The dust hangs thick in the air at Sharp Group’s recycling facility in Rainham, east London, where the relentless rumble of hoppers and conveyor belts sets a punishing tempo. It is, by any measure, an unforgiving place to earn a living, and increasingly, that is the problem.

The family-run skip and waste management business, which processes up to 280,000 tonnes of mixed recycling a year, depends on 24 agency workers stationed along its rapid conveyor belts. They sift, in real time, through a procession of debris that ranges from old trainers and VHS cassettes to slabs of concrete. It is the sort of work that few are queueing up to do, and the figures bear that out. Annual staff turnover at the plant runs at 40%, mirroring an industry-wide retention crisis that is now forcing British SMEs to confront a question once reserved for car factories and Amazon warehouses: can robots do this instead?

For Sharp Group, the answer may be taking shape on the line itself. A humanoid robot known as Alpha, the Automated Litter Processing Humanoid Assistant, is being trained to pick through the waste stream alongside the human pickers it may one day replace. Built by China’s RealMan Robotics and adapted for British recycling conditions by London-based TeknTrash Robotics, Alpha represents an unusual bet on humanoid form factors in an industry that has, until now, leant towards bespoke automated kit.

“The attraction of a humanoid is that you can put it here and it stays here,” says Chelsea Sharp, the plant’s finance director and granddaughter of founder Tom Sharp. “It will pick all day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s not going to apply for a holiday, it’s not going to have a sick day.”

That blunt commercial logic sits against an equally blunt safety case. Work-related injury and ill-health in the waste sector run 45% higher than the national average across other industries, and the fatality rate is a sizeable multiple of the broader workforce. Sharp Group is proud of its own safety record, but the maths of recruitment in such an environment is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

“The belt is moving all the time, you’re constantly picking. I go through a lot of pickers because they just aren’t up to the job,” says line supervisor Ken Dordoy. The firm rotates staff through different waste streams every 20 minutes, with periodic stoppages built in for respite, a regime that speaks volumes about the strain involved.

Alpha, for now, is no quick fix. It is in the early stages of an exhaustive training programme, with a plant worker wearing a VR headset alongside the robot to demonstrate what good picking looks like. The dual challenge, TeknTrash founder and chief executive Al Costa explains, is teaching the machine first to identify objects on a moving belt, and then to lift them reliably. His firm’s HoloLab system feeds Alpha a torrent of data from multiple cameras, generating millions of training data points a day.

Costa is candid about the gap between marketing hype and operational reality. “The market thinks these robots are prêt‑à‑porter, that all you need to do is plug them into the mains and they will work flawlessly. But they need extensive data in order to be effectively useful.”

The humanoid approach has the advantage of slotting into existing infrastructure without expensive plant redesign, no small consideration for SMEs operating on the thin margins typical of the recycling sector. The alternative, increasingly favoured by larger operators, is wholesale retrofitting with bespoke automated kit.

Colorado-based AMP, which runs three of its own plants and supplies equipment to dozens of facilities across Europe and the UK, takes that route. Its systems use air jets to fire items into chutes, with AI continuously sharpening the machine’s ability to identify and sort materials. “Our robots are much more efficient than humans, probably eight or 10 times the pace,” chief executive Tim Stuart says. “The AI technology and jets have really increased the capacity and efficiency and accuracy of what we can do.”

California’s Glacier, co-founded by Rebecca Hu‑Thrams, deploys mounted robotic arms paired with AI vision. She is quick to note the sheer unpredictability of the material her machines must contend with. A leaking beer can may threaten sensitive equipment; her customers, she adds, have seen “unbelievable things like hand grenades and firearms coming through their facility”. The proposition, she says, is improvement at scale: “As our models learn from more than a billion items, the AI gets better and better. And we’ve always designed our technology so it works not just for big urban plants, but for the semi‑rural facilities running on much tighter budgets.”

For all the differences in approach, the conclusion across the industry is converging. The labour-intensive model that has propped up British waste processing for decades is reaching the end of its useful life. Academics studying the sector see the same trajectory. Professor Marian Chertow of Yale University argues that “robotics coupled with AI-driven vision systems offers the greatest potential for improving material recovery, worker experience, and economic competitiveness in the recycling sector”.

That leaves the awkward question of what happens to the people currently doing the picking. Chelsea Sharp does not pretend the work is anything other than gruelling. “This is a really dirty place to work. You can see the dust, you can hear the noise. It’s not that nice.” Her stated plan, however, is reskilling rather than replacement. “The plan is to upskill those staff. They’ll be maintaining and overseeing the robots. And it brings those same people away from any dangers, including the unpleasant environment, heavy lifting and noise.”

Whether the rest of the sector follows Sharp’s lead, or whether automation ushers in a quieter, leaner workforce by default, will become clear over the next few years. What is no longer in dispute is that the British recycling line of 2030 will look nothing like the one running in Rainham today.

Read more:
Humanoid robots step onto the recycling line as waste firms battle 40% staff turnover

Britain’s distillers have been handed an unexpected fillip after Donald Trump announced the removal of all US tariffs and restrictions on whisky imports, a concession the president attributed directly to the influence of King Charles and Queen Camilla’s four-day state visit to America.

The decision, revealed on Trump’s Truth Social platform shortly after the royal couple departed for the UK, brings to an end a punishing 10 per cent levy that the Scotch Whisky Association estimates has been costing the industry roughly £4m a week, some £150m over the past year, at a time when distillers were already bracing for a further 25 per cent charge on single malts due to return this spring.

