Business

A workplace EV charge point used to be a perk reserved for headquartered corporates. The picture in 2026 looks different. Small and medium-sized enterprises across the UK are installing chargers at their own premises.

Customer expectations, staff retention pressures, and the cost-to-install curve all read as reasons to act sooner. The decision now sits in front of most SME owners with a car park, a forecourt, or even a customer-facing kerb.

The right installer turns the decision from a multi-week project into a clean rollout. Essex-based providers like TBE Electrical handle the workplace EV charger installation alongside their wider commercial electrical services, which makes the project a single-contract job rather than a coordination headache. The framework below covers what UK SME owners should know before booking the install.

Why Is Workplace EV Charging Becoming a UK SME Decision?

Workplace EV charging has become an SME decision because three operational signals have aligned at once. Staff increasingly expect a charging option at work. Customer-facing premises read a visible charger as a credibility cue. And the OZEV-administered Workplace Charging Scheme reduces the per-socket cost meaningfully.

Three structural reasons explain why the conversation is now everywhere. First, EV uptake among UK private drivers continues to climb, which means staff arrive in EVs more often. The UK government’s Office for Zero Emission Vehicles coordinates the policy framework SME owners now work through.

Second, the workplace charger has become a recruitment signal in competitive sectors. Candidates increasingly read the car park before reading the offer letter.

Third, premises owners are starting to see chargers as infrastructure rather than tech. The install is now treated as part of the building’s electrical fit-out, not an optional add-on.

What Six Factors Shape the Workplace EV Charging Install?

Six factors usually drive the workplace EV charger decision for UK SMEs.

Premises survey. A qualified electrician assesses the existing supply, board capacity, and the cable run from the consumer unit.
Charger type. 7kW single-phase or 22kW three-phase chargers fit different premises and use-cases.
Number of sockets. Two-to-four sockets cover most SME premises; high-traffic forecourts need more.
Cable management. Tethered or untethered options affect both upfront cost and ongoing user experience.
Authentication setup. RFID cards, app authentication, or open access each suit different operational models.
OZEV grant eligibility. The Workplace Charging Scheme covers up to 40 sockets per applicant, but the eligibility criteria need a careful read.

A well-scoped install usually fits inside a one-to-two day window for most SME premises. The UK government’s low-emission vehicle grants collection covers the funding routes SME owners can stack alongside the install.

How Should an SME Owner Plan the Install?

Five practical steps shape a workplace EV charging rollout that does not derail the business.

The first is the premises walk-around. A qualified electrician walks the site, checks supply capacity, and identifies the most cost-effective cable route.

The second is the use-case scoping. Staff-only, customer-only, or mixed access shapes the socket count and authentication choice. Coverage of UK car safety ratings reinforces how vehicle-side criteria shape the wider workplace fleet conversation.

The third is the grant application. The OZEV Workplace Charging Scheme application sits with the chosen installer, who needs the relevant authorisations.

The fourth is the install scheduling. Most SMEs find a quiet weekend or out-of-hours window works better than a midweek install, even when the install is short.

The fifth is the post-install signposting. A new charger only earns its keep when staff, customers, and visitors know it is there. Coverage of whether Trustpilot reviews can be trusted reinforces how visibility and credibility cues compound for a small business across the channels customers actually check.

What Are the Common SME Workplace Charging Mistakes?

A workplace charging mistake is a planning gap that costs the SME budget, time, or operational comfort.

The first is the wrong-charger default. Installing 22kW three-phase chargers when 7kW single-phase covers the actual use-case usually overspends without producing meaningful benefit.

The second is the no-grant pattern. Missing the OZEV Workplace Charging Scheme leaves money on the table that a qualified installer can usually access.

The third is the under-scoped socket count. Installing one socket and finding it permanently occupied within a fortnight is a common pattern. Two-to-four sockets fit most premises better.

The fourth is the unclear access model. Open-access chargers without authentication can attract non-staff usage that drives up the electricity bill. Authentication usually pays back inside the first quarter.

The fifth is the no-signposting habit. A charger that staff and customers cannot easily find produces low utilisation and weak return on the install.

The sixth is the underestimated electricity cost. Without a usage policy in place, the chargers can produce a noticeable rise in the monthly bill. A simple authentication setup and a written workplace charging policy usually keeps the cost in line with the use-case the SME planned for.

The seventh is the no-maintenance pattern. A workplace charger needs occasional inspection, software updates, and cable checks. Booking a yearly check-in with the installer keeps the unit reliable for the long term and avoids the disruption of a sudden fault.

A Quick SME EV Charging Reality Check

Confirm the premises has sufficient supply capacity for the planned chargers
Match the charger type to the actual workplace use-case
Check OZEV Workplace Charging Scheme eligibility before the install
Plan authentication and access early
Brief staff and customers on the new charger inside the first week

The Honest Bottom Line for UK SME Owners

A workplace EV charger is no longer a strategic moonshot; it is an infrastructure decision SME owners can make this quarter and have running before the next one. The install is short, the grant routes are well-mapped, and the operational signals all point in the same direction.

The decision rewards SMEs who act ahead of the customer expectation rather than behind it. A visible charger reads to staff, customers, and visitors as a credible signal that the business is paying attention to the same shifts they are.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Long Does a Workplace EV Charger Install Take?

