Business

The British folding bicycle maker Brompton has sold a significant stake to the French sporting goods retailer Decathlon and a Chinese venture capital firm, in a deal designed to bankroll the brand’s expansion in France and China, now its single largest market.

The transaction, reported to be worth £18 million, hands Decathlon a 10 per cent holding and gives BA Capital a 5 per cent stake. The Shanghai-based investor is best known for backing Labubu maker Pop Mart and Laopu Gold, the luxury jewellery brand nicknamed the “Hermès of gold” in China.

Founded in London in 1975, Brompton is famous for its three-part folding bicycles, which are hand-built at its main factory in west London and exported worldwide to China, America and Europe. Founder Andrew Ritchie remains the largest shareholder, while the company’s long-serving chief executive, Will Butler-Adams, also holds a stake.

Butler-Adams, who took the top job in 2008, said the fresh capital would allow staff and long-term investors to realise cash from the sale of shares, while bringing in market and technology expertise from the new backers. The partnership is expected to accelerate growth in China, which has emerged as the company’s biggest market in recent years as the firm pulled back from a more cautious United States.

The deal follows a bruising spell for the wider cycling industry, which has wrestled with sharply falling demand since the pandemic boom faded, forcing many manufacturers into deep price cuts. Brompton has not been immune. Last year the company reported pre-tax profits of just £130,500, up from a meagre £4,602 the year before but still a fraction of its former earnings.

Even so, the manufacturer is still expected to produce more than 100,000 bikes a year, with prices for its top-end models reaching almost £6,000. More than 1.2 million Bromptons have rolled off the production line since the first was built more than half a century ago.

“For over fifty years, Brompton has unlocked urban freedom and happiness for riders across the globe. While we’re proud of the impact we’ve made, our journey is only just beginning,” Butler-Adams said. “Together with Decathlon, another family business built over half a century, we’re ready to achieve even more.”

The investment from Decathlon, made through its investment and innovation arm Decathlon Pulse, will see the signature folding bikes sold in “Brompton corners” across a handful of the retailer’s French stores. According to Brompton’s own announcement, it will also help the company push further into the fast-growing electric bike market.

The move marks the firm’s second equity event in recent years, following its first capital raise in 35 years backed by BGF, and underlines a renewed appetite for ambition after a difficult few years. The timing chimes with a recovering market: analysts at Mordor Intelligence value the UK e-bike sector at around 554 million dollars in 2026, with steady annual growth forecast through the rest of the decade.

“Brompton embodies a unique combination of performance, durability and community engagement that perfectly complements our approach,” said Franck Vigo, chief executive of Decathlon Pulse. “This partnership is about scaling that model while preserving what makes Brompton truly unique.”

Business confidence slipped over the past month as firms wrestled with stubborn inflationary and cost pressures, with the Middle East war now into its fifth month, according to a survey published today.

The index of sentiment among private-sector companies compiled by Lloyds Bank’s Business Barometer fell by 3 points to 44 per cent in June, leaving it below the 12-month average of 47 per cent. Economic optimism also dropped, down 4 points to 31 per cent.

The lender said businesses were most worried about the rising cost of production, a concern likely tied to the higher energy prices triggered by the Gulf conflict. Over the weekend the United States and Iran traded strikes, each accusing the other of breaching the terms of the ceasefire agreement.

The decline in confidence was most pronounced among manufacturers, where optimism tumbled by 10 points to 33 per cent, a reflection of the sector’s heavy energy use. The reading among retailers fell by 8 points to 45 per cent. Energy costs have remained the single biggest brake on SME growth for much of the past year, with smaller firms warning they have no price-cap protection of the kind afforded to households.

Although inflationary worries persist, oil prices have eased sharply in recent weeks. The price of a barrel of Brent crude, the international benchmark, has fallen back below the levels seen before the conflict broke out at the end of February.

Amanda Murphy, chief executive for Lloyds Business and Commercial Banking, said: “While cost pressures and global uncertainty continue to weigh on business confidence, international firms are much more confident, with many seeing signs of supply chain disruption easing and strengthening customer demand.”

There was better news on jobs. Lloyds said companies’ hiring intentions rose for the first time in three months. Some 55 per cent of the 1,200 firms surveyed said they wanted to expand their workforce, against 14 per cent planning to cut headcount, a fall of 3 points over the month.

