The traditional gear stick, that small, mechanical talisman of British motoring, is being quietly stripped out of new car ranges, and according to fresh forecasts it will be all but extinct by the end of the decade. The diesel engine, long the workhorse of the company car park, is heading for the same exit door.

Analysts at Vehicle Data Global (VDG) say the manual gearbox will disappear from mainstream UK showrooms inside the next three years, well ahead of the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles. Their argument is not sentimental; it is, as the report puts it bluntly, “hard economics”. Electric cars almost universally use single-speed automatic transmissions, and as the EV share climbs, manufacturers are increasingly reluctant to carry the research, development, certification and tooling overheads needed to keep manual variants on the price list for a shrinking pool of buyers.

For the UK’s small and medium-sized businesses, many of which still run mixed fleets of combustion and electrified vehicles, the implications are more than nostalgic. The transmission and fuel choices on offer over the next 36 months will reshape how SMEs specify company cars, train drivers, calculate residual values and plan capital expenditure on vans and pool vehicles.

The numbers behind the obituary

A market-wide review earlier this year found that just 23 per cent of new cars on UK forecourts now have a gear stick, down from roughly two-thirds a decade ago. Where buyers still have a genuine choice between manual and automatic on a petrol or diesel model, only 34 per cent opted for the manual in 2025, a sharp fall from 55 per cent as recently as 2019.

Diesel’s slide has been even more dramatic. Fewer than one in 20 new cars registered in 2026 (4.8 per cent) is a diesel, down from one in two just over a decade ago, according to the latest SMMT registration data. The reputational fallout from the 2015 emissions scandal, tightening clean-air zones and the rise of plug-in hybrids and pure EVs have all combined to push diesel out of the mainstream — a shift Business Matters has tracked in detail in its coverage of how British drivers are sending a “clear signal” in support of electric cars as petrol and diesel sales nosedive.

Ben Hermer, operations director at VDG, summed up the manufacturers’ calculus. “The moment is fast approaching when the economics of maintaining a manual transmission option don’t add up, given the R&D, certification and other overheads involved in developing and refining gearboxes, even if there remains some demand in the market,” he said. “Based on current trend data, between 5 and 10 per cent of cars will theoretically still be manual by 2030. But manufacturers will be looking hard at whether maintaining manual gearbox programmes for a shrinking share of the market makes economic sense.”

Analysis by CarGurus shows the squeeze in real time: just 67 of the 292 new models sold by the UK’s top 30 manufacturers are currently offered with a manual option, down from 197 models in 2016.

What it means for SME fleets and company car schemes

For finance directors and operations managers running small fleets, three practical consequences stand out.

First, residual values for manual diesels are likely to soften faster than the wider market as supply of replacement parts thins and used-buyer appetite narrows. Owner-managers approaching a vehicle refresh in 2027 or 2028 should not assume that today’s resale benchmarks will hold.

Second, driver training and recruitment policies will need a refresh. Auto-only licence holders cannot legally drive a manual car, and as Business Matters has previously reported in its business owner’s guide to volatile fleet costs in 2026, grey-fleet and pool-car policies are already a hidden compliance risk for many SMEs. With automatic-only learners now the fastest-growing segment of new drivers, employers will need to widen their definition of an “eligible driver”, or accept a shrinking talent pool.

Third, capital allowances, benefit-in-kind treatment and total-cost-of-ownership models will tilt sharply in favour of electrified vehicles. The 2030 ban is no longer a distant policy threat; it is a 36-month operational deadline that intersects directly with vehicle replacement cycles. SMEs that delay their transition planning risk being forced into a depleted second-hand market for manuals and diesels just as supply dries up.

Learners are already voting with their feet

The driving school sector is a leading indicator. Figures from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, set out in the DVSA Annual Report and Accounts 2024-25, show that of the 1,839,753 practical driving tests taken in 2024/25, some 479,556, 26.1 per cent, were in automatics. That is up from 23.4 per cent the previous year, 19.2 per cent in 2022/23 and a mere 6.9 per cent a decade earlier.

In other words, automatic tests have moved from fewer than one in 14 examinations ten years ago to more than one in four today, and trade body projections suggest the figure could touch a third by 2027.

Despite the popular belief that they are easier, pass rates in automatics remain stubbornly lower than for manuals: 43.9 per cent versus a 48.7 per cent overall average in the last fiscal year. The catch, of course, is that an auto-only licence is a one-way door. Holders are legally barred from manual cars, which can sting when hiring abroad in markets where stick-shift rentals still dominate and automatic surcharges remain steep.

The models still flying the flag

For motorists, and fleet buyers, who still want a third pedal, the choice is narrowing but not yet bare. Dacia leads the field, offering manual transmissions across its entire six-strong combustion range (only the Spring EV is auto-only). Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Skoda and Volkswagen all still field five or six manual options, while Porsche keeps a manual 911 in the catalogue as a halo product. Jaguar, Honda, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Mini, Tesla, Land Rover and Volvo no longer offer a single manual variant in the UK.

Even Seat has thinned its line-up, with Ateca production ending in the past month. The direction of travel is unambiguous.

For SME owners weighing their next purchase, the message from VDG, the SMMT data and the DVSA’s own statistics is consistent: the era of the manual diesel, the so-called “motorway mile-muncher” beloved of sales reps under New Labour’s generous tax regime, is closing fast. The businesses that plan now for an auto-only, increasingly electrified fleet will be the ones least exposed when the showroom shutters finally come down on the gear stick.

Read more:
Manual gearboxes set to vanish by 2030 and diesel is tailgating its demise

Lidl GB has thrown its weight behind one of the most ambitious surplus food redistribution trials yet seen on the British high street, drafting in the consumer food-sharing app Olio alongside its long-standing charity partner Neighbourly in a move that could keep millions of additional meals out of the bin each year.