Most SME workplace installs sit inside a one-to-two day window. The exact timeline depends on the cable run, board capacity, and the number of sockets being installed.

Do UK SMEs Qualify for EV Charging Grants?

Yes, most UK SMEs qualify for the OZEV Workplace Charging Scheme. The eligibility criteria, voucher amounts, and per-socket caps are updated annually; the chosen installer typically handles the application alongside the install.

What Charger Power Rating Do SMEs Usually Need?

For staff-only car parks, 7kW single-phase chargers usually cover the realistic dwell time. Customer-facing forecourts, fleet premises, or short-stop locations often benefit from 22kW three-phase chargers.

Do I Need a Specialist Electrician to Install a Workplace EV Charger?

Yes, EV charger installation requires a qualified electrician with relevant certifications. NAPIT-certified or NICEIC-registered installers cover the regulatory requirements UK premises owners need.

Read more:
What UK SMEs Should Know About Workplace EV Charging

Europe’s social media landscape is undergoing a quiet revolution. After more than a decade of polished influencer culture, algorithmic homogenization, and engagement-maximising feeds, audiences are pushing back.

A widespread social media trust crisis, paired with growing algorithm fatigue, is reshaping how independent creators and everyday users define value online.

At the centre of this shift sits a new generation of platforms that prioritise honesty over hype, with Hacoo emerging as one of the most distinctive players reshaping the European creator economy.

The End of the Polished Feed

For years, the dominant social media model has rewarded perfection: highly curated visuals, glowing endorsements, and identical aesthetics replicated across millions of accounts.

The result is what industry analysts increasingly describe as algorithmic echo chambers, environments where authentic voices are drowned out by sponsored uniformity.

Audiences, particularly Gen Z and younger Millennials across the UK, France, and Germany, are responding by actively seeking out platforms where real opinions, including critical ones, are allowed to surface.

This is the gap Hacoo is positioning itself to fill.

A Dual-Layer Community Built on Radical Transparency

Hacoo operates as an authentic lifestyle community where users openly share real-life experiences, recommendations, and honest feedback after trying things themselves. Its architecture distinguishes between two distinct participation tiers, creating a sustainable structure for both casual contribution and professional creator work.

The first layer consists of everyday users who share genuine lifestyle inspiration freely, without commercial incentive. The second layer is built around Affiliate Partners, independent creators who are empowered to monetise their authentic recommendations through transparent tools and a formal affiliate program.

This dual-layer design avoids a common pitfall of modern platforms, where every voice is implicitly commercialised, eroding audience trust over time.

The guiding philosophy is what Hacoo calls “Unfiltered Reality”, an explicit rejection of over-edited, fake perfection. The community is encouraged to embrace honest, critical, and even imperfect feedback rather than the polished promotional content typical of legacy influencer ecosystems.

The Technology Behind Independent Income

What separates Hacoo’s discovery ecosystem from earlier creator platforms is the operational depth provided to its partners.

Independent creators on Hacoo are equipped with Smart Resource Matching, a system that pairs creators with relevant content opportunities based on demonstrated expertise and audience alignment, alongside exclusive tracking links that give creators crystal-clear backend insights into content reach and authentic engagement.

Rather than treating affiliates as informal promoters, Hacoo treats them as professional partners with access to structured analytics, performance dashboards, and transparent attribution data.

This level of operational transparency is rapidly becoming a baseline expectation in Europe’s maturing creator economy.

The “Critical Feedback” Algorithm: Rewarding Authenticity

Perhaps the most counter-intuitive element of Hacoo’s model is its monetisation logic. The platform’s algorithm actively rewards creators who provide honest, critical feedback, even when they point out practical flaws or limitations.

The premise is straightforward: Hacoo’s affiliate model provides commissions to creators who drive genuine value through transparent recommendations, rather than incentivizing fake glowing praise.

This inversion of the traditional influencer incentive structure is deliberate. By financially aligning creators with audience interests rather than purely promotional incentives, Hacoo strives to build a feed where critical feedback carries as much commercial weight as enthusiastic recommendations, a meaningful departure from the engagement-bait dynamics that have defined the previous era of social platforms.

Answering the Trust Question: Governance as a Strategic Moat

When audiences search for “Hacoo reviews” or ask “Is Hacoo legit”, they are rarely looking for corporate promises. They are testing whether the platform’s positioning holds up under scrutiny.

Hacoo’s response is to lean into governance rather than marketing slogans, offering what it describes as a safe discovery experience underpinned by strict, enforceable community standards.

The platform operates a “Zero Tolerance” policy approach against deceptive content, malicious redirects, and inauthentic engagement.

Enforcement is structured through a Progressive Penalty System, a clearly defined ladder of consequences for policy violations that escalates from content removal and reach restriction, through temporary suspension, and culminating in permanent account deactivation and partnership termination for repeat or severe offenders.

This governance-first stance is designed to function as a strategic moat. In a market saturated with platforms that treat moderation as a cost centre, Hacoo positions content integrity as a core product feature, one that it heavily invests in mitigating risks around rather than merely reacting to them after damage is done.