Hann-Ju Ho, senior economist at Lloyds Commercial Banking, said: “Overall, while some sectors are holding up, the data suggests that uncertainty is still feeding through unevenly and weighing more heavily on parts of the economy than others.”

The figures may signal that the UK labour market is in the early stages of stabilising after two years of weakening. Data from the Office for National Statistics showed vacancies have fallen to their lowest level in five years.

Growth has also taken a knock from the war. GDP contracted by 0.1 per cent in April, the latest ONS figures show, and the closely watched purchasing managers’ index revealed that activity in the private sector dropped to a 14-month low.

The fall in confidence over the past month may equally be tied to the latest bout of political and policy uncertainty in Westminster, after Sir Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister earlier this month, clearing the way for Andy Burnham to enter No 10 as soon as mid-July.

Mr Burnham has yet to flesh out his tax and spending plans or name his chancellor. Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting are regarded as the most likely picks to replace Rachel Reeves in No 11. Starmer’s probable successor has signalled a preference for lowering VAT on the hospitality industry and overhauling the business rates regime.

Barclays has taken long-term control of its global headquarters at Canary Wharf in a £750m deal that the lender and its landlord have hailed as a “strong endorsement” of the Docklands district and of the capital itself.

The FTSE 100 bank has agreed a long-term leasehold interest with Canary Wharf Group that hands it the right to occupy One Churchill Place for up to 999 years, securing the building that has served as its base since 2005. Barclays’ existing lease had been due to run out in 2039, a deadline the bank only extended two years ago. The fresh acquisition removes that cliff edge altogether.

Barclays said outright ownership of the leasehold would pave the way for continued investment in the 1m sq ft tower and give it room to flex its space as “working patterns and business needs continue to evolve”, a nod to the hybrid-working pressures that have reshaped corporate property demand since the pandemic.

“This acquisition gives us long-term certainty, greater flexibility over our London footprint and reinforces our continued confidence in London as one of the world’s leading global financial centres,” said Barclays group chief executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan.

Shobi Khan, chief executive of Canary Wharf Group, said: “Barclays’ decision to acquire its global headquarters at One Churchill Place is a strong endorsement of both Canary Wharf and London.” The transaction, confirmed by the landlord, ranks among Europe’s largest office deals of recent years at a time when prime, top-grade London floorspace remains in short supply.

For a district that spent much of the early 2020s fielding questions about its future, the Barclays deal lands as the clearest signal yet that the tide has turned. The Isle of Dogs has enjoyed a marked resurgence over the past year, drawing interest from across the financial-services spectrum rather than losing tenants to the City.

Payments giant Visa is among the names voting with its feet, having laid out plans to move its European headquarters to Canary Wharf, taking 300,000 sq ft at One Canada Square on a 15-year term. Fintech challenger Zopa Bank has also committed to the estate, doubling its office footprint with a new 44,000 sq ft headquarters at 20 Water Street that will house its 900 staff.

The single biggest prize, however, remains in the balance. JP Morgan is tipped to deliver the area’s largest-ever boost with a 3m sq ft tower that could become its main UK base and its biggest presence across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, housing up to 12,000 people. The US bank unveiled the plan after the Budget spared lenders a widely trailed tax raid, with chancellor Rachel Reeves describing the investment as a “multi-billion pound vote of confidence in the UK economy”. The project is forecast to inject as much as £10bn into the local economy and create a further 7,800 jobs.

Yet the skyscraper is not nailed on. JP Morgan has repeatedly warned that it will press ahead only if the tax environment stays favourable. A Tower Hamlets council report revealed that the bank had lobbied for a “business rates incentive over a period of years”, while the government has cautioned the local authority that JP Morgan was “unlikely to progress” without “clarity and certainty” on its tax bill.

For Barclays, the calculus is more settled. By converting a ticking lease into near-permanent occupancy, the bank has stripped out decades of property uncertainty in one move, and given Canary Wharf a marquee endorsement to wave at every prospective tenant still weighing whether the Wharf, or the wider London market, is worth the long-term bet.

A year into the job, Britain’s Small Business Commissioner is about to be handed real teeth, and she intends to use them.

Emma Jones CBE has marked her first anniversary as the UK’s Small Business Commissioner, capping twelve months of hard campaigning on behalf of the country’s 5.5 million small firms with the prospect of the most far-reaching shake-up of payment law in a generation. Since taking up the role, the Enterprise Nation founder has trained her attention on speeding up payment times, putting digital tools to work for small traders, and protecting the cash flow that keeps the nation’s smallest businesses alive.