For an industry that counts the United States as its largest export market, with shipments worth close to £1bn annually, the timing could scarcely have been more welcome. Trump told reporters in Washington that the King and Queen “got me to do something that nobody else was able to do, without hardly even asking”, adding that he had moved “in honour” of his royal guests.

Buckingham Palace responded with characteristic understatement. A spokesperson said the King had conveyed his “sincere gratitude” to the president and would be “raising a dram to the President’s thoughtfulness”.

The decision also unlocks renewed commercial co-operation between Scotland and the Commonwealth of Kentucky, two regions historically intertwined through the trade in used bourbon barrels. The Scotch industry imports roughly £200m-worth of these casks from Kentucky each year, using them to mature its single malts and blends. Trump noted the linkage explicitly, describing both as “very important industries” in their respective territories.

Graeme Littlejohn, director of strategy at the Scotch Whisky Association, told Business Matters the industry was “delighted” by the move. “Distillers will breathe a sigh of relief now that these tariffs are off,” he said. “It’s really thanks to the huge amount of negotiation that’s been going on over many months, at a very senior level. Perhaps the state visit has been the catalyst for getting this over the line, and the King’s added that little bit of royal sparkle to make the deal work.”

Scotland’s First Minister, John Swinney, hailed the announcement as “tremendous news for Scotland”, noting that “millions of pounds were being lost every month from the Scottish economy” under the previous regime. He paid particular tribute to the monarch’s behind-the-scenes role.

The UK government confirmed that the removal applies to all whisky tariffs, including those affecting Irish whiskey producers, a clarification that will be welcomed by distillers on both sides of the Irish Sea. Peter Kyle, the Business and Trade Secretary, called the breakthrough “great news for our Scotch whisky industry, which is worth almost £1bn in exports and supports thousands of jobs across the UK”.

For SMEs across the sector, from craft distillers in Speyside to family-run bottlers in the Highlands and Islands, the lifting of tariffs offers a tangible reprieve. Single malts, which command premium prices in the American market, have been disproportionately affected by the Trump-era levies, and smaller producers without the balance-sheet depth of multinational rivals have felt the squeeze most acutely.

The development represents a rare instance of soft power translating directly into hard economic gain. Whether it heralds a broader thaw in transatlantic trade relations remains to be seen, but for an industry that has spent the better part of a year absorbing the costs of protectionism, the immediate message is clear: the dram is back on.

Read more:
Whisky tariffs lifted as Trump hails royal state visit

Bristol and Edinburgh are emerging as the unlikely engines of Britain’s innovation economy, posting the country’s fastest-growing workforces among technology firms, university spin-outs and patent holders, according to fresh research that lays bare the persistent funding gap with the so-called golden triangle.

Headcount at innovative companies in Bristol jumped 65 per cent between 2019 and 2024, with Edinburgh up 43 per cent over the same period, comfortably outpacing Oxford on 40 per cent and Cambridge on 26 per cent, the analysis of nearly 40,000 businesses reveals.

The study, conducted by the research firm Beauhurst, classifies an “innovative” company as one that is either a university spin-out, the recipient of an innovation grant of £100,000 or more, the holder of a patent, or a technology business that has secured equity investment.

Yet despite the workforce surge in regional hubs, capital remains stubbornly concentrated in the south-east. Some 80 per cent of venture capital invested in the UK still finds its way to London, Oxford or Cambridge, the report finds, a figure that is likely to reignite debate over whether Whitehall’s levelling-up rhetoric is being matched by private-sector reality.

Karim Bahou, head of innovation at Sister, the Manchester-based innovation district that commissioned the study, said the work was designed to shed light on the structural reasons behind the funding gap that continues to dog regional cities.

Manchester itself, Bahou’s analysis found, is punching well above its weight. On a per-capita basis the city is on a par with the capital, with each boasting two innovative companies for every 1,000 residents.

Bahou is now urging cities outside the golden triangle to forge so-called “innovation corridors” between themselves rather than continuing to orbit London. The corridors, established networks linking regions that routinely collaborate on funding and company-building, allow capital, talent and intellectual property to flow more freely across the country.

Scotland’s central belt is leading the way. The Edinburgh-Glasgow corridor has already racked up 448 partnerships, including 378 investments and 70 research grants, making it the most deeply integrated city-to-city innovation network in the UK.

“Up in Scotland we see some really strong links between Glasgow and Edinburgh. This is where we think there is an opportunity to apply a Scottish model to the rest of the country,” Bahou said.

The report goes on to recommend devolving research and development tax incentives to regional authorities, establishing dedicated regional investment funds to unlock deal flow beyond the capital, and developing physical innovation districts, Sister itself is cited as an example, to keep intellectual property and talent rooted locally.

“We’ve got the Northern Powerhouse Fund, and that’s brilliant. We should be doubling down on funds like that, that focus on specific regions and the strength they bring,” Bahou said. “But investors themselves need to come and see what’s happening up in the north, we’ve got some incredible businesses here.”

Read more:
Bristol leads UK innovation jobs boom as the regions close the gap on London

Rolls-Royce has brushed aside investor jitters over the war in Iran, telling shareholders it remains firmly on course to deliver at least £4 billion of underlying operating profit this year, with engine flying hours running 15 per cent ahead of pre-pandemic levels.