A Different Model for Europe’s Next Creator Decade

The broader takeaway for European business observers is that the creator economy is bifurcating. On one side sit platforms optimised purely for scale and surface-level engagement metrics; on the other, platforms like Hacoo are betting that radical transparency, professional creator infrastructure, and disciplined governance will define the next decade of growth.

For independent partners seeking a structured environment to build durable audiences, and for users tired of curated perfection, Hacoo’s positioning represents a deliberate move beyond algorithmic echo chambers, toward a model that is more honest, more accountable, and more aligned with how European audiences actually want to discover lifestyle ideas, creators, and communities online.

Read more:
Beyond Algorithmic Echo Chambers: The Rise of Authentic Lifestyle Communities in Europe’s Creator Economy

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

Reform UK leader vows to lift income tax from overtime pay for anyone earning under £75,000, a policy he says will reward graft, lift productivity and put more than £1,000 a year back into the pockets of nurses, police officers and factory hands.

Nigel Farage has fired the starting gun on what is shaping up to be the most consequential domestic tax debate of the parliament, pledging to abolish income tax on overtime hours for the bulk of the British workforce should Reform UK win the next general election.

Under the proposal, unveiled in a Telegraph column timed to coincide with the Makerfield by-election campaign, employees on salaries below £75,000 who work beyond a 40-hour week would keep every penny of their additional pay. The party has badged it the “hard work bonus” and put the cost at around £5bn a year.

For Business Matters readers running payroll, the policy lands somewhere between a productivity opportunity and an administrative headache. It also marks Mr Farage’s most pointed move yet to recast Reform as the natural home of the working voter — territory Labour has long taken as its own.

A direct strike at Burnham’s Labour

The timing is no accident. Survation’s constituency poll on Saturday put Labour on 43 per cent in Makerfield against Reform’s 40 per cent, a wafer-thin margin in a seat Andy Burnham is fighting in the hope of using a Westminster perch to challenge Sir Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership.

Mr Burnham’s pitch, a £35bn land value tax paired with a £39bn social care levy, has handed Reform a clean line of attack. Mr Farage, writing in The Telegraph, accused Labour of being “more on the side of welfare” than workers, and argued that ordinary families were being “dragged into higher tax bands with nothing to show for it”.

The policy also bears the unmistakable fingerprints of Donald Trump’s “no tax on tips” pledge, a populist tax cut aimed squarely at the workers Labour assumes will vote for it by reflex.

What it would mean in the workplace

Reform’s worked examples are deliberately granular. A nurse on a 40-hour contract at the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary working six extra hours of overtime each week would, the party claims, take home an additional £5 an hour and be more than £1,300 better off across a year. Workers on the line at the local Heinz factory would gain more than £1,000.

That is a meaningful sum in a constituency where average earnings have lagged the national figure for the better part of a decade, and it speaks to the broader frustration with fiscal drag that has seen more professionals question the value of earning more as frozen thresholds pull them into ever-higher tax bands.

For SME owners, the implications are double-edged. A genuine “hard work bonus” could ease recruitment in sectors where overtime is the difference between covering a shift and turning custom away, hospitality, logistics, social care, construction. Office for National Statistics data on average hours worked by industry already shows healthcare and construction running well above the national mean on weekly hours, and a tax-free top-up could materially shift the labour supply equation.

The flipside is administrative. Reform concedes that anti-avoidance rules will need to be drafted to stop employers reclassifying ordinary hours as overtime, a temptation that will fall hardest on smaller firms without payroll departments. Amendments to the Working Time Regulations, a piece of retained EU law, would also be required.

The fiscal credibility test

This is Mr Farage’s first major tax announcement since October, when he scrapped his £90bn package of cuts in a deliberate move to harden Reform’s fiscal image, a turn already covered by Business Matters in our analysis of the party’s revised manifesto promising seven million workers would pay no income tax.

Reform says the £5bn cost would come out of £40bn in annual savings, ending welfare entitlement for foreign nationals, capping foreign aid at £1bn, axing net zero schemes, removing personal independence payments for non-serious anxiety conditions and trimming Civil Service back-office headcount.

Not everyone is convinced. Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has called the proposal “problematic in principle and practice”, questioning why a tax break should be aimed at employees already clocking 40 hours a week. The behavioural risk — that workers and employers simply restructure existing pay arrangements to qualify, is one HMRC will need to plan for from day one.

There is also context worth noting for British employers. The UK has just seen the largest employer-side tax rise in the developed world on the back of the OECD’s recent labour cost data, a backdrop that has sharpened the appetite for any policy that puts cash back into the take-home pay column without obviously hitting business.

The political read

Polling by More in Common suggests a Burnham-led Labour would beat Reform 30 per cent to 27 per cent in a general election, within the margin, but tighter than the figures Sir Keir is currently posting. Wes Streeting’s pitch this week for a wealth tax, including aligning capital gains tax with income tax to raise £12bn, has further muddied Labour’s message on aspiration.

Into that confusion, Mr Farage has dropped a policy that is easy to explain, easy to cost on the back of a payslip and aimed squarely at the kind of voter neither of the legacy parties can now take for granted.