The timing is no accident. Her milestone arrives just as the government’s Commercial Payments Bill, also referred to as the Small Business Protections Bill, completes its passage into Parliament. The legislation is designed to give Britain the toughest late payment regime in the G7 and, crucially, to convert the Office of the Small Business Commissioner (OSBC) from a mediation service into a genuine enforcement body with the power to investigate and to fine.

For anyone who has run a small business, the problem it targets needs little explanation. Late payment drains an estimated £11 billion from the economy every year, and the human cost behind that figure is what Jones returns to again and again.

“Having started, scaled, and sold businesses myself, I know first-hand how draining it is to chase the money you have already rightfully earned,” she said, reflecting on her first year. “This year, our small but mighty team has focused heavily on reducing the hours business owners waste on non-productive tasks so they can reinvest that energy back into growth.”

She is blunt about the scale of the drag. “Late payment isn’t just an administrative inconvenience, it is a massive barrier to excelling,” she said. Joint research from the Department for Business and Trade and the OSBC, she noted, shows UK small businesses lose a staggering 133 million hours of staff time every year purely chasing overdue invoices, an average of 86 hours for every affected firm. “This is time stolen directly from product development, training, and expanding operations. As we look to the year ahead, the new legislation represents a monumental shift. It gives us the teeth we need to end this culture of delay and unlock the full potential of our small business community.”

Jones has spent her opening year reshaping how the OSBC reaches and supports small firms. Acting as an independent advocate for micro-businesses and SMEs squeezed by large corporate supply chains, her office has clawed back £1.5 million for small businesses caught out by late payment, building on the Commissioner’s wider track record of recovering money owed to suppliers.

On the digital front, she has published fresh guidance alongside a payment pledge signed by major UK eCommerce marketplaces including eBay, Temu, PayPal and SumUp, and produced AI advice tailored to small firms. Behind the scenes, she has worked closely with the Department for Business and Trade and research partners to lay the groundwork for the incoming Bill, drawing on international best practice to shape it.

Cultural change has been a constant theme. More than 600 businesses across the UK have now signed up to the Fair Payment Code, among them HSBC, Barclays, NatWest, Nationwide, Heathrow Airport, Amey, Kier, AXA, Boeing, BT and Welsh Water. Jones has also grown the office’s social media reach and launched an interview series, ‘Get the money moving’, with leading voices in the fair payment space. In person, she has met more than 5,000 people and run monthly SME Safaris, sending civil servants out to meet founders in their real trading environments.

The year ahead will be defined by readying the business community for the Commercial Payments (Late Payments) Bill now making its way through Parliament. The government has billed the package as the toughest crackdown on late payments in over 25 years, and the detail bears that out.

Under the reforms, the Commissioner will gain powers to investigate the persistent poor payment practices of larger businesses, adjudicate disputes outside the court system, and levy financial penalties on repeat offenders that could run into tens of millions of pounds. The OSBC will also be able to act on anonymous complaints, shielding small suppliers from the threat of corporate retaliation when they speak up.

Two further measures go to the heart of the cash flow problem. Large companies will be capped at a maximum of 60 days’ payment terms when dealing with smaller suppliers, and statutory interest of 8% above the Bank of England base rate will apply automatically to overdue invoices, stripping away a firm’s ability to contract out of late fees. The new powers for the Commissioner were confirmed when the Bill was introduced to Parliament, alongside the wider crackdown on firms that pay late.

Before the legislation takes effect, Jones is focused on keeping the quality of casework and support high, welcoming more firms onto the Fair Payment Code, and exploring a future in which the office covers some of its own costs while positioning the UK as a global leader in the shift to a prompt payment economy.

After a year of persuasion, in other words, the Commissioner is preparing for a year of enforcement. For the 5.5 million small businesses she represents, the difference could be measured in both hours and pounds.

UK Export Finance has fired the largest single shot in its century-long history, setting aside a fresh £50 billion to bankroll British defence exports at a moment when the world is rearming faster than at any time since the Cold War.

The new Defence Export Fund takes the government’s export credit agency from an £80 billion ceiling to a total capacity of £130 billion, with the additional £50 billion ring-fenced to support large-scale defence sales and shore up Britain’s competitiveness in a market that is expanding at remarkable speed. For an agency that has spent 100 years quietly underwriting the deals that keep British goods moving across borders, it is a statement of intent.