The German-owned discounter, which has been one of the fastest-growing grocers in Britain over the past decade, will switch on the new three-way model on Friday 15 May across 20 stores in London and the north of England. If the pilot delivers as hoped, Lidl expects a nationwide rollout by the end of 2026 — a step change that would see more than 5,000 tonnes of edible surplus, equivalent to roughly 11.9 million meals, redirected annually from landfill to people who need it.

The partnership is unusual in that it knits together two of the most prominent names in British food redistribution for the first time. Neighbourly, the Bristol-based social impact platform that already manages Lidl’s “Feed it Back” scheme, will continue to coordinate the pipeline. Olio, the London-headquartered app that has built a community of more than nine million users globally around the idea of sharing rather than binning leftover food, will plug its volunteer “Food Waste Heroes” into Lidl’s evening collection slots as a second tier behind charities.

In practical terms, registered Food Waste Heroes will arrive at participating stores after trading hours to collect chilled lines, including meat, fish and poultry, as well as Lidl’s popular bakery range. The food is then offered, free of charge, to neighbours through the Olio app — extending the reach of the redistribution network into the evenings, when charity partners traditionally find collections hardest to staff.

It is also a clear signal that the discount sector has no intention of being outflanked on sustainability. Lidl has already smashed its previous food waste target, cutting waste by more than 40% ahead of schedule, and has since raised the bar to a 70% reduction by the end of FY2030. According to WRAP, the government’s waste advisory body, only around 7% of retail and manufacturing food surplus in the UK is currently redistributed, leaving a significant prize for any retailer prepared to crack the logistics.

Matt Juden, head of sustainability at Lidl GB, framed the move as the next logical step in a programme the supermarket has been refining since 2016. “At Lidl GB, we believe that no good food should ever go to waste,” he said. “While we have already made massive strides in reducing our surplus, this extension of our Neighbourly-managed programme allows us to have even more impact. It ensures that we are reaching every corner of the communities we serve, making sure edible food stays on plates and out of the bin.”

The pilot also lands at a sensitive moment for retailers who collect surplus only in the evening. Recently concerns were raised by charities about Tesco’s evening-only collection policy, and Neighbourly’s chief executive Steve Butterworth was at pains to stress that the Lidl model would not crowd out third-sector partners. “Our mission has always been to ensure as much edible surplus food as possible goes to those in our communities that need it most,” he said. “By expanding the programme to evening collections and including Olio’s Food Waste Heroes, we are providing Lidl with a robust additional redistribution layer. This isn’t about diverting food away from charities, it’s about opening up new streams of chilled and fresh produce for them, while ensuring nothing goes to waste if a charity can’t make it.”

For Olio, the deal marks another significant institutional endorsement of a model the start-up has been quietly scaling since 2015. Co-founder and chief operating officer Saasha Celestial-One described the tie-up as a chance to push more surplus into hyper-local hands. “We’re delighted to be joining forces with Neighbourly and Lidl,” she said. “We’re looking forward to working together to maximise the amount of edible surplus that can reach local communities from Lidl stores, and making sure as little food as possible goes to waste. We’re excited to see the impact of the trial, and we know our volunteers will be thrilled to have the chance to rescue Lidl food via our app.”

The political and regulatory backdrop is also shifting in favour of redistributors. Ministers have signalled growing impatience with the volume of edible food still going to waste, with Labour recently backing a £15m rescue fund aimed at supporting food redistribution organisations and helping them invest in the logistics and technology required to handle bulkier, more perishable donations. Pilots like the Lidl-Olio-Neighbourly trial slot neatly into that direction of travel, demonstrating how the private sector can plug the gap without waiting for primary legislation.

Lidl GB has now donated more than 50 million meals through Feed it Back since 2016, linking every one of its UK stores to a local good cause. With the Olio extension layered on top, the discounter is making a calculated bet that combining the efficiency of a national charity partner with the long tail of a consumer-led app can finally close the awkward last-mile gap in surplus redistribution — and turn what is still one of the grocery industry’s most stubborn problems into a marker of competitive advantage.

Read more:
Lidl ropes in Olio and Neighbourly in landmark surplus food trial that could rescue 11.9 million meals a year

In a claim that will resonate with thousands of school-leavers wading through a torrent of rejection emails this summer, the skills minister has declared that securing a coveted apprenticeship in Britain has become harder than winning a place at Oxford or Cambridge.

Baroness Smith of Malvern, the former Commons home secretary turned Strictly Come Dancing contestant who now holds the skills brief at the Department for Education, told The Sun on Sunday that young people the length of the country were “queuing up” for apprenticeships, with employers spoilt for choice. Her remarks landed as Whitehall figures laid bare a deepening youth labour crunch: roughly one million people aged between 16 and 24 are now classed as Neets – not in education, employment or training.

The numbers behind the soundbite

The arithmetic appears, on the face of it, to back her up. Cambridge received 22,820 applications for the 2025 intake and offered 3,716 places, an acceptance rate of 16.3 per cent. Oxford was tighter still, admitting just 3,245 of 23,061 hopefuls, 14.1 per cent. By comparison, several blue-chip apprenticeship schemes, especially degree-level engineering programmes, routinely attract north of 150 applications per slot, eclipsing the odds at the dreaming spires.

According to the latest Department for Education apprenticeship statistics, there were 353,500 apprenticeship starts in England in the 2024-25 academic year and 761,500 people participating overall, with higher-level apprenticeships up more than 15 per cent year-on-year. Business, administration and law remains the largest single subject area.

To unblock the bottleneck, Lady Smith pledged £600 million of new funding to bankroll 60,000 additional apprentices, part of a broader push to plug skills gaps in construction, engineering and digital roles. “It can sometimes be easier getting into Oxford or Cambridge than it can be getting an apprenticeship,” she said, adding: “Sometimes people say, ‘Young people don’t want to work in the construction industry’, but they really do… they are queuing up.”

Why employers are hesitating

The pledge nonetheless lands awkwardly for the small and medium-sized businesses that have historically done the heavy lifting on apprentice intake. Industry data suggest just one in five construction SMEs is planning to take on an apprentice this year, and employers’ groups argue that the Chancellor’s autumn measures, chiefly the rise in employer National Insurance contributions from 13.8 to 15 per cent in Rachel Reeves’s first Budget, have left many smaller firms re-running the numbers on every new hire.