Whether the Treasury would ever sign it off is another matter entirely. But as a piece of political positioning four weeks out from a by-election Reform was already favoured to win, it is the cleanest piece of retail politics Mr Farage has produced in this cycle.

Read more:
Farage promises tax-free overtime in £5bn pitch to working Britain

The Icelandic-born billionaire behind Nasdaq-listed biosimilars group Alvotech has become the latest international entrepreneur to warn that Britain’s tax direction is making the country uninvestable for mobile capital.

Róbert Wessman, the 56-year-old founder and chief executive of Alvotech and the owner of fast-growing French wine venture Maison Wessman, has told Business Matters in an interview at his Pall Mall club that the “whole package” of inheritance tax, capital gains tax and political instability is steadily pushing him towards the exit.

“It’s just the whole scheme has changed so much, which makes it very difficult, not only for foreigners to come here, but for wealthy people, who live here, are born here, and have always been here, to basically stay here,” Wessman said.

His warning lands as Britain digests the most striking edition of the Sunday Times Rich List in living memory, with one in six members of the 2026 list dropping out and the UK billionaire population falling to 157, twenty fewer than four years ago. Almost a third of the 350 British nationals on the main list no longer live on the British mainland.

‘Not a pro-business country anymore’

Wessman, who moved his family from Reykjavík to London in 2019 and opened a Hammersmith head office for his Aztiq investment vehicle two years later, said he no longer regarded the UK as a pro-business destination.

“At the same time, the stability is not really there. You had Brexit, it was a big issue for the industry, for the country, for the business, and then all the tax legislation now,” he said.

He spoke before the former health secretary Wes Streeting, who has launched a Labour leadership bid against Sir Keir Starmer, pledged what he called a “wealth tax that works”, centred on aligning capital gains rates with income tax. The proposal has been costed by allies at around £12 billion a year.

Asked about politicians’ appetite for taxing the wealthy, Wessman was unsparing: “We see this in many countries, that this can be the flavour of the day for politicians. But in the end, countries are built on employment, on jobs, high-paying jobs preferably, value creation. And hopefully you can then benefit from having the business in the country.”

His comments echo a growing chorus of warnings from international business owners. Henley & Partners has forecast that Britain will lose more millionaires than any country bar China this year, and a BDO survey recently found that two-thirds of the UK’s ultra-wealthy have considered relocating, citing policy inconsistency as a bigger problem than the headline tax rate itself.

From Icelandic generics to Nasdaq biosimilars

Wessman has built, and lost, fortunes before. He turned Delta, an obscure Reykjavík generics business, into Actavis, one of the world’s largest generic drugmakers, before losing an estimated €250 million in the 2008 Icelandic banking crash. That episode triggered a long and bitter legal battle with fellow Icelandic financier Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson over a highly leveraged pre-crisis buyout.

Undeterred, he has founded seven companies over three decades and is now ploughing capital into Alvotech, the Nasdaq, Icelandic and Swedish-listed group he is positioning as a global challenger in biosimilars.

The group has invested $2 billion since 2013, employs 1,500 staff, most of them in Reykjavík, and is being built deliberately as the “fourth leg” of the Icelandic economy alongside fishing, tourism and manufacturing. Alvotech has five approved biosimilars on the market, generated revenues of $593 million last year and is guiding to $650 million to $700 million in 2026. It is currently valued at around $1 billion in New York.

Wessman holds a 35 per cent stake through Luxembourg-domiciled Aztiq, plus a further 30 per cent through a partnership with Temasek, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, and private equity house CVC Capital Partners.

Biosimilars, close copies of complex biological drugs whose patents have expired, are notoriously expensive to develop and frequently trigger patent litigation, as Alvotech experienced in its dispute with AbbVie over the autoimmune blockbuster Humira. Wessman argues they are essential if state-funded healthcare systems are to avoid being “sunk” by the cost of modern biologics.

A château, two million bottles and Norah Jones

His diversification into wine began as a hobby with the 2004 acquisition of the 12th-century Château de Saint-Cernin, near Bergerac, and the release of an inaugural vintage in 2016. Maison Wessman is now on track to produce around two million bottles this year, supplying French retailer Intermarché and backed by the American jazz singer Norah Jones, whom Wessman met through a mutual contact after Enrique Iglesias played at his wedding.

‘We are leaving with a lot of capital, a lot of jobs’

Wessman, who is not a non-dom, said he moved to London “against the stream when Brexit was happening” because of the capital’s practical access to his businesses across Asia, the United States and central and eastern Europe. His Russian-born wife and six children are settled in “world-class” London schools.

“London is the most amazing city to live in. It has amazing education. It has everything to offer. It has amazing history,” he said.

But he believes Brexit was a strategic error for what he called “a very proud nation”, leaving Britain less integrated into European supply chains and badly diminished as a listing venue.

“Since Brexit, many of the big banks don’t ever bring up the UK as an alternative, as a listing venue anymore,” he said.

That listings problem now compounds with sweeping fiscal reform. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has scrapped the centuries-old non-dom regime and replaced it with a new four-year residence-based test for foreign income and gains, plus a residence-based inheritance tax that captures worldwide assets for those resident in the UK for ten of the previous twenty years. Capital gains tax rates were also lifted in the October 2024 Budget to 18 per cent and 24 per cent.