The Derby-based aero-engine giant used its annual general meeting this week to draw a line under several weeks of share-price turbulence triggered by Donald Trump’s decision to launch military action in the Middle East. Since hostilities began, the stock has shed close to 20 per cent of its value, sliding from an all-time high of £13.63 and wiping more than £20 billion off the company’s market capitalisation. Shares clawed back 2.9 per cent in early trading on Thursday to stand at £11.06.

The market’s anxiety has been understandable. Rolls-Royce’s civil aerospace division leans heavily on long-haul carriers operating through the Gulf, and the threat of a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz raised the spectre of jet-fuel shortages, route cancellations and a fresh bout of pain for an engine maker still scarred by the pandemic-era grounding of the global fleet.

Yet the picture painted by chief executive Tufan Erginbilgic, now nearly three and a half years into his turnaround, is one of remarkable resilience. In the first four months of the year, engine flying hours have run ahead of internal forecasts. In the three months to 31 March, large engine flying hours rose 5 per cent to reach 115 per cent of 2019 levels. The company is sticking to its full-year guidance of 115 to 120 per cent.

Crucially, Rolls-Royce reported a “significant recovery” in Middle Eastern airline activity, with flying hours on the Airbus A350, powered exclusively by the company’s Derby-built Trent XWB, its single largest revenue line, having “fully recovered to pre-conflict levels”. Carriers, it said, had moved with unexpected speed to redeploy aircraft into other growth markets, leaving far fewer planes parked than analysts had feared. Qatar Airways is the world’s second-largest A350 operator after Singapore Airlines, with both running substantial Gulf traffic.

The group also pointed out that the bulk of aircraft currently grounded for economic reasons, chiefly fuel-cost pressures, are narrow-body, short-haul jets, a segment Rolls-Royce does not serve.

For Erginbilgic, the message to shareholders is that diversification is doing its job. Civil aerospace remains the engine room, but the defence arm, supplying powerplants for the Eurofighter Typhoon, Royal Navy warships and submarines, and several US military programmes, is buoyant amid heightened Western defence spending. The power systems division, which builds diesel engines and generators for everything from data-centre backup to German and Polish army fighting vehicles, is benefiting from the global data-centre boom and rearmament across Nato. A fourth, emerging leg, small modular nuclear reactors, formally backed by the UK government, adds longer-dated optionality.

The reaffirmed guidance points to underlying operating profit of £4 billion to £4.2 billion this year, with free cash flow of £3.6 billion to £3.8 billion.

“We have had a strong start to the year. Operational performance has been strong across the group,” Erginbilgic said. “With our diversified portfolio of three high-performing businesses, we are creating a more resilient and agile Rolls-Royce that is better equipped to respond to changes in the external environment. The conflict in the Middle East has created uncertainty for the industry. We are taking the necessary actions and expect to fully mitigate the current financial impact of the disruption to our business.”

For SME suppliers across the Midlands aerospace cluster, many of whom rely on Rolls-Royce’s order book to keep their own production lines moving, the reaffirmed guidance will be welcome reassurance that the engine maker’s recovery story remains firmly intact, geopolitics notwithstanding.

Read more:
Rolls-Royce holds nerve on £4bn profit target as flying hours soar past pre-pandemic peak

Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to deliver “personal superintelligence” fails to calm Wall Street as the social media group lifts its 2026 capital expenditure forecast by another $10bn, even as an algorithm overhaul drives record time spent on Instagram and Facebook.

Meta Platforms wiped roughly 7 per cent off its share price in after-hours trading on Wall Street last night after the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp jolted investors with another sharp increase in its artificial intelligence spending plans, even as a sweeping algorithm overhaul drove record engagement across its apps.

The Silicon Valley group, run by Mark Zuckerberg, said it now expected capital expenditure to come in at between $125 billion and $145 billion in 2026, up from the $115 billion to $135 billion range it had pencilled in only months earlier. The revised guidance pushed shares down $46.62, or 7 per cent, to $622.50 in extended trading in New York, despite first-quarter sales and profits that comfortably beat City and Wall Street forecasts.

The reaction underlines the growing unease among shareholders over Big Tech’s escalating AI arms race, with the world’s largest technology companies pouring tens of billions of dollars into data centres, custom chips and machine-learning talent in a bid not to be left behind, a dynamic that is increasingly setting the cost of doing business for smaller rivals and the digital advertising market on which countless British SMEs now depend.

Zuckerberg sought to reassure the market that the spending would pay off, arguing that Meta’s algorithm changes were already translating into stickier users and a more lucrative advertising business. The chief executive said improvements to content ranking had lifted “real time” spent on Instagram by 10 per cent in the first quarter, while video engagement on Facebook climbed by more than 8 per cent globally, the biggest quarter-on-quarter jump in four years.

Susan Li, chief financial officer, told analysts that Meta had doubled the length of user interactions used to train Instagram’s recommendation systems during the period, allowing its AI models to “develop a deeper understanding of user interests”. Engineers had also accelerated the speed at which fresh posts were surfaced, using “more advanced content understanding techniques” to identify content that might appeal to a user “even if they haven’t engaged with a lot of similar content”.

More than half a billion users on each of Facebook and Instagram are now consuming AI-translated videos after the company began auto-dubbing clips into a viewer’s local language, a move designed to widen the pool of recommendable content and, ultimately, monetisable inventory. Across Meta’s family of apps, daily active users hit 3.56 billion in the first quarter.