The minimum wage settlement that took effect in April only sharpened the squeeze. The apprentice rate climbed 6 per cent to £8 an hour; the 18-to-20 band rose 8.5 per cent to £10.85; and the National Living Wage for over-21s reached £12.71. As Business Matters has previously reported, the combined effect has been to push employer costs for low-paid staff up by more than £2,100 per employee, a sum that, for owner-managers in hospitality, retail and care, has made hiring under-25s, in the words of one trade body, “unaffordable” without external support.

A political squeeze tightens

The minister’s timing reflects a Treasury under mounting pressure to demonstrate that ministers can convert announcement into appointment. The latest Office for National Statistics NEET bulletin put the share of 16-to-24-year-olds out of work and study at 12.8 per cent, equivalent to 957,000 young people, with the next release due at the end of May.

Industry watchers will be looking for evidence that the policy mix is starting to shift the dial. With youth unemployment hovering near an 11-year high and employers warning that wage and tax bills are leaving little headroom to expand junior intake, the £600 million pledge will need to translate into hard cash on the ground, not merely a press notice, if Westminster is to ease the bottleneck that, on the minister’s own admission, is leaving Britain’s school-leavers fighting harder for an apprenticeship than for a place at the country’s most selective universities.

For SMEs, the calculation is unchanged: the talent is willing, and arguably abundant. The question is whether the policy framework finally makes saying yes affordable.

Read more:
Apprenticeships ‘tougher to land than Oxbridge places’ as ministers pledge £600m for 60,000 new starts

A swelling queue of British exporters hoping to recoup money lost to Donald Trump’s now-discredited emergency tariffs may discover that they are entitled to precisely nothing, the audit, tax and business advisory firm Blick Rothenberg has warned.

According to John Havard, a consultant at the firm, roughly 126,000 claims have been lodged through the US Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) system since it opened for business on 20 April. Yet a sizeable proportion of those applications are expected to be bounced, either because the claimant is not legally eligible or because the paperwork has fallen foul of the portal’s exacting requirements.

“Some UK businesses hoping for compensation may find they are ineligible for it and receive nothing,” Mr Havard said. “A number of small British firms may never have encountered tariffs until President Trump’s second term. They are likely unaware that, although falling sales and higher shipping costs have inflicted significant harm on their finances, legally they are owed nothing by the US Government.”

Who actually owns the tariff bill

The crux of the issue, Mr Havard argues, lies in the small print of international trade contracts. Where British firms shipped goods to American customers on an “ex-works” or “cost and freight” basis, the legal obligation to settle the tariff sat with the US importer rather than the UK seller.

“Reimbursing the US importer for its additional costs does not qualify the UK entity to apply for a tariff refund,” he explained. In other words, even where British exporters voluntarily absorbed the cost to preserve a customer relationship, they cannot now walk into the CAPE system and ask for it back.

It is a hard truth for the cohort of SMEs that scrambled to keep American buyers on side after Mr Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to slap tariffs on a wide range of imports, measures that were subsequently struck down by the US Supreme Court, opening the door to refund claims in the first place.

A system creaking under the weight of claims

An official status report timed at 7am Eastern on Monday 11 May 2026 indicated that of the 126,000 claims received, roughly 87,000 had been validated. The remainder are sitting in limbo, with many of the rejections traceable to mundane formatting problems in the CSV files uploaded to the portal.

“Rejections may be because the CSV files submitted to the online portal could not be read and processed by the system due to formatting mistakes,” Mr Havard said. “But some rejections will be due to the claimants’ ineligibility for refunds.”

He added that before businesses can even attempt to file, they must hold an account with US Customs and Border Protection’s Automated Commercial Environment. “Anecdotally there has been considerable activity in new account registrations since the Supreme Court ruled the IEEPA tariffs to be unlawful, but this presents another system for businesses to navigate before they can attempt to get refunds.”

A further pitfall is mistaken identity. “Another reason for rejection could be that the person who filed for a tariff refund is not in Government records as the listed importer, or that person’s broker, for the particular tariffs identified in the claim. This could be people trying to game the system, but it is also potentially because individuals do not fully understand who is supposed to make the claim.”

Refunds trickling out – and bank details missing

Despite Washington signalling that no payments would land before 12 May, Mr Havard said there is reliable evidence that some refunds have already been paid out, with at least one claimant receiving interest on top.

But the process is being held up at the final hurdle for nearly 1,900 claimants who have failed to supply bank details. “As at 7am Eastern time on Monday 11 May 2026, there were 1,880 consolidated refunds which could not be passed from the Office of Trade to US Treasury for payment because the claimant had still to provide the necessary bank account details,” Mr Havard said.

Importers whose applications have been rejected can correct errors and resubmit. “However, no amount of resubmission will help if the claim is invalid in the first place – or if they are not getting clear messages from CAPE to explain why they were rejected.”

The next legal front: the 10% global tariff

Even as refunds for the IEEPA tariffs begin to flow, a second courtroom battle is unfolding over Mr Trump’s replacement measure, a blanket 10% “global tariff” introduced under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 after the Supreme Court struck down the original duties.

A coalition of small businesses and roughly two dozen, mostly Democrat-led, states challenged the move at the US Court of International Trade, which ruled by a 2:1 majority on 7 May that the new tariffs were also invalid. The Government has appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has granted an administrative stay, meaning the 10% levy continues to be collected on US-bound shipments while the legal process plays out.

“Whatever decision the Appeals Court eventually hands down, it seems inevitable that the losing side, as with the IEEPA tariffs, will want to make a further appeal to the US Supreme Court,” Mr Havard said.

The sums at stake are far from trivial. Estimates suggest some $8 billion of Section 122 tariffs were collected in March alone, a substantial slice of the wider tariff burden being shouldered by British exporters, which has weighed heavily on UK trade flows and prompted British factories to cut their exposure to the US market.

