable incomes are eroded, consumer-facing businesses in retail, hospitality and food service are expected to feel a secondary shockwave.

“The hit will be felt in lower-income regions where consumers typically have less rainy-day savings, which will reduce spending in the retail and hospitality sectors,” said Tim Lyne, an adviser to the Item Club, in a candid assessment of how the downturn will play out beyond the M25.

The geographical pattern of the squeeze will be uneven and, in places, severe. Birmingham’s unemployment rate is forecast to climb from 6.7 per cent to 7.8 per cent over the year, while Glasgow is on course to break through the 5 per cent mark from a 4.3 per cent average in 2025. Cambridge stands as the lone exception among Britain’s major cities, with overall employment expected to edge modestly higher on the back of its knowledge-economy base.

Nationally, the jobless rate, which brushed 5 per cent at the close of last year, is heading for 5.1 per cent in the coming months, up from 4.9 per cent in the most recent official figures published by the Bank of England.

Official growth data due this week is expected to confirm that the economy expanded by around 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, a modest improvement on the 0.1 per cent recorded in the final three months of 2025, but hardly the kind of momentum that creates jobs at scale.

A separate survey from KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation lends weight to the gloomier outlook. Permanent placements across the economy fell in April at their fastest rate since the start of the year, while demand for temporary staff climbed to its highest level since 2023, as employers hedged their bets on hiring commitments.

Neil Carberry, chief executive of the REC, said the trend reflected a “preference for short-term staff at some firms who wanted to push ahead with business development and expansion plans” against an uncertain backdrop. “Businesses will be particularly concerned about the impact on inflation, their borrowing costs and any disruption to wider supply chains,” he added, alluding to the lingering aftershocks of the conflict in Iran.

For business owners, the message is one many will recognise from the past two years: keep options open, keep headcount flexible, and assume that the cost of capital will remain elevated for longer than is comfortable.

The Item Club expects the only meaningful employment growth this year to come from publicly funded corners of the economy, education, health and social care, but its analysts are blunt that this expansion is “unlikely to offset losses in larger, more demand-sensitive sectors”. In short: the state will hire, but it will not hire enough.

For SMEs, the most worrying signal in the report is the speed at which higher interest rates and elevated inflation feed through to recruitment freezes and redundancies. With wage settlements still running ahead of productivity gains, and with energy contracts due for renewal across thousands of mid-sized industrial businesses this summer, the path of least resistance for many owner-managers will be to thin payrolls rather than expand them.

One silver lining is the gradual improvement in economic inactivity rates, as more people who left the workforce during and after the pandemic are now returning to look for work. But with vacancies falling and the labour market loosening, that fresh supply of jobseekers may find conditions tougher than they were even a year ago.

The Item Club’s projections, drawn from the Treasury’s own model, are typically used by policymakers to scrutinise the government’s claims about its economic agenda. On this occasion, they offer ministers little political cover and Britain’s job creators even less.

Read more:
Britain set to shed 160,000 jobs as energy costs and stalling growth bite

Many employers assume that withdrawing a job offer before someone starts work is a low-risk decision.

A recent Employment Appeal Tribunal ruling suggests otherwise. It held that the withdrawal of a conditional job offer amounted to a breach of contract, even though the employee had not actually started work, and that the financial consequences can be significant.

The case of Kankanalapalli v Loesche Energy Systems Ltd is a timely reminder that a job offer, even one labelled “conditional”, can amount to a binding contract the moment a candidate accepts it.

What happened?

A candidate was offered a role as a project manager, subject to satisfactory references, a right to work check, and successful completion of a six-month probationary period. The offer letter referred to key terms such as salary and a start date, but it did not mention a notice period. The employer also agreed to contribute towards relocation costs.

The candidate accepted the offer by email and completed the new-starter paperwork, including providing referee details and the required right to work documents.

A few weeks later, the employer withdrew the job offer because of delays in the project. The candidate brought a claim for breach of contract, citing the withdrawal of the offer and failure to pay any notice pay.

What did the Employment Tribunal and EAT decide?

The Employment Tribunal dismissed the claim. It held that the job offer was conditional and that the employer had not yet received references or completed the right to work checks (which required original documents). The contract had therefore not been formed.

The EAT disagreed. The key question was the nature of the conditions attached to the offer and whether they were:

• “Conditions precedent”, that is, conditions that must be satisfied before any contract is formed) or
• “Conditions subsequent”: whereby acceptance of an offer gives rise to a binding contract, but if the conditions are not satisfied, the contract terminates.