The timing is no accident. Global military expenditure climbed to a record $2.7 trillion in 2024, a 9.4 per cent year-on-year jump that, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, was the steepest rise since at least the end of the Cold War. Spending rose across all five of the world’s regions, driven by the war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East and a broad reappraisal of national security among Western governments. Allies are not only spending more, they are actively shopping for the kind of advanced capability that British industry is well placed to supply.

The mechanics are straightforward enough. UKEF will guarantee the bank loans taken out by British defence exporters as they fulfil contracts, and it will provide or back the financing extended to other countries buying British defence products. In practice that means a UK manufacturer can compete for a major overseas order knowing the financing is underwritten by the government, while the purchasing nation gets access to a competitive, state-backed payment package alongside the kit itself.

That combination, world-leading hardware paired with government-backed finance, is what ministers hope will tip large contracts in Britain’s favour. The fund is open to defence businesses of every size, from established prime contractors to the smaller firms looking to break into international markets for the first time, a constituency that has historically found export finance hard to navigate.

It is a theme UKEF has been building towards for some time. The agency has already widened its toolkit for smaller exporters, unveiling new products designed to help SMEs trade globally and to remove some of the friction that has long deterred first-time exporters from chasing overseas work.

The Defence Export Fund does not arrive out of nowhere. UKEF has been steadily deepening its defence portfolio, backing landmark deals that include air defence systems for Poland and Ukraine and submarine rescue vehicles for Indonesia, transactions that translate into skilled jobs and economic value spread across the UK rather than concentrated in a single region.

The numbers have grown accordingly. Defence transactions worth more than £5 billion are now routine for the agency, and it supported a total of £10 billion of defence business in the 2024/25 financial year alone. With that trajectory showing no sign of flattening, the new allocation is designed to let UKEF meet rising demand without running up against its own limits.

That ambition sits within a wider government push to treat defence not merely as a security obligation but as an engine of industrial growth. Westminster has moved to boost domestic weapons production and cut reliance on imports, while a separate drive aims to give smaller defence firms easier access to Ministry of Defence contracts. The export fund is the international-facing piece of that same strategy.

‘Allies are actively seeking what Britain can build’

Tim Reid, chief executive of UKEF, framed the move as a response to genuine demand from partner nations. “Security is a strategic priority for governments worldwide, and the UK’s defence sector offers pioneering capabilities that allies are actively seeking,” he said. “With billions of pounds available in new export financing, we are strengthening the sector’s global competitiveness while backing skilled British jobs and supporting long-term economic growth.”

The agency, which sets out its broader approach in its strategic financing for industrial growth, has set itself a clear target. By 2029 it aims to help UK firms win more than £12.5 billion of new export contracts through its finance offer, with defence expected to account for a growing slice of that total.

For Britain’s defence businesses, large and small, the message is that the financing constraint which once kept them on the sidelines of the biggest deals has been substantially loosened. Whether that translates into the contract wins ministers are banking on will depend, as ever, on the firms themselves. But the cheque book has rarely been bigger.

WhatsApp is preparing to let its users start conversations without handing over the one piece of information most of us would rather keep to ourselves: our mobile number.

Instead, the Meta-owned messaging service will allow people to connect by exchanging unique usernames, a change that brings the world’s most-used chat app into line with rivals that have offered the feature for years.

The roll-out is being staged globally across WhatsApp’s three billion account holders over the coming months. From this week, users can begin reserving a name through the app, although doing so will not be compulsory. The company says people will be able to remove or change their username at any time, and that once the system is fully switched on, two users will be able to connect having shared nothing more than their handles. The familiar options to block or report unwanted contacts will remain in place.

How the new system works

Names will be capped at 35 characters, with relatively few restrictions beyond a carve-out for some high-profile officials and celebrities, whose names will be ring-fenced so they cannot be claimed by impersonators. In other words, WhatsApp is unlikely to be flooded with users styling themselves as Donald Trump.

Meta is framing the move squarely as a privacy feature. Alice Newton-Rex, WhatsApp’s head of product, said she had heard repeatedly from users who did not always want to share their phone number simply to stay in touch, particularly within group chats. She said she hoped the change would “give users control over how they choose to show up” on the app.

The handles will be introduced “gradually over the coming months”, according to Meta, with users notified once their username goes live. Anyone wanting to get ahead can reserve a name now through their account or profile settings, where the option to claim a handle will appear as it becomes available.