For SME exporters watching from this side of the Atlantic, the message from Blick Rothenberg is sobering: those who think a cheque is in the post would do well to check the terms of their export contracts, and the bank details on their CBP account, before they start spending it.

Read more:
Many British exporters chasing US tariff refunds may end up with nothing

The Government’s headline-grabbing summer VAT giveaway has been dismissed as politically convenient window-dressing by the head of the UK’s night-time economy trade body, who argues that the country’s clubs, festivals and live music venues have once again been left to fend for themselves.

Michael Kill, chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA), launched a withering critique of the Great British Summer Savings scheme unveiled by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, which slashes VAT from 20 per cent to 5 per cent on a narrow band of family attractions, including theme parks, zoos, museums, children’s cinema tickets and kids’ meals, between 25 June and 1 September. The cut, ministers say, is designed to help households afford summer days out and bolster the hospitality sector through its peak trading window.

For an industry that has watched roughly a third of the country’s nightclubs disappear since 2017, however, the measure looks less like a lifeline and more like a snub. The full details of the chancellor’s family-focused VAT package made no mention of the late-night venues, festivals or grassroots music spaces that have been pleading for sector-wide tax relief for the better part of a decade.

“The Government’s latest VAT announcement is not just a missed opportunity, it is a glaring example of short-term thinking and a fundamental misunderstanding of the UK’s leisure and cultural economy,” Kill said. “While positioning this as support for families, the policy completely overlooks and effectively sidelines the night-time economy, including festivals, clubs, live music venues and late-night cultural spaces that have been fighting to survive under relentless financial pressure.”

A backbone, not a footnote

Kill’s frustration is rooted in hard numbers. NTIA data shows the UK lost roughly 1,940 licensed clubs between 2015 and 2025, a 26 per cent decline, while 26 per cent of British towns that previously had at least one nightclub now have none at all. Industry research published earlier this year warned that, without urgent intervention, Britain risks losing 10,000 late-night venues and 150,000 jobs by 2028.

The festival circuit is faring little better. More than 40 UK festivals were scrapped in 2024, with a similar tally lost in 2025 and a fresh wave of 2026 cancellations, including Red Rooster, Stone Valley South and WestworldFest, already announced as operators buckle under soaring production costs, post-pandemic debt and softer ticket sales.

“These businesses are not peripheral, they are the backbone of the UK’s global cultural reputation and a critical driver of jobs, tourism and economic activity,” Kill argued. “For years, we have consistently lobbied for a fair and meaningful reduction in VAT across hospitality, live events and cultural experiences. Instead, what we have been given is a narrow, temporary measure that cherry-picks certain activities while leaving the rest of the sector to absorb rising costs, punitive tax burdens and ongoing instability.”

The trade body has repeatedly pressed Treasury ministers for a permanent VAT cut from 20 to 10 per cent across hospitality and the cultural sector, a campaign that has gathered momentum after a string of nightclub closures prompted renewed calls for action.

Squeezed at every turn

Operators say the picture on the ground is bleak. April’s business rates reforms removed the 40 per cent Hospitality, Leisure and Night-Time Relief, pushing the typical rates bill for a £100,000 rateable-value venue from £28,800 to roughly £43,000. Combined with higher employer National Insurance contributions, a steeper National Living Wage and double-digit increases in utilities, the cumulative cost burden has tipped many otherwise viable businesses into the red.

A recent New Statesman investigation into the policies killing Britain’s nightlife painted a similarly grim picture, charting how successive Westminster decisions, from licensing reform to tax tinkering, have hollowed out the cultural infrastructure of British towns and cities.

“Festivals are being squeezed to breaking point. Grassroots venues are closing at an alarming rate. Clubs and late-night operators are facing unsustainable operating conditions,” Kill said. “And yet, once again, they have been completely sideswiped by policy that claims to support leisure and participation.”

A test of credibility

The political calculation behind the Great British Summer Savings scheme is straightforward. A targeted, family-friendly cut delivers a punchy headline, plays well with voters facing another stretched school holiday and concentrates the Treasury’s fiscal firepower on a tightly bounded window. The trouble, as Kill sees it, is that such tactical interventions cannot substitute for a coherent strategy.

“This is not just short-sighted, it is economically reckless,” he warned. “You cannot claim to support the visitor economy, regional growth and cultural output while actively ignoring the sectors that deliver it at scale. If the Government is serious about growth, it must stop delivering piecemeal, headline-driven interventions and start engaging with the full reality of the industries it relies on. That means meaningful VAT reform, long-term policy stability and a commitment to supporting the entire ecosystem, not just the parts that are politically convenient.”

Until then, Kill concluded, the summer VAT cut “will be seen for what it is: a superficial fix that fails the very industries it should be backing.”

For SME operators across hospitality and the cultural economy, the message from Whitehall is becoming uncomfortably familiar. The headline is generous; the small print is not.

Read more:
Nightlife chief brands Chancellor’s summer VAT cut a ‘superficial fix’ that abandons clubs and festivals

British food marketers have been handed a stark warning after the advertising watchdog banned two high-profile campaigns promoting domestic beef and milk, ruling that the carbon footprint claims at their heart could not be substantiated.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint brought by Chris Packham, the broadcaster and environmental campaigner, against the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) over its taxpayer-funded Let’s Eat Balanced campaign. The decision is likely to send a chill through the marketing departments of food producers, processors and trade bodies that have increasingly leaned on green credentials to drive sales.

At issue were two adverts trumpeting British beef as having a “carbon footprint that’s half the global average” and British milk as producing emissions “a third lower than the global average”. Both campaigns referenced the “full lifecycle” of the produce, a phrase that has now proved their undoing.

The AHDB, which is funded by a statutory levy on farmers and growers, argued that consumers would reasonably have understood the figures to relate only to the journey from farm to retail. The board pointed to independent consumer research, commissioned after the investigation began, suggesting the majority of respondents interpreted the adverts in precisely that way.