The conditions were grouped together in the offer letter, and one (passing the probationary period) could only be satisfied after employment began. As there had been no attempt to differentiate between the different conditions, this prevented the EAT from finding that they could be conditions precedent.

The offer letter included the key terms, both parties had treated the contract as binding, and the employer had started the onboarding process. Consequently, the employer did not have an unrestricted right to withdraw the offer for reasons unrelated to the conditions subsequent.

Finally, as the offer letter was silent on notice, the EAT had to imply a reasonable notice period. Taking into account the role’s seniority, the relocation requirement, and the lengthy interview process, it was concluded that three months’ notice would be a reasonable period, which the employer was required to pay.

What does this mean for your business?

The case highlights several practical steps employers should take when making job offers:

1. Labelling an offer “conditional” is not enough on its own and will not prevent a binding contract from forming or a breach of contract if the job offer is withdrawn. If you intend certain conditions to be met before a contract exists, those conditions need to be clearly spelled out, with pre-contract conditions listed separately from post-start conditions, such as probation.
2. Always include a notice period in the offer letter, covering both the probationary period and the post-probation standard notice period after probation has been successfully completed. If you don’t, the Employment Tribunal will imply one, and it may be longer than you’d expect.
3. Before withdrawing any offer, take legal advice to ascertain whether the job offer was conditional or unconditional. Depending on the seniority of the role and the implied or stated notice period, a successful breach of contract claim can mean significant compensation as well as considerable management time.
4. Finally, it’s worth reviewing your current offer letter templates to ensure key terms are included and that the conditional nature of any offer is clearly and correctly expressed.

A little extra care at the offer stage is far less costly than defending a claim if a job offer is withdrawn.

Read more:
Withdrawing a job offer can cost you more than you think

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roughly 600 staff at OpenAI have walked away with an average of $11 million (£8 million) apiece after cashing out a combined $6.6 billion (£4.8 billion) in shares, in one of the largest single transfers of employee wealth that Silicon Valley has produced.

The secondary share sale, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, allowed early employees of the ChatGPT developer to sell stock to incoming investors rather than wait for an initial public offering. As many as 75 of the lucky group sold the maximum permitted by the company and walked away with $30 million each.

It is a vivid illustration of the concentration of wealth being generated by the artificial intelligence boom and a sharp reminder, for British SME founders watching from the sidelines, of the scale at which the US technology sector now operates. The single payout pool exceeds the entire annual research and development budget of most FTSE 250 companies.

OpenAI requires staff to hold their shares for two years before they can be sold, meaning last year’s deal was the first significant opportunity for early employees to realise their gains since ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022. The product’s instant global success has driven one of the steepest re-ratings of a private company in corporate history.

The lab founded by Sam Altman and his co-founders was valued at around $1 billion in 2019, when it established a profit-making subsidiary alongside its non-profit parent. By 2023, after Microsoft’s landmark investment shortly following ChatGPT’s launch, the figure had reached $29 billion. The October secondary sale that delivered last year’s payouts valued the company at $500 billion, and a further $122 billion fundraising round completed in March pushed the figure to $852 billion.

An initial public offering, expected in early 2027, could value OpenAI at more than $1 trillion and turn dozens of its earliest employees into multimillionaires several times over. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which now houses his xAI laboratory, and Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, are both reported to be eyeing public market debuts at comparable valuations.

The scale of the OpenAI payout has not gone unnoticed in the wider technology labour market. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is reported to have offered individual compensation packages worth more than $300 million in an attempt to lure leading AI researchers from rivals. The resulting talent war has pushed salaries for senior machine-learning engineers well into seven figures and is making it increasingly difficult for European start-ups, including British ones, to retain home-grown talent.

The transaction was completed even as concerns about an AI bubble reached a recent peak. Technology stocks suffered a sharp sell-off between September and October last year amid investor unease over the circular financing arrangements between AI laboratories, chipmakers and cloud providers, and over the eye-watering capital expenditure being committed by the largest players. That OpenAI was able to clear a $6.6 billion secondary at a $500 billion valuation in the middle of that wobble underlines the strength of demand from sovereign wealth funds and private investors for exposure to the sector.