For founders and owner-managers, there is a useful wrinkle. Creators, small businesses and organisations will be able to claim the username they already use on Instagram or Facebook, keeping their identity consistent across Meta’s estate. Everyone else who wants their WhatsApp handle to match those on other Meta apps will need to link their existing accounts through Accounts Centre, which in turn means some data, across services such as Threads and Messenger, is shared between those accounts. It is a trade-off worth understanding before you tick the box.

Some users have already grumbled on social media that the option to reserve a name has yet to appear for them. The company’s advice is straightforward: make sure you are running the latest version of the app and keep checking.

A familiar idea, finally arriving

WhatsApp is not breaking new ground here. The encrypted messaging app Signal introduced an almost identical feature in 2024, and the broader direction of travel, away from the phone number as a universal identifier, has been building for some time.

That context matters when weighing the privacy claims. “It is a good feature, but even if it does offer more privacy, remember WhatsApp is not a privacy-friendly app overall,” said Carisa Véliz, a professor at the University of Oxford and author of Privacy is Power. “It collects much metadata about users for marketing purposes. We have to remember that WhatsApp is owned by Meta, one of the tech companies with the worst track records when it comes to privacy.”

The distinction is an important one for any business relying on the platform. WhatsApp does not use the content of private chats for advertising; those messages are protected by end-to-end encryption, so the company cannot read them. It does, however, draw on other data, such as your general location and basic account details including age, to support advertising, a model explored in our coverage of Meta’s wider use of automation and user data.

Once the feature is fully live, individual phone numbers will no longer be visible inside WhatsApp. There will be no public username directory, and a phone number will still be needed to open an account in the first place. The handle changes who can find you, not whether you exist on the network.

The scam question

The obvious worry is that easier, number-free contact could hand fraudsters a fresh route in. Asked on X about safeguards, the company pointed to “multiple layers of defence”. Chief among them is an optional username key, a short numbered code that means someone can only message you if they hold both your username and that key, a detail confirmed by security outlet BleepingComputer. WhatsApp adds that its systems “detect and block abuse patterns” automatically, an approach SecurityWeek notes is designed to limit unsolicited first contact.

For SME owners who increasingly run customer service, bookings and sales through the app, the username key is the setting to watch. Used well, it offers a way to stay reachable to genuine customers while keeping the door shut to opportunists.

The platform’s minimum age remains 13, and messaging apps will sit outside the UK’s incoming social media restrictions for under-16s, due to take effect next year, a regulatory backdrop that has already drawn scrutiny in the debate over whether stricter rules could push encrypted services out of Britain and in earlier criticism of the app’s age policies.

New name, new boss

The username launch also lands during a change at the top. WhatsApp recently confirmed that Kunal Shah, founder of an Indian fintech start-up, will take over as head of the platform, with Will Cathcart stepping down after seven years in charge.

For now, the message to users and businesses alike is to reserve early, weigh up the Accounts Centre trade-off, and treat the username key as a feature rather than an afterthought. Whether it materially improves privacy or simply repackages it, the days of the phone number as your sole identity on WhatsApp look numbered.

There is a particular sort of Englishman who can walk into a room full of sceptics, sceptical bankers and business owners like me, sceptical councillors and sceptical journalists with their arms folded and their expense-account pastries going cold, and leave forty minutes later having quietly persuaded the lot of us that the country is not, after all, finished. Andy Street is that Englishman.

I spent an afternoon recently listening to him lay out Prosper UK, the movement he has launched with Ruth Davidson to win back the seven million voters who feel they have nowhere left to put their cross, and I came away thinking something I had not thought in a worryingly long time. Competence, it turns out, is a political philosophy all on its own.

From having headed up CBM, the publishers of Business Matters, for over two decades I have spent enough years watching politicians promise the moon and deliver a damp car park to be cured of any romance about the lot of them. But Street is a different animal, and the reason is dully, gloriously unsexy: he has actually run things. He spent the best part of a decade as managing director of John Lewis, a shop that, last time I checked, managed to sell socks without bankrupting the nation. Then he spent seven years as Mayor of the West Midlands, during which something like 100,000 jobs arrived and roughly £10 billion of investment followed them through the door. He did not tweet the economy into existence. He went out, in an unfashionable suit, and got it.