The early evidence is unflattering: around 1,800 non-doms have already quit the UK in the wake of the reforms, raising serious questions about whether the package will deliver the £34 billion Treasury revenue target.

Wessman said he had recently looked at properties in Milan and made clear he was reluctantly being pushed in that direction.

“I don’t regret paying high taxes in the UK,” he said, “but it has to be within certain certainties and scope. I’m sitting with my tax adviser getting an update two to three times a year of what might be coming next, and it’s all over the place. This is not encouraging anyone to live here.”

“I really love to live here. But overall, I think where you have mobile capital, which can be based anywhere, it will push more people out.

“We are leaving with a lot of capital. We are leaving with a lot of jobs. We are leaving without even thinking that the UK would be a good idea to build any manufacturing or R&D or anything. That’s the sad part of it.”

For a government banking on wealthy non-doms to part-fund public services, that is a warning shot from precisely the sort of internationally mobile, job-creating, IP-rich founder the Treasury insists it still wants to attract.

Read more:
Alvotech founder Robert Wessman threatens to quit Britain over ‘anti-wealth’ tax regime

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

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

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

A regulatory pile-on, not a market verdict

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

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

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

The view from UK boardrooms

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

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

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

From record year to flat patch

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

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

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

What it means for SMEs

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

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

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

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

Spanish-owned Encirc, which produces a third of Britain’s glass bottles, is understood to be poised to withdraw a £500m furnace upgrade as Whitehall digs in on a levy the Bank of England says is already feeding through to the till.

Households can expect a fresh round of price rises at the supermarket after ministers confirmed they will press ahead with the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regime, the £2 billion packaging levy that food producers, brand owners and online retailers must pay on every item of packaging they place on the UK market.

Senior officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have told industry leaders in recent days that there will be no climbdown, despite mounting evidence that the scheme is stoking food inflation and chilling investment in British manufacturing. The decision lands at a particularly awkward moment for shoppers, who are already absorbing the supermarket fallout from the Iran-US conflict.

Roughly four-fifths of the EPR bill is passed straight through to consumers, which is why insiders have taken to calling it a “shopping stealth tax”. The cost to the average UK household is estimated at around £50 a year — a figure that will edge higher when fees on coffee cups, soup pots and juice cartons rise by an average of 19 per cent later this year, with charges on plastic packaging up by 15 per cent.

The Bank of England has already attributed around half a percentage point of food inflation directly to EPR, and warned in its most recent Monetary Policy Report that headline CPI could touch 6.2 per cent by the start of 2027, with food inflation running as high as 7 per cent. Disruption to fertiliser exports from the Middle East — particularly painful for the tomato, cucumber and lettuce supply chain — will only sharpen the squeeze.

A levy that local councils have grown to love

In theory, money raised by EPR is supposed to flow to local authorities to upgrade household recycling. In practice, the funding is unhypothecated, meaning cash-strapped town halls are free to redirect it to social care, planning or education budgets. One industry source recounted the unvarnished view of a backbench MP: “Thank goodness it’s coming in, otherwise my council’s going bust fast.”

That political reality helps explain why ministers are reluctant to retreat, even as business groups warn that the design of the regime is doing real economic damage. As Business Matters reported earlier this year, industry chiefs have already sounded the alarm over the “horrific” packaging tax threatening UK businesses, with smaller food producers among those most exposed.

Glass sector on the brink

Nowhere is the strain felt more acutely than in glass. Whitehall is keen to point out that EPR fees on glass will fall when the regime resets in June, but its own projections suggest the reduction will average just 1 per cent. Glass already shoulders £400 million of the up to £2 billion the scheme generates, despite accounting for only 5 per cent of the packaging market by volume. Because EPR is levied by weight, the sector is being asked to pay 27 per cent of total fees.

For an industry that supports 120,000 jobs across its supply chain and contributes £2 billion to GDP, the maths is becoming impossible. Vidrala, the Spanish parent of Encirc, which runs plants in Northern Ireland, Cheshire and Bristol and produces around three billion bottles a year for the likes of Budweiser, Fever-Tree and Smirnoff, is understood to be on the verge of pulling a £500 million investment earmarked for upgrading its furnaces to meet net zero requirements. Encirc declined to comment.

Nick Kirk, federation director at trade body British Glass, said Defra’s response had failed to engage with the evidence. “The policy is already contributing to a sharp decline in domestic glass production, rising imports and growing uncertainty for investment across the sector,” he said.

He pointed out that five of the six UK glass packaging manufacturers are headquartered overseas, and that only one of twelve production sites is operated by a British-owned company. “This ownership structure means that future investment decisions, including the billions of pounds required to transition to net zero glass production, are being made outside the UK. Without the right policy and economic environment, there is a real risk that these investments will be directed to other countries.”

Grocers count the cost

Supermarket chiefs are no happier. Even with the ability to pass on the majority of the levy, one large grocer estimates EPR will widen its own bottom-line hit by roughly a fifth, potentially exceeding the financial impact of the Iran conflict on its commodity book. That tallies with warnings carried in Business Matters that supermarkets believe tax rises will drive food prices higher across the coming year.