The ASA disagreed. The regulator concluded that the adverts implied a cradle-to-grave assessment encompassing farming, retail, consumption and disposal, and that the evidence supplied fell short of supporting claims on that basis. The watchdog acknowledged the practical difficulty of producing post-retail emissions data but said that, where environmental claims are made, the burden of proof rests squarely on the advertiser unless caveats are made plain.

“We acknowledged the potential difficulties in producing post-retail emissions data,” the ASA said in its ruling. “The claims in the ads suggested those emissions were included, and we therefore expected the evidence provided to also include them. We therefore concluded that the evidence presented was insufficient to support the full life cycle claims in the ads, which was how the average consumer was likely to interpret them.”

Mr Packham, the long-standing presenter of BBC’s Springwatch, had also alleged that the adverts misrepresented British beef as typically outdoor-grazed and made claims that could not be substantiated. The watchdog rejected five of his six points, ruling that images of cows in green pastures amounted to a “generic reflection” of British farming rather than a blanket assertion that all cattle live outdoors.

Will Jackson, the AHDB’s director of communications, struck a defiant note in response to the ruling. “Let’s Eat Balanced is doing what it was designed to do, providing clear, factual, evidence-led information about British food, nutrition and farming standards,” he said. He added that the board’s own consumer research “supports our belief that consumers were not misled by the information we shared in these two specific adverts”.

For the wider SME landscape, however, the ruling carries lessons that extend well beyond the farm gate. Small and mid-sized food businesses, from artisan cheesemakers to regional butchers, have increasingly built marketing around lower-carbon, locally produced credentials. The ASA’s intervention signals that broad-brush green claims, particularly comparative ones, will face robust scrutiny regardless of whether the advertiser is a multinational, a government-backed body or a family-run producer.

The decision also lands at a sensitive moment for British agriculture, which is grappling with the phasing out of EU-era subsidies, mounting input costs and growing consumer pressure on the environmental footprint of meat and dairy. Sector bodies will now need to weigh up whether the marketing benefits of headline carbon comparisons justify the regulatory risk, or whether more conservative, narrowly framed claims offer a safer path.

For marketers across the SME economy, the practical takeaway is straightforward enough. Lifecycle language must be backed by lifecycle evidence; comparative claims must be supported by robust, like-for-like data; and where caveats are required, they must be clear enough that the ordinary consumer cannot reasonably misread them. As the ASA has made plain, the test is not what the advertiser intended to say, but what the average reader took away.

Read more:
ASA bans British beef and milk adverts after Packham complaint over carbon claims

For nearly four decades, The Sunday Times Rich List has been the closest thing Britain has to a national league table of money. This year’s edition reads less like a celebration of enterprise and more like a departures board.

Revolut chief executive Nik Storonsky and the publicity-shy quant trader Alex Gerko have broken into the top 10 for the first time. But the headline story, according to the list’s compiler Robert Watts, is not who has arrived, it is who has gone.

As many as one in six of the individuals and families who appeared on the 2024 ranking are missing from this year’s edition, with the compiler warning that the figures lay bare the scale of Britain’s wealth exodus.

“Many foreign billionaires who have been living in the UK have… dropped out because they have moved away,” Mr Watts said.

The top of the table holds, but the cracks are widening

Sanjay and Dheeraj Hinduja, the British-Indian brothers behind the Mumbai-headquartered Hinduja Group, kept top spot with a combined fortune of £38bn. The rest of the podium was likewise unchanged, with the famously secretive property magnates David and Simon Reuben and Ukrainian-born industrialist Sir Leonard Blavatnik both still sitting on fortunes north of £25bn.

The most dramatic faller was Sir James Dyson. The inventor’s eponymous engineering empire was hit hard by Donald Trump’s swingeing tariff regime, and his estimated net worth nearly halved over the year from £20bn to £12bn, enough to send him tumbling from fourth to 13th. It is not the first time Sir James has tangled with policy: he has been one of the most vocal critics of Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax changes, branding them “spiteful” and warning of the consequences for British family businesses.

City money muscles into the top 10

If old money is having a wobble, the new money minted in the City of London is flexing. Mr Storonsky cracked the top 10 in the same year his fintech juggernaut was finally granted a UK banking licence and clinched a $75bn valuation in a November funding round.

A place behind him in eighth sat Mr Gerko, the cerebral force behind XTX Markets, the quantitative trading shop that has quietly become one of the City’s biggest tax payers. His estimated fortune sits north of £16bn.

Both men were born in Russia, and both have renounced their citizenship in protest at Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine — a reminder that the City’s talent pool is global, and mobile.

A tale of two exoduses

The list’s real story, however, is in the gaps.

For the first two decades of this century, Britain’s super-rich enjoyed a near-uninterrupted bull run. Rich List wealth grew by close to 600 per cent between 2000 and 2022, according to The Sunday Times. That run is now over. The number of sterling billionaires in the UK peaked at 177 in 2022; this year’s tally of 157 was barely up on 2025.

Under the survey’s rules, foreign-born residents who leave automatically fall out of the rankings, while British citizens who emigrate remain. Both groups are now visibly thinning. Mr Watts said he had seen a “sharp rise in the number of British nationals now resident in Dubai, Switzerland and Monaco”, warning the “twin exoduses” represented a worrying development for the British economy and the public finances.

His unease is echoed by international data. The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report has the United Kingdom haemorrhaging high-net-worth residents at a faster clip than any other major economy, with the UAE, Italy and Switzerland the biggest beneficiaries.

“Will more of the wealthy now set up or grow their ventures overseas and in doing so create fewer jobs here?” Mr Watts asked. “How much tax – if any – will Rachel Reeves’ Treasury be able to extract from those affluent Brits who have now left the country?”

The Reeves effect

Critics increasingly point the finger at Whitehall. The Chancellor has been accused of accelerating departures with a string of measures aimed at ultra-high-net-worth residents and their assets.