The payouts also coincide with an increasingly bitter legal dispute between the company and Mr Musk, an early backer who has sued OpenAI over its conversion from a charitable foundation into a for-profit enterprise. The case, which has been in court for the past fortnight, has produced one of the more eye-popping disclosures of the boom: Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, testified that his stake in the business is worth approximately $30 billion. OpenAI has dismissed the litigation as motivated by jealousy and did not respond to a request for comment on the share sale.

For founders of British growth-stage businesses, the OpenAI numbers serve as both inspiration and warning. They demonstrate the extraordinary value that secondary markets can unlock for employees without the need to list, a route increasingly favoured in Silicon Valley as companies stay private for longer. They also underline the talent and capital headwinds facing any UK firm hoping to compete with the American hyperscalers, where stock-based compensation alone can exceed the lifetime earnings of an entire British R&D team.

Whether the AI boom proves to be a generational technological shift or a richly priced rerun of the dotcom era, the cheques have already cleared.

Read more:
OpenAI mints hundreds of overnight millionaires as staff cash out $6.6bn in share sale

The German utility giant Eon has agreed to buy the retail arm of Ovo Energy in a transaction that will create Britain’s largest household energy supplier and end the 17-year run of one of the country’s best-known challenger brands as an independent operator.

The deal, the value of which has not been disclosed but is understood by industry sources to be worth up to £600 million, will hand Eon roughly four million additional customers and lift its UK book to about 9.6 million households. That tally vaults the combined business past Octopus Energy, which had emerged as the market leader after absorbing the remnants of Bulb in 2022.

For Ovo, the sale draws a line under a torrid 18 months in which the Bristol-based supplier warned in its most recent annual report of “material uncertainty” hanging over its future. The company had been struggling to meet the financial resilience benchmarks introduced by Ofgem after the wave of supplier failures that swept the sector in 2021 and 2022, and had drafted in advisers at Rothschild to shore up its balance sheet.

Ofgem had previously granted Ovo additional time to rebuild its capital buffer on the condition that the company set out a credible road map back to compliance. A sale to a deep-pocketed European utility removes that constraint at a stroke.

Stephen Fitzpatrick, the entrepreneur who founded Ovo from a flat in Notting Hill in 2009 and who built it into one of the few genuine British challengers to the so-called Big Six, said the writing had been on the wall for some time. “Energy retail is now more regulated, more capital intensive and increasingly dependent on long-term investment and scale,” he said. “In that context, bringing Ovo together with Eon is the right next step for customers, for colleagues, and for the long-term commitment that decarbonisation requires.”

The transaction is a striking reversal of fortune for a business that, only six years ago, was itself the consolidator. In 2020 Ovo paid roughly £500 million to take over SSE’s retail arm, a deal that quadrupled its customer base overnight and briefly made it the country’s second-largest supplier. The integration proved bruising, however, and the energy price shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine left the company badly exposed.

In a separate but parallel transaction, Ovo has agreed to sell its home services arm, which provides boiler insurance and servicing contracts, to the British energy services firm Hometree. That carve-out leaves Ovo Group with Kaluza, its technology platform, which licenses customer-management and flexibility software to third-party utilities including the French group Engie. Kaluza is widely regarded as the more strategically valuable half of the business and is not part of the Eon deal.

Marc Spieker, chief operating officer for commercial at Eon, framed the acquisition as a long-term bet on the British market’s role in the energy transition. “The United Kingdom is an important growth market for Eon, particularly for flexibility and customer-focused energy solutions,” he said. “Energy flexibility and electrification are becoming increasingly important and are critical to the success of the energy transition.”

Eon, headquartered in Essen, already operates in Britain through Eon Next, the rebranded successor to the old Npower retail business it acquired as part of its 2019 takeover of Innogy. The Ovo deal will give it a commanding presence in the heat-pump, smart-tariff and electric-vehicle charging markets that are expected to drive growth as households electrify.

The acquisition is subject to clearance from regulators including the Competition and Markets Authority and Ofgem, and is expected to complete in the second half of the year. Industry analysts will be watching closely to see whether the combined entity’s 9.6 million customer base attracts close scrutiny from competition authorities, given that it would account for roughly a third of all British households.

For SME suppliers and the smaller challengers still battling for market share, the message is unambiguous. The era in which a charismatic founder with a clever app and a hedged book of supply contracts could disrupt the British energy market appears, for now at least, to be over. Scale, balance-sheet strength and the patience of a European parent are once again the prerequisites for survival.

Read more:
Eon swallows Ovo in £600m deal that crowns Germany’s biggest energy giant as Britain’s largest supplier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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