The increased engagement is feeding directly into the advertising machine that still generates the lion’s share of Meta’s revenues. Total ad impressions rose 19 per cent year-on-year in the period, as the group’s automated, AI-powered ad platform, which lets brands personalise campaigns at scale, continued to gain traction with marketers, including the small and mid-sized advertisers that increasingly account for the bulk of its long tail.

Zuckerberg used the earnings call to set out his most ambitious vision yet for the technology, telling investors that Meta intended to build AI agents capable of delivering “personal superintelligence” to billions of people. He said he wanted Meta’s products to “understand people’s goals specifically and then be able to just go work on them for them, and check back in”, whether those goals related to health, learning, relationships or careers.

“Literally every person in the world is going to want some version of it,” he said, suggesting that consumers would be “willing to pay a lot of money to have premium or high compute versions” — a hint that Meta is preparing to layer subscription products on top of its traditionally ad-funded model.

AI models, Zuckerberg added, would help Meta to “develop a first principles understanding of what you care about and what each piece of content in our system is about, so that way, we can show you more useful things for what you’re trying to accomplish.”

The bullish tone on AI sat uneasily, however, with the group’s plans to cut roughly 8,000 staff, or 10 per cent of its workforce, in May. Pressed on whether the technology would ultimately replace human workers, Zuckerberg insisted his view differed from much of Silicon Valley.

“My view of AI is very different from many others in the industry,” he said. “I hear a lot of people out there talk about how AI is going to replace people instead. I think that AI is going to amplify people’s ability to do what you want, whether that’s to improve your health, your learning, your relationships, your ability to achieve your personal career goals, and more.”

Li told analysts she was “unsure about the optimal workforce size” for the company, but said management was determined to use AI tools to “substantially increase our productivity”. She added: “We’re approaching this with a bias for wanting to use these tools to build even more products and services than we would have before. At the same time, we’re making very significant investments in infrastructure, and we are very focused on continuing to operate efficiently. So I think we will be continuously evaluating how we’re structured, just to make sure we’re best set up to deliver against our priorities over the coming years.”

For all the angst over capital spending, the underlying numbers were strong. Meta reported first-quarter revenue of $56.3 billion, ahead of Wall Street’s $55.58 billion consensus. Net income jumped 61 per cent year-on-year to $26.8 billion, well clear of the $17.2 billion analysts had pencilled in, although the figure was flattered by an $8 billion tax benefit linked to the US tax reform package signed into law last July.

The question now facing shareholders is whether Zuckerberg’s vast bet on AI infrastructure will deliver the productivity gains and new revenue lines needed to justify the bill, or whether, as some on Wall Street fear, the social media empire is about to enter another costly chapter of the metaverse playbook, only this time with a different acronym.

Read more:
Meta’s $145bn AI splurge spooks investors despite engagement surge

The John Lewis Partnership has been hauled before the High Court by the past and present owners of Brent Cross shopping centre in north London, in a dispute that could redraw the lines between bricks-and-mortar leases and the digital tills that now run through them.

Hammerson, the FTSE 250 landlord that owns Brent Cross today, and Standard Life, its predecessor, allege that the employee-owned retailer has been underpaying its rent for more than a decade by failing to count click-and-collect transactions as part of its in-store takings. The claim, lodged at the High Court last December and first surfaced by the *Financial Times*, hinges on the wording of a lease drafted in 1972, four years before Brent Cross even opened its doors and decades before the world wide web entered commercial use.

John Lewis has been one of the centre’s anchor tenants since 1976. The 125-year lease it signed obliges the partnership to pay a base rent of £30,000 a year plus a turnover top-up: 0.75 per cent of sales between £4m and £10m, rising to 1 per cent on anything above £10m. Industry sources put the store’s annual takings at around £50m, which would imply a rent bill of roughly £475,000 a year, a modest sum in modern retail terms, and a reminder of just how favourable these deals could be.

Such generous arrangements were common for anchors. In the heyday of the British shopping centre, landlords routinely offered cut-price rents to the John Lewises, BHSs and Marks & Spencers of the world on the basis that their mere presence would pull in footfall, lift surrounding rents and de-risk the entire scheme. Half a century on, those legacy leases are now being stress-tested against a retail landscape their drafters could not have imagined.

At the heart of the case is the meaning of “gross receipts”. Hammerson and Standard Life argue the term should capture online orders collected at the Brent Cross store, online orders fulfilled from the store, and in-store orders dispatched later from a John Lewis delivery depot. They point to lease language that already takes in “mail, telephone or similar orders received or filled at or from” the premises, alongside orders that “originated and/or are accepted at or from the demised premises” regardless of where delivery ultimately takes place.

John Lewis is not commenting publicly, but court papers show it is contesting the claim. Sources close to the partnership argue that a lease drafted before the internet existed cannot, as a matter of common sense, have intended to scoop up e-commerce.

That view has support across the property industry. “The sale occurs at the click, not the collect,” one rival landlord told *Business Matters*, “and the landlord should be benefiting from the ‘halo’ sales when shoppers come in to pick up their orders. You can’t argue there was intent to include click-and-collect in the lease because the internet didn’t exist in the seventies.”

The case is not solely about definitions. Hammerson has also taken aim at the way John Lewis has been reporting its numbers. Under the lease, the retailer must supply an audited sales certificate, signed off by its accountants. The landlord claims that for the past 12 years those certificates have come with a striking caveat: that the accountants’ examination “was not such as to constitute an audit”. Nor, it says, have the certificates included a breakdown of sales. The landlords “consider it likely” that some of those certificates have omitted sums that should have been included.