Prosper UK is, in a sense, the same instinct dressed for national service. Davidson and Street reckon there are seven million Britons who believe in enterprise, sound money and public services that actually work, yet feel that no party will own all three at once. Tens of thousands signed up within a fortnight, which tells you the hunger is real. You can sneer at the centre ground all you like, and plenty of clever people do, but it is where most of the country quietly lives and works and pays its taxes.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the other Andy.

By the time you read this, Andy Burnham may well be measuring the curtains in Downing Street. The man who spent years as the King in the North, having decamped to Westminster as the new Member for Makerfield, is now the overwhelming favourite to lead the country, and he has arrived with a genuinely interesting prospectus. His “No 10 North”, the plan to physically wrench decision-making out of Whitehall and plant it in Manchester, is the boldest thing anyone has said about the British constitution in years. You can read the full sweep of it in TIME’s account of his economic and devolution agenda, and whatever you make of the politics, the ambition is real.

Here is the thing that nobody in either tribe seems willing to say out loud. These two men are, on the economy, arguing for almost exactly the same thing.

Both believe the British state is too centralised, too timid and too obsessed with the square mile around the Treasury. Both have spent their careers proving that a metro mayor with real powers can shift the dial in a way no Whitehall mandarin ever has. The Institute for Government has documented how Greater Manchester’s mayoralty became the template the rest of the country now copies. And the case for going further is hardly some fringe obsession of mine; Business Matters has been making it for years, from the academics arguing that regional disparities can be tackled by more devolution to the London business lobby that, remarkably, agrees Burnham is right to put devolution front and centre.

So why am I urging the incoming Prime Minister to take a quiet cup of tea with a Conservative he beat to nothing? Because Burnham has the mandate and Street has the manual.

Burnham is a brilliant campaigner, a man who can summon a crowd and a cause with equal ease. But running a national economy is not a rally. It is procurement, planning, skills funding, the unglamorous grinding business of getting a tram line built before the next election rather than the one after. Street has done precisely this, at scale, and he has done it while keeping the private sector in the room rather than haranguing it from the steps outside. When Japanese investors poured £118 million into Greater Manchester, business leaders rightly warned that Whitehall must now match that confidence. Confidence is built by people who deliver, not people who announce.

There is a national vice we really must shake off, and it is the belief that wisdom only ever comes wrapped in your own colours. The Americans call it tribalism; I call it self-harm. If the next Prime Minister genuinely wants to rewire Britain, he could do a great deal worse than borrow the wiring diagram from the one man who has already done the job and lived to tell the tale.

Sit down with Street, Andy. Order the good biscuits. Listen. The economy you are about to inherit is far too important to leave in the hands of people who merely agree with you.

There is no shortage of admiration for Britain’s fastest-growing businesses, and nor should there be.

The entrepreneurs who disrupt industries, scale at speed and pull in investment embody much of what makes British enterprise so widely admired. They are a reminder that innovation, ambition and resilience remain alive and well in every corner of the economy.

At the Lloyds British Business Excellence Awards, we celebrate those firms with pride. They represent the future. But if we are to build that future properly, we must also give due credit to the businesses already carrying so much of the economy today.

Britain’s mid-market is, in many respects, our economic backbone. These are the companies that have made the difficult passage from start-up to sustainable enterprise. They have moved beyond proving an idea and into the far harder work of building something that lasts, creating thousands of jobs, investing in people, supporting supply chains and contributing in real terms to regional and national prosperity.

The numbers bear this out. Mid-sized firms make up roughly 0.5 per cent of UK companies yet account for around a quarter of private-sector employment and close to a third of economic output, contributing some £1.3 trillion in turnover. They rarely command the headlines in the way unicorns or venture-backed scale-ups do. Yet their contribution is, frankly, immeasurable.

Every year, the awards give us the privilege of meeting businesses that show exactly what sustainable success looks like.

Take Net World Sports, recognised as Lloyds Mid-Size Business of the Year. From its base in North Wales, it has grown into a global sporting goods business, exporting British innovation around the world while creating high-quality employment and investing continually in its people and infrastructure. Its story is a reminder that world-class companies are being built in every region of the UK, not just the major cities.

Or consider Travel Counsellors, whose steady growth over more than three decades has shown that putting people and relationships at the heart of a business is not simply good culture, it is good business. Its continued success illustrates how mid-market firms build resilience through trust, loyalty and long-term thinking.

More recently, Tropic Skincare, winner of the Lloyds Mid-Market Business of the Year (pictured), has demonstrated that rapid commercial success and purpose-led leadership are not mutually exclusive. Under Susie Ma’s leadership, the company continues to scale while holding firm to an unwavering commitment to ethical sourcing, sustainability and the empowerment of thousands of independent ambassadors across the country.