In her first Budget in October 2024, Ms Reeves pressed ahead with the abolition of the non-domicile tax regime, slapped VAT on private school fees, raised capital gains tax and tightened several inheritance tax carve-outs. Her 2025 intervention added a so-called mansion tax on properties worth more than £2m and further narrowed the inheritance tax net.

Advisers say the cumulative effect has been a stampede. Research from consultancy Chamberlain Walker, cited by Business Matters, suggests around 1,800 non-doms left Britain in the months after April’s tax changes — 50 per cent more than the Treasury had pencilled in.

The casualties include some of the City’s biggest names: former Goldman Sachs International chief Richard Gnodde and steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, both long-standing Rich List fixtures, have moved on. Only one billionaire is recorded as having moved the other way in the past year — the new US ambassador to the Court of St James’s, Warren Stephens.

What it means for SME Britain

For the small and medium-sized businesses that read this magazine, the implications run deeper than schadenfreude over a few moving vans full of Old Master paintings.

Wealthy entrepreneurs are typically the angel investors, family-office backers and growth-stage cheque writers that smaller firms rely on when banks turn cautious. If they decamp to Dubai or Lugano, that capital tends to follow them. The same goes for the philanthropic giving, board memberships and mentoring that often anchor a city’s business community.

The harder question for the Chancellor, and for the firms that depend on a healthy ecosystem of British-based capital, is whether the additional tax raised from those who stay can outweigh the receipts and investment lost from those who leave. On the evidence of this year’s Rich List, that calculation is starting to look uncomfortable.

Read more:
Britain’s billionaires are voting with their feet – and the rich list proves it

Veteran-led small businesses are about to find the door to international trade rather easier to push open.

UK Export Finance (UKEF), the government’s export credit agency, has today unveiled a partnership with specialist broker Finance for Forces designed to plug an awkward gap that has long frustrated former service personnel turning their hand to enterprise: getting the right finance, at the right moment, to chase orders overseas.

For the thousands of veterans who have built businesses since leaving uniform, the appetite to export is rarely in doubt. The cash flow to underwrite that ambition, however, has been another matter. Under the new arrangement, Finance for Forces, founded by Russell Lewis MC and Paul Goodman, will be able to introduce qualifying clients to UKEF’s suite of short-term products for smaller exporters, including working capital guarantees, bond support guarantees and export insurance policies. UKEF, in turn, will refer veteran-led firms back the other way where the fit is right.

It is a neat piece of joined-up government, and one that comes with a clear strategic backdrop. The collaboration is explicitly designed to support the Government’s Veterans Strategy, launched in November 2025, which framed the ex-service community as a national economic asset rather than a welfare line item, citing the leadership, discipline and operational nous that translate, with surprising frequency, into commercially robust SMEs.

Beyond the referrals plumbing, the two organisations will run information sessions and networking events aimed at demystifying export finance, an area that even seasoned founders can find labyrinthine. For veteran entrepreneurs, many of whom are scaling for the first time, that hand-holding is likely to matter as much as the products themselves.

Chris Bryant, Minister of State for Trade, said the partnership was about converting service into commercial reward. “Our veterans have shown extraordinary bravery and dedication in service to the nation, and their skills should be matched by real commercial opportunity,” he said. “This partnership will help turn entrepreneurial ambition into export success, helping veteran-led businesses reach international markets with the backing and confidence they deserve.”

Tim Reid, chief executive of UKEF, said the agency’s small business remit was central to the move. “Supporting small businesses to export and grow is central to UKEF’s mission. By partnering with Finance for Forces, we can reach more veteran-led businesses and help them access the finance they need to win international contracts, enter new markets and scale up with confidence.”

Paul Goodman, co-founder of Finance for Forces, was perhaps the bluntest on the practical problem the deal is meant to solve. “Veterans bring leadership, resilience and a mission focus to business, but navigating commercial finance can be challenging,” he said. “This partnership with UKEF will help veteran-led firms understand their options and access the backing they need to develop exports and accelerate growth.”

For UKEF, the announcement sits within a broader push to shed any lingering reputation as a facility primarily for the corporate heavyweights. The agency has spent recent years recalibrating towards SMEs in every corner of the country, promising faster response times and more targeted support irrespective of location, size or ownership. Bolting on a dedicated channel for the veteran business community, a constituency with a particularly strong record on resilience and follow-through, looks, on the face of it, like a sensible bet.

Whether the partnership translates into a meaningful uplift in veteran-led export volumes will depend, as ever, on awareness and execution. But for founders who have spent years wondering whether the export financing system was really built for businesses like theirs, the answer just got a little more encouraging.

Read more:
UKEF teams up with Finance for Forces to put veteran-led exporters on the global map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The owner of Facebook and Instagram has taken the UK’s media regulator to the high court, opening a fresh front in the increasingly fractious relationship between Silicon Valley and Britain’s online safety regime.

Meta has filed for a judicial review of Ofcom’s methodology for setting fees and penalties under the Online Safety Act, arguing that pegging charges to a company’s qualifying worldwide revenue (QWR) is disproportionate and out of step with the geographic scope of the regulator’s remit. A hearing has been scheduled for 13 and 14 October.

The stakes are considerable. Under the Act, Ofcom can levy fines of up to 10 per cent of QWR or £18m, whichever is higher. Given that Meta reported global revenues of roughly $201bn last year, the regulator could in theory issue a penalty of around $20bn, a sum that would dwarf the largest fines in UK corporate history. The fee regime introduced last September applies the same QWR principle to annual tariffs, capturing companies whose user-generated content, search or adult-content services in the UK generate more than £250m a year.

Meta contends that liability should be determined by activity within the jurisdiction doing the regulating. “We and others in the tech industry believe its decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate,” a company spokesperson said. “We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history.”

Court documents filed on Meta’s behalf by Monica Carss-Frisk KC describe Ofcom’s approach as “troubling”, warning that it would result in a handful of large platforms shouldering the bulk of the regulator’s costs even though the Act covers a much broader sweep of internet services. The barrister noted that QWR is not pegged to revenue generated by any particular service in the UK; rather, once a service is offered to British users, the entirety of its global turnover is counted.