The remedy being sought is far-reaching. The claimants want the court to compel John Lewis to produce a detailed sales breakdown for every year since 2013, with backdated rent, interest and costs to follow if the figures show click-and-collect was excluded.

For SME retailers and landlords watching from the sidelines, the implications are considerable. Turnover-linked rents, once a niche feature of anchor tenant deals, have spread rapidly through high streets and retail parks since the pandemic, as landlords have offered flexibility in exchange for a slice of the upside. How the courts interpret half-century-old wording could set a benchmark for far more recent agreements that are similarly silent on omnichannel trading.

It also raises a more uncomfortable question for retailers running hybrid operations. If a click-and-collect order is fulfilled from a back-of-store stockroom, is the shop a shop, a warehouse, or both? The answer matters not just for rent, but potentially for business rates, insurance and even planning classifications further down the line.

A trial date has yet to be set. Whatever the outcome, the case is likely to be studied closely by every property director, finance chief and retail lawyer with a turnover lease in the bottom drawer.

Read more:
John Lewis dragged into High Court over click-and-collect rent at Brent Cross

Aidan and Howard Barclay, the eldest sons of the late Sir David Barclay, have narrowly sidestepped bankruptcy after striking an eleventh-hour deal with creditors that has prompted HSBC to abandon its pursuit of the brothers through the High Court.

At a hearing on Tuesday, the bank’s counsel Matthew Abraham told Judge Burton that HSBC was now seeking to have its bankruptcy petitions dismissed following the approval of an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), the formal alternative to bankruptcy that allows debtors to settle obligations with creditors on agreed terms.

“In the circumstances, the petitioner seeks dismissal of the petitions following approval of the IVA,” Mr Abraham told the court. The arrangement, the court was told, had been waved through at a virtual creditors’ meeting the previous Tuesday. Judge Burton said she was “content in the circumstances” to grant the dismissal. The terms of the agreement remain confidential.

For Aidan, 70, and Howard, 66, the ruling brings a measure of personal reprieve after a wretched run for the once-formidable Barclay business empire, though it does little to mask the scale of value that has bled away from a fortune painstakingly assembled by their father and his late twin, Sir Frederick, through decades of debt-fuelled acquisitions.

HSBC filed its bankruptcy petitions against the brothers in December, citing substantial sums owed in the wake of the family’s logistics business going under. The bank has so far recovered just £1.2 million of a £143.5 million secured loan from the administration of Logistics Group, the parent company behind the Barclay-owned parcel carriers Yodel and ArrowXL.

Logistics Group tipped into administration in March 2024 after HSBC pulled the plug on its facility and the business proved unable to repay. The collapse was a hammer blow not only to the family’s balance sheet but to thousands of SME retailers who relied on Yodel as a low-cost alternative to the dominant carriers.

At an earlier hearing in late March, HSBC had raised “various issues over assets, who owns them and where they come from”, pointed language that hinted at the bank’s reservations about the brothers’ initial proposals to creditors. That those concerns appear to have been resolved sufficiently to secure approval marks a notable, if quiet, victory for the Barclay camp.

The IVA is the latest chapter in the unwinding of one of Britain’s most secretive business dynasties. The family has, in short order, lost control of a series of trophy assets including The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Very Group, the online retailer formerly known as Shop Direct.

Last month, Axel Springer, the Berlin-based media group behind Bild and Politico, agreed to acquire Telegraph Media Group for £575 million, seeing off a competing bid from Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and General Trust. The sale brought to a close a protracted ownership saga that began when Lloyds Banking Group seized the Telegraph titles in 2023 over unpaid debts owed by the Barclay family’s holding companies.

For Britain’s SME community, the Barclay saga is more than a tabloid spectacle. It stands as a cautionary tale of the perils of leverage, the speed at which a long-built empire can unspool when lenders lose patience, and the practical utility of the IVA mechanism for owner-operators staring down personal liability for corporate debts. Restructuring practitioners have long argued that IVAs remain underused by directors of failed businesses who too often default into formal bankruptcy at significant personal and professional cost.

Whether the brothers’ arrangement holds, and what it ultimately yields for HSBC and the wider creditor pool, will not be known for some time. But for now, at least, Aidan and Howard Barclay live to fight another day.

Read more:
Barclay Brothers swerve bankruptcy with eleventh-hour creditor pact

Grosvenor, the property company controlled by the Duke of Westminster, has broken ground on a £40m repositioning of The Hive in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, in a move that takes the group’s directly managed flexible workspace model outside London for the first time.

The Lever Street landmark, which extends to 78,000 sq ft, will be reimagined as a destination office building anchored by 25,500 sq ft of flex space and a hospitality-led amenity offer. Ground-floor units fronting Lever Street will house a deli and a restaurant, both run by what Grosvenor describes as “well-known Manchester names”, with a launch pencilled in for autumn 2026.

For Grosvenor’s UK property arm, the project is the most visible test yet of a regional strategy launched in 2020 that now stretches across roughly 500,000 sq ft in Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds. The portfolio is currently 90 per cent let, a figure that compares favourably with a regional office market still wrestling with hybrid working and a flight to quality.