Realise Training Group, recognised for Mid-Market Growth, shows another side of Britain’s economic success. By training more than 16,000 learners a year and employing hundreds of people, its expansion directly strengthens the UK’s workforce and productivity, delivering social impact alongside commercial returns.

These businesses may operate in very different sectors, but they share something fundamental. They have moved beyond merely building successful companies. They are building institutions.

Taken together, Britain’s mid-market firms employ millions of people. They invest in apprenticeships, nurture future leaders, adopt emerging technologies and support thousands of suppliers across every nation and region of the UK. They are often the anchor employers in their local economies, providing stability in uncertain times while continuing to invest for the future. Importantly, they have mastered one of the hardest disciplines in business: longevity.

That contribution is finally being recognised at a national level. A government-backed council to champion the country’s “unsung” mid-sized businesses is now giving the sector a more unified voice on issues from planning and infrastructure to the persistent skills shortage. It is a welcome acknowledgement that, much like the small and medium-sized firms so often described as the backbone of our economy, the middle of the market has been underserved by the national conversation for too long.

At the Lloyds British Business Excellence Awards, we celebrate organisations at every stage of that journey, from ambitious start-ups to established market leaders, as this year’s line-up of finalists makes clear. What unites them all is excellence.

Excellence is not measured by valuation or headline growth alone. It is reflected in leadership, culture, innovation, resilience, customer commitment and the positive impact a business has on its people and communities.

Britain’s future will not be built by one type of business alone. It will be built by ambitious start-ups becoming scale-ups, scale-ups becoming established enterprises, and established mid-market businesses continuing to innovate, invest and inspire the next generation. That is why supporting the entire business lifecycle matters.

Because while tomorrow’s unicorns will undoubtedly shape future headlines, it is Britain’s mid-market businesses that power our economy every single day. They may not always be the loudest voices in British business. But they are, without question, among its strongest.

Entries close for the 2026 Lloyds Business Excellence Awards on July 3rd.

HMRC has confirmed it will not appeal the tribunal decision that football referees engaged by Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL) are self-employed rather than employees, drawing a line under one of the longest-running employment status disputes the tax authority has pursued.

In a statement given to IR35 Shield, an HMRC spokesperson said: “The tribunal decided that these referees were not employees based on the specific facts of the case, and we won’t be appealing this decision. Taking the case to the Supreme Court was important because it clarified how to distinguish employees and self-employed workers for tax purposes, and confirmed our longstanding approach.”

The concession brings to a close a saga that has run for the best part of a decade and travelled all the way to the country’s highest court. The Supreme Court handed down its judgment in September 2024, ruling that the tests of mutuality of obligation and control were both met, before sending the matter back to the First-tier Tribunal to weigh the relationship in the round. When the tribunal applied that final stage, it found the referees did not bear the hallmarks of employment after all.

For Dave Chaplin, chief executive of IR35 Shield and a regular presence at the PGMOL hearings, HMRC’s framing of the outcome sits awkwardly with the result.

“HMRC continues to maintain that its longstanding approach to employment status is correct, which begs the question why they got the referees case wrong for 10 years,” Chaplin said.

His central criticism concerns mutuality of obligation, the principle that has long been a battleground in status cases. “HMRC has consistently argued that mutuality of obligation simply means payment for work completed. However, the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, confirming that the nature of the obligations between the parties was central to determining employment status.”

The distinction matters well beyond the touchline. Mutuality of obligation goes to whether an engager is bound to offer work and the worker bound to accept it. In the referees’ case, the obligations reset after every match, with no commitment on either side to future appointments, a feature the tribunal treated as telling.

Chaplin reserved his sharpest words for HMRC’s Check Employment Status for Tax (CEST) tool, the online questionnaire businesses are encouraged to rely on when determining a contractor’s status.

“If the facts of the case are entered into HMRC’s Check Employment Status for Tax (CEST) tool, it fails to reach the correct conclusion, instead returning an ‘indeterminate’ result and suggesting the case is finely balanced,” he said. “The judge reached the opposite view, stating that the case was not finely balanced and that the referees did not exhibit the hallmarks of employment.”