Smaller producers, meanwhile, have little headroom to absorb anything. Independent brands have already cautioned that the regime could prove catastrophic for small food businesses, with some warning of lines being delisted or reformulated to lighter, less recyclable substrates simply to reduce the tax footprint.

Government holds the line

Defra insists the scheme is working as intended. “EPR moves the cost of dealing with waste away from taxpayers and generates more than £1 billion annually,” a spokesperson said. “It’s part of a major investment in the UK economy, helping create 25,000 jobs, and we will continue to work with industry as the changes are implemented.”

For Britain’s grocery shoppers, glassmakers and smaller food producers, however, that reassurance is unlikely to land. With the June reset offering only marginal relief, the question now is whether ministers will revisit the design of a tax that the Bank of England, the British Retail Consortium and the country’s largest manufacturers all agree is making a difficult inflationary picture appreciably worse.

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Food bills set to climb as ministers refuse to ditch £2bn packaging levy

Barely two months after the spectacular implosion of the craft brewer he built into a £2bn icon of British entrepreneurship, James Watt is climbing back into the fermentation tank.

The BrewDog co-founder has unveiled Second Best, a new community-funded beer business that will hand up to 19.3 per cent of its equity, free of charge, to the small investors and bar staff whose holdings were obliterated when BrewDog was sold to Canadian-American cannabis and drinks group Tilray Brands for £33m in March.

Announcing the venture on LinkedIn, Mr Watt struck an unusually contrite tone. “Thousands of people trusted me to build a brilliant beer business and create value for them. It was an obligation I took very seriously. And I, for one, am not done with that obligation,” he wrote.

Under the proposal, former BrewDog “Equity Punks” will be invited to become “Second Founders”, claiming a stake in the new company identical in size to the one they held in the old one. “No catches, no cash required, and your equity in Second Best will always rank alongside my own,” Mr Watt said. “You’ll own it. I’ll fund it. And I’ll dedicate myself to building it.”

Almost all former BrewDog bar staff, who held shares at the point of collapse, are also expected to qualify. By Friday evening, Mr Watt told The Telegraph, more than 2,000 former Punks had registered interest – 500 of them within the first ten minutes of his announcement.

A leaner, canned-first model

In a marked departure from the sprawling bricks-and-mortar empire that became BrewDog’s defining feature, Second Best will be built around canned beer rather than pubs. According to the Financial Times, the venture will launch with two pale ales and a lager, brewed in Germany and across Europe. Mr Watt has indicated that a handful of specialist beer-focused pubs may follow once the brand is bedded in.

In a nod to changing British drinking habits, the company will also tease the market with what Mr Watt describes as an “alcohol-adjacent” concept before its first brews land. “I am going to make a non-alcoholic beer for my non-drinking wife,” he said – a reference to his spouse, the former Made in Chelsea star and I’m A Celebrity winner Georgia Toffolo.

The pivot reflects the wider commercial reality facing UK brewers. The low and no-alcohol category has surged past 200 million pints a year, while a punishing combination of input costs, business rates and shrinking discretionary spend has triggered a wave of insolvencies across the craft sector – a backdrop Business Matters has explored in its analysis of whether it is last orders for the UK craft beer sector.

Second Best has yet to secure all the licences and approvals required to begin trading, and no launch date has been confirmed.

From £2bn darling to £33m fire sale

The new venture marks a striking second act for one of Britain’s most polarising entrepreneurs. Founded by Mr Watt and Martin Dickie in a unit in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, in 2007, BrewDog rode the craft beer wave to operate more than 120 bars across 57 countries and was valued at around £2bn at the height of its 2021 fundraising.

That high water mark proved fleeting. Five consecutive years of losses from 2019 onwards combined with mounting debts to its private equity backer, TSG Consumer Partners, to leave liabilities of more than £800m by the time of the brewer’s collapse. The eventual sale to Tilray, which Business Matters covered in detail at the time of the £33m rescue deal that closed 38 bars and cut 484 jobs, wiped out TSG, both founders and the entire Equity for Punks community – an army of more than 200,000 small investors who had collectively put in around £75m over seven crowdfunding rounds.

For Mr Watt, the fallout came on top of a difficult few years personally and professionally. He stepped down as chief executive in 2024, a move chronicled in Business Matters’ coverage of his departure amid controversies over workplace culture allegations first raised by more than 60 former employees in 2021. He has consistently said management needed to “listen, learn and act”.

Following March’s sale he publicly described himself as “heartbroken” for the Equity Punks who “did not get the return on their investment they wanted” and for having “dedicated the best 20 years of my life to something that ultimately did not have the ending we all wished for”.

Will the Punks bite a second time?

The central commercial question is whether trust, once forfeited at this scale, can be rebuilt. Equity Punks were as much a marketing engine as a funding mechanism; their evangelism turned BrewDog into a household name. Reproducing that flywheel without the headline-grabbing pub rollouts – and without the eye-catching valuations that powered successive raises – will be the test.

Industry observers note that Mr Watt is, in effect, attempting to invert the BrewDog playbook: lighter on capital expenditure, heavier on community ownership, and explicitly self-funded by the founder rather than underwritten by private equity. Coverage by trade title The Grocer suggests the canned-first, Europe-brewed approach is designed to keep fixed costs low and routes-to-market flexible while the brand finds its footing.