The group has appointed x+why, the B Corp-certified workspace operator, to run more than 22,000 sq ft of the flex floors under a management agreement. The deal extends a partnership that began in 2023 at Fivefields, Grosvenor’s social-impact workspace in Victoria, and signals a growing appetite among traditional landlords to plug operating expertise into their own buildings rather than cede space to third-party flex providers on conventional leases.

Interiors will be designed by x+why’s in-house team, whydesign, with a deliberate nod to local craftsmanship. Pieces by Manchester-based furniture designers and artists including Aiden Donovan, Jesse Cracknell, Matt Dennis and Mima Adams will be woven into the scheme, while elements from the fit-out installed by previous tenant The Arts Council are to be repurposed, a small but pointed gesture towards the building’s creative heritage.

The bet on Manchester reflects a wider conviction inside Grosvenor that the city’s office market remains one of the most resilient outside the capital, underpinned by a deep talent pool, inward business migration and a structural shortage of grade-A space. The landlord’s nearby Ship Canal House is, it says, close to full occupancy following a run of new lettings and renewals.

Fergus Evans, office portfolio director at Grosvenor Property UK, said the Hive scheme typified the group’s regional playbook of taking “a prime asset in a great location and repositioning it to meet the evolving needs of today’s occupiers”. He added: “Manchester continues to perform strongly for us, and our investment in The Hive reflects sustained demand for well-located, high-quality offices, particularly from the city’s growing digital and creative economy. Combining x+why’s experience in creating design-led, community-focused workspaces with our approach to active asset management, we are well placed to deliver a distinctive, flexible offer that responds to local demand.”

Rupert Dean, chief executive and co-founder of x+why, said the operator was “delighted to be partnering with Grosvenor again to bring The Hive into its next chapter”. He added: “The Northern Quarter is one of the most exciting and entrepreneurial parts of the UK, and The Hive will reflect that energy, offering a workspace that is not only functional, but inspiring and socially driven.”

For SMEs and scale-ups in Manchester’s digital and creative cluster, the very occupiers Grosvenor and x+why are courting, the arrival of a higher-end, hospitality-led flex product on Lever Street is likely to sharpen competition with established players such as WeWork, Bruntwood and Department, and could nudge headline rents in the Northern Quarter higher when the doors open next autumn.

Read more:
Grosvenor takes flex workspace model out of London with £40m bet on Manchester’s Northern Quarter

The British Business Bank has committed $20m to Ineffable Intelligence, the London-headquartered artificial intelligence venture, as part of a landmark $1.1bn seed round that ranks as the largest in European history.

In a move that signals a sharpening of the Government’s industrial strategy around frontier technology, the state-owned development bank has co-invested alongside the Sovereign AI Fund, the Treasury-backed vehicle established to keep strategically significant AI businesses anchored on these shores. The Sovereign AI Fund has put in further capital on top of the Bank’s contribution, although the precise figure has not been disclosed.

The British cheques sit within a syndicate that reads like a who’s who of Silicon Valley capital. Sequoia, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Index Ventures, Google, EQT, Evantic, Flying Fish, DST Global and BOND have all joined the round, lending weight to the argument that Britain remains capable of attracting deep-pocketed foreign investors to its homegrown technology champions despite persistent concerns about the country’s appetite for risk.

Ineffable Intelligence is the brainchild of David Silver, the University College London professor widely regarded as one of the most influential reinforcement learning researchers of his generation. Silver previously ran the reinforcement learning team at Google DeepMind and is credited with pivotal work on AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaFold and AlphaProof, the systems that successively rewrote what machines were thought capable of in domains ranging from board games to protein folding and mathematical reasoning.

His new venture has set itself a deliberately audacious mission: to build what Silver calls a “superlearner”, a system capable of discovering knowledge from its own experience rather than relying on the data humans feed it. If realised, the technology would represent a step change beyond today’s large language models, which remain heavily dependent on training material drawn from the internet.

For the British Business Bank, the investment marks the latest in a steady cadence of AI commitments. The lender has now made nine AI deals over the past twelve months, with recent backing for autonomous driving outfit Wayve and conversational AI specialist PolyAI. The Bank has also been a quietly significant force behind the commercialisation of British academic research, supporting almost a quarter of all university spinout deals struck between 2022 and 2024.

Charlotte Lawrence, managing director of direct equity at the British Business Bank, described Silver as “a generational talent who has consistently been on the cutting edge of AI development“. She added: “Ineffable Intelligence has the potential to produce a paradigm shift in our scientific and technology landscape, and we are incredibly excited to be supporting him and his team in this endeavour.”

George Mills, the Bank’s investment director, said the company was tackling “one of the most significant opportunities within AI”, citing potential applications spanning advanced problem solving and new product development. “The UK produces world-class AI talent, and we are pleased to back strategically important businesses to scale and stay in the UK,” he said, in remarks that will be read as a pointed reminder of the Government’s determination to stem the flow of British intellectual property to American owners.

Josephine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI, was equally bullish. “Very few founders in the world could credibly set out to build a superlearner, a system that discovers new knowledge from its own experience rather than ours. David is one of them,” she said. “From AlphaGo to AlphaZero to AlphaProof, he has spent nearly two decades turning reinforcement learning from a research idea into the results the rest of the field builds on. Ineffable is being built in the UK, and that matters.”

The deal arrives at a delicate moment for British technology policy. Ministers have repeatedly stressed their ambition to position the country as a global hub for safe, sovereign AI development, but they have faced criticism for the relative scarcity of late-stage growth capital available to scaling deep-tech businesses. A seed round of this magnitude, anchored by domestic public capital and topped up by the world’s most prolific venture investors, will be cited by Whitehall as evidence that the strategy is beginning to bear fruit.