It is a charge that will resonate with contractors and engagers who have grown wary of the tool. Business Matters has previously reported that HMRC’s updated CEST tool still poses a threat to compliance, and that faith in the tool has fallen so far that only around 10 per cent of contractors now use it, down from roughly 28 per cent at launch. When a tool cannot match the conclusion of a judge presented with the same facts, the case for treating its output as a safe harbour looks thin.

The PGMOL outcome lands in a line of high-profile defeats that have dented HMRC’s record on status. Television presenters including Kaye Adams, who won her own IR35 case against HMRC after a nine-year ordeal, have spent years and considerable sums fending off the taxman over arrangements that tribunals ultimately judged to be genuinely self-employed.

For the businesses and freelancers caught in the middle, the lesson is uncomfortable but clear. Status is decided on the full picture of a working relationship, not on a single factor and not on a one-size-fits-all questionnaire. HMRC may insist its approach has been vindicated, but a ten-year pursuit that ended in defeat, and a tool that could not call the result, tell a more complicated story.

Andy Burnham’s pledge to deliver the biggest shift of power away from Whitehall in modern history has won early backing from London’s business community, with leaders arguing the capital is just as hobbled by centralised policymaking as the regions it is so often accused of overshadowing.

Responding to the Greater Manchester mayor’s speech, which set out a vision for a “No 10 in the North” and a sweeping transfer of decision-making to local leaders, John Dickie, chief executive of BusinessLDN, said the direction of travel was exactly what the economy needed.

“Andy Burnham is right to put greater devolution at the heart of his agenda,” Dickie said. “Giving regions the powers they need to attract investment, upskill communities and deliver infrastructure is key to getting the economy moving again.”

The intervention is notable because BusinessLDN, the business membership group formerly known as London First, represents firms in a city frequently cast as the chief beneficiary of Westminster largesse. Dickie was quick to challenge that framing, arguing that proximity to Whitehall has done the capital few favours.

“It’s good to hear him backing London as the world’s greatest capital and setting out plans to devolve further powers to the city,” he said. “Contrary to the perception, proximity to Whitehall has not automatically worked in the capital’s favour and London is just as constrained by one-size-fits-all policymaking as other parts of the country.”

The crux of the business lobby’s case is that London punches below its weight on the powers and purse strings available to comparable world cities. The mayor of London currently holds fewer powers than counterparts in New York and Paris, and less financial freedom than the mayors of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands.

The numbers behind that argument are stark. London and its boroughs retain only around 7 per cent of the taxes raised in the capital, against more than 50 per cent in New York, according to BusinessLDN’s recent report on the new powers London needs to thrive. Roughly three-quarters of the city’s funding still arrives as central grant, much of it with strings attached.

That dependence sits awkwardly with London’s status as the engine room of the national economy, and analysts at the Institute for Government have long noted that the capital’s governance is best compared with Paris, New York and Berlin rather than with English regions of a very different size and shape. For BusinessLDN, the lesson is that a stronger settlement for London and a stronger settlement for the North are not competing demands but two halves of the same growth strategy.

Dickie also welcomed Burnham’s willingness to take on the structural problems that have dogged successive governments, singling out housing supply and the tax that falls hardest on the high street.

“The commitment to grappling with some of the long-standing thorny challenges facing the country, from housebuilding to reforming business rates, will also be welcomed by firms across the capital,” he said.

Both issues are live for the business community. Pressure for a wholesale overhaul of business rates has been building for years, with retailers, manufacturers and hospitality operators all warning that the current system penalises bricks-and-mortar firms and discourages expansion. The question of how far to go on fiscal devolution, meanwhile, has already been flagged by Chancellor Rachel Reeves as a piece of unfinished business, as the Treasury weighs handing more tax-raising and tax-retention powers to local leaders.

There are signs, too, that Burnham’s economic prospectus reaches beyond the machinery of devolution. His own advisers have floated ideas such as tying pension tax relief to British investment, part of a wider push to channel domestic capital into domestic growth.

For Dickie, the prize is ultimately about prosperity that is felt in people’s pockets, in the capital as much as in the North.

“The only way to improve living standards is through growth, and unleashing London’s potential is vital to achieving that, while also tackling the deep inequality and poverty that persists across the capital,” he said.

Whether Burnham’s blueprint survives contact with the Treasury, and with the political reality that any meaningful devolution means central government letting go, remains to be seen. But on the morning’s evidence, the business voices that are often assumed to defend the Westminster status quo are lining up behind a different model entirely, one in which power, money and accountability sit a good deal closer to the communities they serve.