Ofcom, for its part, is preparing to dig in. The regulator said its fees and fines framework reflected “a plain reading of the law” and pledged to “robustly defend our reasoning and decisions”.

Meta is not alone in pushing back. The US online forum 4chan has refused to pay penalties imposed under the Act, and Ofcom is facing separate litigation from the operators of both 4chan and Kiwi Farms. The regime has also drawn criticism from Donald Trump’s White House, which has signalled growing impatience with European digital rules that it sees as targeting American firms.

The financial significance of the new system for Ofcom itself is hard to overstate. Once the preserve of broadcasters and telecoms operators paying for spectrum and licence fees, the regulator now expects the bulk of its £233m budget for the year to come from online safety tariffs, which are forecast to bring in £164m. That marks one of the most substantial shifts in Ofcom’s funding base in its two-decade history.

For SME founders watching from the sidelines, the case is more than a transatlantic skirmish between Big Tech and a British quango. The threshold of £250m in qualifying turnover means most smaller platforms sit outside the fee net, but the principles being tested in October, how revenue is attributed across borders, and how proportionality is measured for global digital businesses, will shape the regulatory environment for any UK-based scale-up that one day finds itself trading internationally on the back of user-generated content. The judgment, when it comes, will be read closely well beyond Menlo Park.

Read more:
Meta launches high court challenge against Ofcom over online safety act fines

For most small and medium-sized British exporters, the painful moment is rarely the order itself. It is the phone call a few days later, when the bank politely points out that the working capital required to fulfil it sits stubbornly the wrong side of an agreed credit ceiling. A career-defining contract becomes, almost overnight, a balance-sheet problem.

That is precisely the bind that Masters Speciality Pharma, a 41-year-old Hertfordshire specialist pharmaceutical company, found itself in last year after winning two sizeable orders from Saudi Arabia worth a combined £2.3 million. The remedy, as is increasingly the case for ambitious British SMEs eyeing the Gulf, came from UK Export Finance (UKEF), the government’s export credit agency, which stepped in with insurance cover against the risk of non-payment and gave HSBC UK the confidence to lift its credit thresholds.

The deal is the latest example of how government-backed insurance is quietly underwriting British SME ambition in one of the world’s most lucrative regions, and it lands at a moment when UKEF is leaning harder than ever into the SME exporter agenda.

A 41-year-old elstree exporter that punches above its weight

Founded in 1984 by Dr Zulfikar Masters OBE and based in Elstree, Masters Speciality Pharma is precisely the sort of business that ministers like to wheel out at trade receptions but that the wider public rarely hears about. The company specialises in making hard-to-source medicines available in markets that the big pharmaceutical multinationals often overlook, and now serves more than 75 countries across the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Saudi contracts in question were not vanity wins. One covered the supply of a treatment for sickle cell disease, a debilitating inherited blood disorder that disproportionately affects patients in the Middle East and Africa. The other was for a specialised antibiotic used to treat life-threatening infections. In both cases, demand was urgent and the procuring authorities expected delivery on terms that demanded substantial up-front cash.

Therein lay the problem. Masters needed to pay its own suppliers well before the Saudi buyers were due to pay it, and the orders themselves were larger than its existing credit facility with HSBC UK. Without additional headroom, the contracts would have been physically impossible to deliver without straining the rest of the business.

How UKEF’s insurance unlocks the bank

The mechanism UKEF deployed is one that more British SMEs will encounter as the agency expands its remit. By insuring HSBC UK against the risk that the Saudi buyers fail to pay, the government effectively de-risked the additional lending the bank needed to provide. With UKEF on the hook for the downside, HSBC was able to raise its credit thresholds and free up the working capital that Masters needed to fulfil the orders, all without disrupting the company’s day-to-day operations.

It is a model UKEF has been deploying with growing frequency. The agency, which now has authority to provide up to £80 billion of support to British exporters, has set out a target of helping UK firms win more than £12.5 billion of new export contracts by 2029, with the Middle East firmly at the centre of that ambition. It forms part of a broader push that has seen UKEF step up support for SME exporters through faster-track products and higher auto-inclusion limits.

Tim Reid, chief executive of UK Export Finance, said the case for backing companies such as Masters extended well beyond GDP arithmetic. “British businesses like Masters Speciality Pharma are doing vital work, not just for the UK economy, but for patients around the world who depend on access to critical medicines. These are exactly the kind of exports we want to support,” he said. “UKEF is open for business, and we will continue to provide insurance and guarantees to UK exporters of all sizes as they take on new opportunities in the Middle East and across the world.”

The ceiling problem every sme exporter knows

For Simon Clarke, chief operating officer at Masters Speciality Pharma, the appeal of the arrangement boiled down to a frustration that is wearily familiar to any SME finance director who has tried to scale internationally. “A problem for SMEs like us is that you can get a certain amount of credit, but when you hit the ceiling you can go no further,” he said. “UKEF’s support made the difference – it meant we could take on these contracts that would otherwise have been beyond our reach or would have stretched working capital to the detriment of the rest of the business.”

That ceiling is one of the most reliable killers of British export ambition, particularly in higher-ticket sectors such as pharmaceuticals, engineering and capital equipment where customers expect long payment terms and suppliers want their money quickly. James Cundy, head of corporate and leveraged finance at HSBC UK, which already banks Masters in several markets, said the partnership with UKEF had allowed the bank to back the customer without flinching. “HSBC supports Masters Speciality Pharma in several markets across the globe. We know customers exporting overseas often struggle with freeing up working capital, so we were delighted to work with UKEF and increase our facilities to allow Masters Speciality Pharma to continue their vital work without disruption,” he said.