Whether it works will depend less on the beer and more on the maths. As City AM noted in its analysis of the “equity punk” comeback, Mr Watt’s pledge that Second Founders will always rank alongside him is a direct response to the preferential share structure that left ordinary BrewDog investors at the back of the queue when the music stopped.

“I feel an obligation to the Equity Punk investors. I want to try to create the future of beer,” Mr Watt told the Financial Times. “Hopefully, the second beer business I build with the community will be the best one.”

The name, at least, sets the expectations accordingly.

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James Watt plots brewing comeback with community-owned Second Best venture

Bradford-based grocer pitches its Myton manufacturing arm to Sainsbury’s and other supermarket rivals as it tries to grind down a £3.1bn debt pile inherited from its 2021 private equity takeover.

Morrisons is in advanced conversations with rival British supermarkets to start supplying them with own-brand pies, meat and eggs produced by its Myton manufacturing division, as chief executive Rami Baitiéh hunts for fresh sources of revenue to ease the grocer’s heavy debt burden.

The Bradford-based chain, one of the so-called Big Four, is understood to have ushered buyers from competing retailers into a Myton factory in recent weeks, with Sainsbury’s among the grocers to have toured production sites previously. The push marks a notable shift in posture: Morrisons has historically guarded the output of its 17 UK manufacturing sites as a competitive moat, but is now willing to feed rivals’ shelves if it brings in profitable third-party volume.

Myton is one of the country’s largest food manufacturers and produces Morrisons’ sweet and savoury pie ranges, while also sourcing meat, fish, eggs and even flowers for the supermarket. It already serves a clutch of independent retailers and is now being pitched to large hospitality groups as well, with showcase events held in recent months to highlight its British-made credentials.

£3.1bn debt overhang from the CD&R takeover

The wider strategic context is hard to ignore. In its most recent set of accounts, covering the 52 weeks to 26 October, the grocer posted a pre-tax loss of £381m after absorbing a £281m interest bill on its borrowings. Net debt stood at £3.1bn at the year-end, an overhang from the £10bn leveraged buy-out by US private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice in 2021.

Morrisons has been steadily chiselling away at that figure, gross debt is down roughly 46 per cent from its 2022 peak, helped by a series of sale-and-leaseback deals, but the interest cost still dwarfs reported profits. Underlying earnings of £835m and twelve consecutive quarters of positive like-for-like sales growth, as detailed in the company’s full-year results, suggest the operating business is in markedly better shape than the bottom line implies.

That is where Myton comes in. While Morrisons does not break out the division’s numbers, it is widely understood inside the business to be profitable, with spare manufacturing capacity that executives believe could be sweated harder by serving a broader customer base, at home and overseas.

Closures, cafés and a streamlined estate

The supply-side push lands alongside an aggressive cost programme. Morrisons has confirmed plans to close 100 convenience stores, shuttered a swathe of in-store cafés, counters and florists, and has been trimming head office headcount as it leans into automation and AI. Earlier this year, Myton itself closed its loss-making Wakefield bakery in a sign that no part of the empire is sacrosanct.

Competitive pressure has not abated either. Discounters Aldi and Lidl continue to nibble at the heels of the traditional Big Four, with Aldi having overtaken Morrisons to become Britain’s fourth-largest supermarket by market share, a shift that has sharpened the urgency behind any plan capable of widening the grocer’s margin pool.

Sale considered, then parked

The latest outreach follows an episode earlier in the year, first reported by The Telegraph, in which Morrisons received an unsolicited approach for Myton and held talks with at least one private equity bidder about an outright sale. The Grocer subsequently reported that the supermarket was no longer in active negotiations to offload the unit.

Mr Baitiéh has been notably bullish on keeping manufacturing in-house. In January, the Frenchman, who joined from Carrefour in 2023, said vertical integration was “part of the DNA of Morrisons, it’s going to stay”, arguing that owning the factories gives the grocer a point of difference against rivals reliant on a patchwork of external suppliers.

For SME food producers watching from the sidelines, the move is double-edged. Morrisons remains a major buyer from British farmers and small food businesses, but a more commercially aggressive Myton, selling pies and meat into Sainsbury’s, hospitality chains and beyond, could either crowd out smaller competitors or open up new co-manufacturing opportunities, depending on how the contracts are structured.

A spokesman for the supermarket said: “Myton is a high-quality food manufacturing business and has always served other customers as well as Morrisons. We have been growing this area of the business over recent years by attracting new customers in retail, food service and food manufacturing, to build a broader base for the business both in the UK and internationally. Myton does not comment on the detail of its customer relationships.”

What it means for the turnaround

Strip out the headline loss and the picture at Morrisons is one of a grocer slowly clawing back relevance: solid Christmas trading, a 17.4 per cent jump in sales of its premium “The Best” range, and a debt pile that is shrinking rather than spiralling. Pushing Myton’s produce onto rival shelves is unlikely, on its own, to crack the debt problem, but it is a low-capital lever that uses existing assets, and one that Mr Baitiéh appears determined to pull.

