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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A flagship reform under fire

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

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

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

The BGC disputes almost every part of that picture.

“Serious failings” and a 20% problem

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

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

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

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

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

The black market gathering pace

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

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

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

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

A regulator on the back foot

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

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

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

What to watch this week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A shipping disruptor with a 95 per cent answer

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

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

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

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

A 54-year-old hymn to Madame Clicquot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A $145bn bet on ‘personal superintelligence’

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

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

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

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

A wider AI-driven shake-out in tech

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

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

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

Meta and Intuit were contacted for comment.

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

Britain’s pitch as the most reliable address in European real estate has taken a knock.

Foreign investors, the lifeblood of the country’s commercial property market for much of the last decade, deployed just £3.6 billion into UK bricks and mortar between January and March, according to figures from industry body Real Estate:UK and analytics group CoStar — a 30 per cent slump on the £5.2 billion booked in the same period a year earlier.

Including domestic buyers, total UK commercial property investment limped in at £9.7 billion for the quarter, almost 40 per cent below the five-year average. It is the kind of read-across that should give the Treasury pause: when the overseas money that quietly underwrites office redevelopment, logistics sheds, healthcare facilities and the build-to-rent pipeline thins out, smaller occupier businesses are the ones left navigating tired stock, stalled refurbishments and shrinking landlord investment in their premises.

A regulatory pile-on, not a market verdict

What is striking about the figures, published in the joint Real Estate:UK and CoStar quarterly update, is that the slowdown took hold before the war in Iran rattled markets. The report points the finger squarely at the cumulative weight of regulation rather than any fundamental loss of faith in UK plc.

Planning continues to grind. The Building Safety Regulator’s processing of higher-risk schemes, although showing some signs of improvement in the most recent government data — has lengthened development timetables and bled costs into project budgets. Layered on top, the report cites the “sudden and untrailed” statutory ban on upward-only rent reviews, the delayed homes penalty proposal, the forthcoming building safety levy and the wholesale reorganisation of English local government as a quartet of policy shifts that, taken together, add cost, uncertainty and time to almost every deal that crosses an investment committee’s desk.

For an overseas pension fund or insurer weighing up whether to buy a tired 1980s office block, knock it down and put up a modern, net-zero replacement, that arithmetic increasingly fails to add up. The same is true of refurbishment plays, the value-add strategies that have powered much of the recovery in regional cities. Capital that once flowed in by default now sits in the in-tray.

The view from UK boardrooms

The frustration is not confined to the foreign-exchange dealing rooms of Manhattan and Munich. UK-listed property companies and housebuilders have been sounding the same alarm. Great Portland Estates, one of the most respected names in West End offices, recently turned to its shareholders for £350 million to capitalise on a stuttering market it argues is being held back by a planning system that has effectively ground London office development to a halt.

Housebuilders tell a similar story. Berkeley, Barratt Redrow and their peers have slowed expansion plans as viability calculations buckle under the weight of compliance costs. Barratt Redrow, the country’s biggest housebuilder, has already cut £200 million from its land buying budget, citing the war in Iran on top of an already cooler outlook. The broader construction sector reflects the strain, with activity slumping to its weakest level since the Covid lockdowns as housebuilding output retreated.

For Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses, these are not abstract numbers. Fewer cranes mean fewer industrial units coming forward for growing manufacturers; stalled office refurbishments mean SMEs continue to occupy poorly performing buildings with higher energy bills; and slower housebuilding tightens the labour market in regions where workers cannot afford to move.

From record year to flat patch

The Q1 wobble is doubly jarring because it follows what had been a banner 2025. Foreign inflows into UK commercial property rose 33 per cent last year to £27.2 billion, the fourth-strongest year on record. American capital did most of the heavy lifting, deploying £18.2 billion, more than half of which went into healthcare property, including Welltower’s eye-catching £5.2 billion purchase of a care home portfolio previously owned by Irish horse racing magnates JP McManus, John Magnier, and Celtic FC’s largest shareholder Dermot Desmond.

That tide is now visibly going out. US inflows have “eased significantly” in the opening months of 2026, the report notes. “Sterling’s appreciation against the dollar may also be eroding some of the pricing advantage that helped drive exceptionally strong US investment into UK real estate during 2025,” said Melanie Leech, interim chief executive of Real Estate:UK.

A stronger pound is, in normal times, a reasonable problem to have. Combined with regulatory drag and geopolitical anxiety, however, it has become one variable too many.

What it means for SMEs

The temptation in Westminster will be to treat this as a story about big institutional money. That would be a mistake. Commercial property investment is the plumbing that keeps the rest of the economy moving, the warehouses growing e-commerce firms expand into, the small office floors marketing agencies upgrade to, the GP surgeries and care homes communities rely on.

When that plumbing seizes up, SMEs feel it in higher rents on a shrinking pool of good-quality stock, longer waits for new units to come to market and patchier service from cash-strapped landlords. The Real Estate:UK report makes clear the industry’s view that the cumulative impact of recent regulatory change, however well-intentioned each measure may be individually, is now actively deterring capital that Britain badly needs.