Why the middle east, and why now

The Middle East is becoming an ever more strategic plank of UK export policy. Saudi Arabia is the UK’s largest market for healthcare products and medical equipment in the region, and its Vision 2030 reform programme is creating sustained demand for everything from specialist medicines and medical devices to clean energy infrastructure, education services and advanced manufacturing. UK goods and services exports to Saudi Arabia ran into the billions of dollars in 2024, and ministers expect that trajectory to steepen.

For UKEF, the Masters deal is also a useful case study in selling its proposition to British SMEs who often assume export credit agencies are the preserve of defence primes and civil engineering giants. The agency’s recent push has included a £6.5 billion boost for British exporters and a tighter focus on the kind of insurance and guarantee products that suit smaller, faster-growing companies.

The takeaway for finance directors at Britain’s SMEs is straightforward enough. The Gulf contracts are there for the winning, the medicines, machines and services they want are squarely in British wheelhouses, and the working capital problem that has historically killed those wins can, increasingly, be solved with a phone call to UKEF and a sympathetic bank.

For Masters Speciality Pharma, the result is two delivered contracts, patients in Saudi Arabia receiving treatments they urgently need, and a Hertfordshire SME that has demonstrated, once again, that British specialist manufacturing remains very much open for business.

Read more:
Hertfordshire Pharma lands £2.3m Saudi contracts after UKEF steps in to plug working capital gap

A Cotswold soap-maker, a Warwickshire 3D-printing pioneer supplying supercar manufacturers and an Edinburgh tech-refurbishment social enterprise are among 186 organisations honoured this year with The King’s Awards for Enterprise, as Britain’s most prestigious business accolade marks its 60th anniversary.

The 2026 cohort, which includes 76 winners for international trade, 52 for innovation, 36 for sustainability and 22 for promoting opportunity through social mobility, underlines the growing breadth of the awards first presented by Queen Elizabeth II in 1966. Renamed in 2022 following the King’s accession, the honours have now recognised more than 8,000 British businesses across six decades.

A sustainability story written in soap

For Emma Heathcote-James, founder of the Little Soap Company, the recognition vindicates an approach that has prized principles over margins since she began hand-crafting bars from her Cotswold cottage in 2008.

“We don’t make the profit that we perhaps could if we made everything in China, but every single decision that we make is putting the planet and people first,” said Heathcote-James, 49, whose products are now stocked by Waitrose, Tesco and Boots.

The business, which turns over around £2.4 million and employs 13 staff, manufactures exclusively in Scotland and northern England, home to the few soap factories Britain has left, and produces vegan-certified, cruelty-free ranges in recycled packaging.

It has not, however, been insulated from the macroeconomic squeeze. Chief operating officer Sharon Redrobe, who is married to Heathcote-James, said geopolitical tensions had pushed up the cost of raw materials including the essential oils used as fragrances, while greenwashing by some competitors remained a source of frustration. Winning as a small, independently financed business, she said, was the company’s “biggest coup” to date.

Little Soap Company has deliberately avoided external investment, wary of pressure to grow margins by switching to cheaper inputs. “It’s really important that we can demonstrate you can have a successful business and still do things correctly from the start,” Heathcote-James said.

From a mother’s garage to the supercar grid

In Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, RYSE 3D has secured an international trade award after export orders rose by an extraordinary 2,300 per cent to £2.24 million over three years. The company manufactures high-performance 3D-printed parts for more than 20 of the world’s leading supercar marques.

Founder Mitchell Barnes, 29, started developing a 3D printer in his mother’s garage as an undergraduate, using his student loan to build the first prototype and selling the service to coursemates after successfully printing a model for his car-design degree. He is among the youngest ever recipients, and has now collected a second King’s Award in as many years, having won his first at 27.

“It’s a royal honour,” Barnes said. “You don’t believe it when you first get it, but then winning two is even more insane.”

The business, which employs 25 people, exports principally to Latvia, Denmark and the United States, although the tariff regime introduced by Washington last year has eaten into US returns. Healthy margins have allowed RYSE 3D to absorb some of the impact, but Barnes said the team had had to redouble efforts elsewhere to compensate, including launching an automated online ordering tool aimed at everyday customers.

To address a chronic skills shortage, the company has taken to recruiting from outside the sector altogether, training former coffee baristas as 3D printing engineers. Barnes plans to open offices on both the east and west coasts of the United States before the end of 2026.

Refurbishing devices, repairing communities

Edinburgh Remakery, a ten-strong social enterprise honoured in the sustainability category, refurbishes and resells used technology, donating devices to people experiencing digital exclusion and routing unsalvageable components to specialist processors including the Royal Mint, which extracts gold from old motherboards.

Chief executive Elaine Brown said the team had been overwhelmed when the news arrived: “There was much jumping up and down in the remakery that day and a few more cakes were had just to celebrate.”

Demand for the service has surged as businesses retire PCs ahead of the end of support for Windows 10, but Brown argued that many of these machines could be given a second life by being fitted with alternative operating systems. “Being a business for good has been good for business,” she said. “We’ve grown our turnover, we’ve grown our engagement, and the King’s Award is the icing on the cake.”

Winners universally described the application process as exhaustive. Serial entrepreneur Will Fletcher, 46, who oversaw the promoting opportunity category as a judge, said the assessment was deliberately rigorous.

“It’s a really, really thorough process,” he said. “You always get a few that are out-and-out winners, and then there’s a few really tough cases.”

The category, Fletcher noted, rewards profitable companies that channel resources back into their communities, work that is “time-consuming to do properly and not directly linked to how much profit the company makes”. His own former business, Recycling Lives, won the award four times, including in 2019 for supporting ex-offenders into employment, where reoffending rates among participants ran at less than 5 per cent against a national average of around two-thirds. Fletcher now runs Car.co.uk, a Lancashire-based digital car-buying platform, which itself takes home a 2026 award for innovation.

Taken together, this year’s roll call suggests that British SMEs continue to find competitive advantage not in spite of their values, but because of them, a message the King’s Awards have championed, in one form or another, for sixty years.

Read more:
King’s Awards crown Britain’s small business heroes on 60th anniversary