For SME founders watching from the sidelines, the headline figures may feel a world away from their own funding realities. Yet the structural shift is significant: the British Business Bank’s growing willingness to write meaningful equity cheques into frontier technology businesses, in concert with private capital, suggests a more interventionist posture that could in time filter down to a broader cohort of high-growth British companies.

Read more:
British Business Bank backs record-breaking Ineffable Intelligence raise as UK doubles down on superintelligence ambitions

A British-backed robotics start-up promising to replace ageing offshore vessels and crews with always-on underwater machines has emerged from stealth with $5m (£3.95m) in pre-seed funding, signalling fresh investor appetite for so-called “physical AI” plays targeting the world’s most stubbornly analogue industries.

Bubble Robotics, founded in 2025 by former engineers from NASA and ETH Zürich, has secured the round from Episode 1 Ventures, Asterion Ventures and Norrsken Evolve, following its incubation through London-based talent investor Entrepreneur First. The company is already sitting on more than $4m of signed letters of intent across offshore wind, subsea infrastructure and maritime security, suggesting commercial pull is running well ahead of the typical pre-seed playbook.

The pitch is straightforward, if ambitious. Today, inspecting an offshore wind turbine, a buried data cable or a section of seabed pipework typically demands a chartered vessel, a specialist crew and a daily bill that can climb to $100,000. According to Bubble’s founders, between 80 and 90 per cent of those costs are tied up in the boat and the people on it, rather than in the inspection itself.

“By removing that dependency, we unlock a step change in cost, safety and operational frequency,” said Jean Crosetti, chief executive and co-founder. “What used to be episodic becomes continuous.”

The plan is to dispense with vessel-based missions altogether and instead deploy fleets of resident autonomous robots that live at sea for months at a time, continuously inspecting, monitoring and gathering data without human intervention. Crosetti likens the model to the satellite constellations that have transformed earth observation over the past decade, only pointed downward into the water column rather than up at the atmosphere.

The timing reflects a wider inflection point. Cheaper edge computing, more capable on-device AI and the rapid expansion of low-earth-orbit satellite connectivity have, between them, made persistent unmanned operations technically feasible in a way they were not even three years ago. The macro pull is equally significant: the offshore energy sector alone is forecast to need an additional 600,000 workers by 2030, a shortfall that no graduate scheme is going to plug in time.

Bubble is selling its capability on a robotics-as-a-service basis, sparing customers the upfront capital expenditure and offshore mobilisation costs that have traditionally locked smaller operators out of high-frequency inspection regimes. Target use cases span the inspection of wind turbine foundations, cables, pipes and subsea structures; benthic mapping, photogrammetry and biofouling monitoring for climate and biodiversity clients; and mine countermeasures, unexploded ordnance detection and continuous surveillance for defence and maritime security buyers.

That last category is increasingly pertinent. Recent incidents involving subsea data cables in the Baltic and North Sea have pushed the security of underwater infrastructure up the agenda for European governments and Nato, exposing how thinly monitored much of it remains. Persistent autonomous systems offer a way to maintain a continuous presence around sensitive assets without committing scarce naval resources.

Alice Bentinck, co-founder of Entrepreneur First, said the founders had stood out from the moment they met at one of the firm’s kick-off weekends. “Patricia and Jean formed a team around a shared belief and complementary skill-set: Patricia with world-class technical credibility in robotics, Jean with unusual commercial instinct and intensity. Their pace of iteration throughout the programme and strong customer obsession make Bubble Robotics a company to watch closely.”

For the wider SME ecosystem, Bubble’s emergence is a useful data point. It suggests that capital is still flowing into deep-tech start-ups with credible commercial traction, even as more speculative AI plays cool, and that the long-promised convergence of robotics, AI and connectivity is finally producing businesses with revenue lines attached, not just demos.

Read more:
Bubble Robotics surfaces from stealth with $5m to build the ocean’s autonomous workforce

A British deep-tech start-up promising to liberate AI-powered businesses from spiralling cloud bills has secured £1 million in pre-seed funding, in a deal that points to one of the most pressing margin headaches facing the SaaS sector.

Loc.ai, a London-based outfit building so-called “off-cloud” AI infrastructure, has closed the round under the leadership of Fuel Ventures, the prolific early-stage investor founded by Mark Pearson. The capital will be used to accelerate go-to-market efforts among SaaS and desktop software companies that are presently bleeding margin to the per-call billing model imposed by hyperscale cloud providers.

The pitch is straightforward, if technically ambitious. Rather than routing every user request through a remote data centre, and paying a fee to the likes of Amazon, Microsoft or Google for each one, Loc.ai shifts the artificial intelligence workload directly onto the customer’s own kit, be that a laptop, a workstation or dedicated edge hardware. The result, the company argues, is faster performance, far stronger data privacy and, crucially for chief financial officers, predictable fixed costs in place of variable cloud fees that scale unhelpfully with user growth.

Co-founder Joseph Ward did not mince words. “For years, we’ve handed control of our most critical AI infrastructure to companies we don’t own and can’t influence,” he said. “Inference costs keep climbing. Services get switched off without warning. Loc.ai exists so that developers, governments and businesses never have to accept those terms again.”