With Iran’s conflict expected to weigh further on deal flow into the summer, the onus is on ministers to ensure that the next set of figures does not read as the start of a trend rather than a blip. For business owners up and down the country, the message from the data is uncomfortably simple: if Britain wants the investment, it will have to make the country easier to invest in.

Read more:
Overseas investors retreat from UK commercial property as red tape bites

Roughly nine in ten companies are yet to see a penny of financial benefit from artificial intelligence, despite a threefold rise in workplace usage over the past two years, according to the head of the world’s largest consulting firm in Britain and Ireland.

Matt Prebble, chief executive of Accenture UK and Ireland, said the disconnect between enthusiastic adoption and measurable returns now ranks as one of the most pressing strategic questions facing boardrooms on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Over the last two years, we’ve seen three times as many people using AI within the workplace, but that individual productivity … that’s not actually yet translating to real company performance,” he said. His verdict echoes fresh Accenture research showing that only one in ten UK organisations has successfully scaled the technology into core operations.

According to Prebble, the failure to extract value has its roots in companies treating AI as a bolt-on rather than reshaping the way they work “across people, process and technology”.

“We found that one in ten companies are really starting to get the productivity flow through to the bottom line, but on the other hand, 90 per cent of companies aren’t,” he said. He remained confident, however, that AI would yet have a “material impact” on businesses prepared to display the “confidence and the willingness to reinvent” how they operate, with the technology at the centre of the redesign.

His warning lands at a moment when chief executives and chief financial officers are sharpening their pencils over AI budgets. Businesses are increasingly questioning whether the sums they are pouring into AI tokens, the basic units used by large language models to read, remember and generate content, are delivering a defensible return. The growing scepticism mirrors a wider pattern of stalling adoption at large enterprises as doubts mount over AI returns.

Andrew Macdonald, chief operating officer at Uber, conceded last week that the ride-hailing and delivery group had yet to observe any direct productivity uplift tied to its rising AI token consumption. “That link is not there yet, right?” he said. By March, Uber had burned through its annual budget for “agentic”, or autonomous, AI, with the link between greater token spend and useful consumer features still unconvincing.

Microsoft has reportedly told some of its staff to switch to its own in-house model rather than third-party alternatives, in an effort to rein in costs. According to Axios, one unnamed company spent $500 million in a single month on Anthropic’s Claude platform after leaving employee usage uncapped.

The mounting cost pressure has emboldened critics of the sector’s hyper-investment cycle. A widely cited MIT study reported by Fortune found that 95 per cent of corporate generative AI pilots were failing to produce measurable returns, prompting renewed warnings of a possible correction in the valuations and business models of the industry’s leading players.

Cultural headwinds are building too. Pope Leo has criticised the AI industry and called for tighter regulation, while graduates at several US college campuses have booed speakers championing the technology. Prebble acknowledged that AI was suffering from “a bit of a brand issue” in the West, “very different to Asia”, with anxiety over job losses and the pace of change clouding the picture.

“You have seen leaders in the market talking around the job dislocation and giving headlines around the impact on early graduate or next graduate jobs, which I think has created some of the fear out there,” he said.

He insisted, however, that equating greater AI adoption with fewer overall jobs reflected a “narrow view” of productivity. “The further we go in this cycle … things will be done differently. And therefore there’ll be different skills and different capabilities required,” he added. “There’s always been those waves of technological change that have come and it is true that it’s always created new job opportunities and over time, those job opportunities have outpaced the previous job.”

For all the gloom over returns, Prebble argued that Britain still has time to turn AI into a national growth story. The UK may have largely missed out on the spoils of building AI infrastructure, but he believes there is a credible path to capitalise on the application layer by playing to British strengths in life sciences and professional services. That view aligns with separate HSBC research suggesting AI adoption could unlock a £105bn revenue boost for UK mid-sized firms by 2030.

“If we can get our innovation swagger back to be able to then scale that across the country and globally, we’ve got some good opportunities,” Prebble said.

Accenture has begun rebranding its 800,000-strong workforce as “reinventors”, a label Prebble said reflects the group’s growing remit advising clients on how to overhaul their operating models for the AI era. Last year the consulting giant restructured its own business, folding strategy, consulting, creative, technology and operations into a single division dubbed “reinvention services”. Earlier this year, reports emerged that the Dublin-based firm had been monitoring how its own staff used AI tools as a factor in promotion decisions.

For now, though, the message from the boss of Britain’s largest professional services consulting brand is blunt: the productivity revolution promised by AI is still, for the vast majority of UK plc, a promise rather than a payslip.

Read more:
Nine in ten companies still waiting for AI to pay off, warns Accenture chief

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

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

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

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

A name nobody recognises

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

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

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

Westminster turns the heat up

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

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

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

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

‘Sucking the soul out of the high street’

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

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

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

150 closures and counting

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

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

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

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

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

Modella declined to comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sector hit by every conceivable headwind

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Whitehall blinked

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

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

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

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

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

What happens next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A structural problem, not a valuation quibble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The verdict from the high street

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more:
ebay rebuffs GameStop’s surprise $55.5bn swoop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four areas where ministers are urged to move

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bottom line

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

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

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

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