If the early site visits convert into supply contracts, expect Morrisons’ annual report to start carving out Myton’s contribution more explicitly. Investors, lenders and, eventually, any future bidder would all want to see it.

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Morrisons courts rival grocers in bid to widen Myton supply deals

A change-of-control clause held by Britain’s wealthiest make-up artist has emerged as the unlikely catalyst behind the collapse of one of the cosmetics industry’s most ambitious tie-ups in a generation.

Charlotte Tilbury has effectively torpedoed a $40bn (£30bn) merger between Spanish luxury group Puig and New York-listed Estée Lauder, after a row over the size of the payout she would have been entitled to demand once the deal completed.

The two beauty conglomerates had been in discussions since March about combining to create what would have been the world’s largest premium skincare and fragrance business, capable of taking on the dominant L’Oréal. By Thursday evening, both sides had walked away.

The Tilbury-branded business is owned by Barcelona-based Puig, which also counts Rabanne and Jean Paul Gaultier among its labels. Estée Lauder, headquartered in Manhattan, owns Jo Malone London, Clinique, Aveda, MAC, Tom Ford Beauty and Bobbi Brown. Sources close to the talks told Business Matters that while several issues had complicated negotiations, the standoff over Ms Tilbury’s stake was the single largest factor in the deal unravelling.

“Estée Lauder was not going to do the deal at any cost,” one person familiar with the discussions said. “They walked away because it didn’t make financial sense any more.”

The clause that cost €900m

When Puig acquired a majority stake in Charlotte Tilbury Beauty in 2020 for a reported $1.2bn, the deal preserved a minority shareholding for the founder and her early backers — and, crucially, embedded a change-of-control clause permitting her to crystallise that stake should ownership of Puig itself change hands.

A merger with Estée Lauder would have triggered precisely that mechanism. Analysts at Jefferies have estimated that buying out Ms Tilbury under the clause could have cost Puig in the region of €900m, a sum the Americans were unwilling to absorb into the transaction economics. The Spanish newspaper Expansión was first to report the dispute.

That figure, set against an already complicated balance-of-power negotiation between the Puig and Lauder families, proved one variable too many. Markets responded accordingly: shares in Estée Lauder jumped as much as 16 per cent after the news broke, while Puig’s stock fell roughly 15 per cent in Madrid, the steepest single-day decline since its 2024 flotation, according to Bloomberg.

From Selfridges concession to global empire

The collapse caps a remarkable decade for Ms Tilbury, who launched her eponymous brand from a concession in Selfridges’ Oxford Street store in 2013 after more than two decades behind the make-up chair for Hollywood stars including Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry.

Trained under Mary Greenwell, the make-up artist for Diana, Princess of Wales, she rose to prominence during the supermodel boom of the 1990s before becoming make-up director for Prada and Alexander McQueen. Her celebrity friendships have remained central to the brand’s marketing playbook; both Kim Kardashian and Salma Hayek have launched lipstick collections with the company.

A first standalone flagship opened in Covent Garden in 2015, and the brand was quickly stocked internationally. Her early YouTube following, built on skincare advice and tutorials, gave Charlotte Tilbury Beauty a direct-to-consumer engine well before the category was fashionable. By 2018 she had been made an MBE for services to the beauty and cosmetics industry, and as of March 2025 she topped the Sunday Times ranking of Britain’s wealthiest beauty entrepreneurs with an estimated net worth of £350m.

Now 53, she is married to film producer George Waud and divides her time between Notting Hill and Ibiza, where she grew up. The £1bn sale of her majority stake to Puig in 2020 cemented her position as one of the most commercially successful founders Britain’s beauty sector has produced, and, as this week’s events demonstrate, gave her uncommon leverage over her acquirer’s strategic options.

A turnaround, not a transformation

For Stéphane de La Faverie, Estée Lauder’s chief executive, the collapse means refocusing on a standalone turnaround plan that Wall Street had quietly been pushing him to prioritise. Analysts had been sceptical that the group could integrate Puig’s brand portfolio while simultaneously cutting thousands of jobs and rebuilding its presence in China, duty-free travel retail and the prestige skincare market.

The New York group has spent the past 18 months pushing into lower price tiers to recruit younger shoppers, while accelerating sales through Amazon and TikTok Shop — channels where it has historically been under-indexed. The Tilbury impasse arguably gives Mr de La Faverie permission to keep his head down and execute.

“We are grateful for the conversations we have had with Puig,” he said in a statement. “Today, we are reiterating our confidence in the power of our incredible brands, our talented teams and our strength as a standalone company.”

What it means for the founder economy

For the wider SME and founder community, the episode is a reminder of how much value a well-drafted minority-stake agreement can preserve, and how much disruption it can cause when interests diverge from those of the controlling shareholder. Reports last year suggested Ms Tilbury had been eyeing a payout north of £500m from any future transaction; the fact that her clause has now flattened a $40bn deal will not be lost on the next generation of UK consumer-brand founders sitting across the table from private equity and strategic acquirers.

Puig and Charlotte Tilbury Beauty declined to comment. Estée Lauder has been approached for further comment.

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Charlotte Tilbury’s payout demand scuppers £30bn Estée Lauder–Puig beauty mega-merger