That message is landing at a moment when the economics of generative AI are coming under serious scrutiny. With AI no longer a bolt-on feature but increasingly the product itself, embedded in meeting tools, writing assistants, customer-support platforms and code copilots, every keystroke can trigger a billable event. For fast-growing software firms, the result is a cost curve that climbs in lock-step with usage, eroding the margin economics that have long underpinned the SaaS model.

Loc.ai is also tapping into Britain’s intensifying push for sovereign AI. Sensitive material, from boardroom transcripts to customer conversations, is at present routinely shipped through third-party cloud APIs sitting outside national jurisdiction. By keeping inference on-device, Loc.ai claims to remove that exposure entirely, leaving customers with full control over where their AI runs and where their data resides.

The technology is being made viable by the rapid maturation of consumer hardware. Modern laptops can now comfortably run open-source models in the seven to thirteen billion parameter range, sufficient, the company says, to power the bulk of enterprise and SaaS use cases without ever phoning home.

Loc.ai was selected for the inaugural cohort of the Google for Startups Accelerator 2025, a programme that has given the team early sight of the ultra-efficient models being designed by Google for consumer devices. That access has shaped the company’s road map and, the founders argue, positioned it for the architectures that will define the next decade rather than those dominating today’s headlines.

Ward and his co-founder Saif Al-Ibadi are not first-time operators. The pair previously built a deep-tech business applying generative design to defence and aerospace engineering, and counted the Ministry of Defence among their clients, delivering the UK’s first generatively designed rocket engine and reportedly slashing design times by more than ninety per cent. Their pedigree in resource-constrained AI has already been put to commercial use through a multi-year contract with B2Space, which has deployed Loc.ai’s agents at the edge of space and cut bandwidth costs by a similar margin.

Mark Pearson of Fuel Ventures said the firm was backing a problem that has fast become impossible to ignore. “Loc.ai is tackling a critical, margin-eroding challenge facing SaaS as AI usage scales,” he said. “Their deep-tech expertise and track record in deploying AI in constrained environments position them strongly to deliver sovereign AI at scale. We’re excited to support Joe and Saif as they help companies regain control over their technology and costs.”

For the CTOs, engineering chiefs and founders Loc.ai is courting, the proposition is simple: convert an unpredictable variable cost into a fixed one, regain control of sensitive data, and stop subsidising the hyperscalers’ growth with their own margin. With the pre-seed round now closed, the company is betting that an increasing share of the British software industry is ready to listen.

Read more:
British deep-tech start-up loc.ai raises £1m to break SMEs free from the cloud’s ‘inference tax’

Jamie Oliver has launched a withering attack on the government’s tax treatment of British entrepreneurs, warning that ministers are “battering” the very people who power the country’s hospitality sector and risk turning Britain into an economic backwater.

Speaking to Times Radio, the celebrity chef said the cumulative weight of recent fiscal measures was choking the life out of small operators and would, in short order, make the UK “less and less important, less and less relevant” as a destination for ambition and enterprise.

“If you just batter the entrepreneurs, you’re going to get nothing,” Oliver said. “There is a lack of understanding of the chemistry of what a bubbling, buoyant, optimistic, aspirational, cool country called Britain looks like.”

His intervention lands at a particularly raw moment for the hospitality trade, which has spent the past year absorbing a punishing trio of cost increases. Higher employers’ national insurance contributions, coupled with a sharply lowered threshold at which they bite, have hit operators hardest in the wage bill. Add to that successive rises in the national minimum wage and a steeper business rates burden, and the margins of independent cafés, sandwich shops and neighbourhood restaurants have been pared to the bone.

Oliver argued that without meaningful incentives for risk-taking, Britain would forfeit its reputation as a crucible for new brands and ideas. “There needs to be enough fat in the game for people to take risk, and the association with risk and then innovation and creativity and brands … that can be amplified and grown,” he said.

His sharpest criticism, however, was reserved for what he characterised as a tax regime blind to scale. The system, he said, draws no meaningful distinction between multinational chains and the corner shop. “What’s interesting is the tax system and the government see no difference between, say, Domino’s or Starbucks and Linda and Paul down the road that run a small independent sandwich shop.” Smaller operators, he added, are being “chocked out”.

Oliver knows the sharp end of the trade better than most. His Italian-themed restaurant chain collapsed into administration in 2019, and only at the end of last year did he set in motion the revival of the Jamie’s Italian brand through a franchise tie-up with Brava Hospitality Group, the owner of Prezzo.

He is far from a lone voice. Earlier this month John Vincent, co-founder of healthy food chain Leon, accused ministers of “totally killing the restaurant industry”. Vincent, who last year bought Leon back from Asda before shuttering 22 sites as part of a restructuring, has emerged as one of the sector’s most outspoken critics, arguing that the tax burden on restaurants has become unsustainable.

When Leon filed for administration, he told the BBC the maths spoke for themselves: “Today, for every pound we receive from the customer, around 36p goes to the government in tax, and about 2p ends up in the hands of the company. It’s why most players are reporting big losses.”

For an industry that has long served as a first rung on the entrepreneurial ladder, and a generous employer of young, low-skilled and part-time workers, the warning from two of its highest-profile figures could scarcely be sharper. Unless the Treasury finds a way to differentiate between the corporate behemoths and the family-run independents, Oliver’s verdict suggests, Britain’s hospitality landscape will be poorer, blander and a good deal less ambitious for it.

Read more:
Jamie Oliver warns ministers are ‘battering’ Britain’s entrepreneurs