Business

Britain’s beleaguered car industry has eked out its first monthly increase of the year, a flicker of momentum that the trade body warns could just as easily be snuffed out by stubbornly high energy costs and a fractious global trade picture.

Factories rolled 49,200 vehicles off their lines in May, up 2.3 per cent on the same month a year earlier, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. It is a modest figure by historical standards, but a welcome one after a run of declines that had become wearily familiar to anyone watching the sector.

The catch, and there is always a catch, is that the year-to-date numbers remain firmly in the red. UK plants have produced 306,000 cars in the first five months of 2026, down 4.1 per cent on the same period last year. May’s bounce, in other words, has trimmed the deficit rather than erased it.

Some of the month’s improvement is a quirk of the calendar. This time last year, Jaguar Land Rover, the Solihull-based maker of the Range Rover, paused shipments to the United States after President Trump slapped fresh tariffs on British exports. Set against that depressed base, almost any number was going to look better. The plants behind the figures read like a roll-call of what remains of British volume manufacturing: Nissan in Sunderland, JLR in Solihull and BMW’s Mini factory in Oxford.

It is worth holding May’s number up against the longer arc of decline. In 2016, when the country voted to leave the European Union, Britain was assembling more than 1.7 million cars a year. The current rolling 12-month average sits at 704,000, less than half that. The slump has been a long time in the making, and a single good month does not reverse it.

If the car numbers are sobering, the commercial vehicle figures are grim. UK factories built 11,500 vans in the year to date, a fall of 60 per cent year-on-year. On a rolling 12-month basis the total stands at 30,000, less than a quarter of what the country was turning out just two years ago.

The collapse follows Stellantis’s decision to shut its historic Luton van plant and convert Ellesmere Port into a low-volume electric van operation. The owner of Vauxhall has, in effect, taken a large slice of British van-making capacity off the board, and the data now reflects it. The country’s output recently slid to its lowest level in decades, a reminder of how quickly industrial capacity can erode once the investment case weakens.

The SMMT, which compiles the figures, is blunt about the causes: punishing energy costs, the unpredictability of international trade, particularly with the United States, and a domestic market that remains soft.

“May’s growth is welcome, and the priority must be to turn this into a sustained recovery by making the UK more competitive as a place to make and sell vehicles,” said Mike Hawes, the society’s chief executive.

He also pointed to a threat on the horizon. New EU trade barriers due next year could shut British automotive firms out of European supply chains if their products or components are deemed to be manufactured outside the bloc, a technicality with potentially expensive consequences for an industry that sends most of its output across the Channel. The full breakdown sits in the SMMT’s vehicle manufacturing data, and the message running through it is consistent: the firms that survived the long contraction are doing so on the finest of margins.

For now, the industry will take the win. A single month of growth is not a recovery, but after a year that has tested the sector’s resilience to the limit, it is at least a reason to look up. Whether it becomes the start of something more durable depends less on the factories themselves than on the cost of the electricity that powers them and the trade rules that govern where their cars can go, themes the government set out to address in its advanced manufacturing plan.

Anthropic, one of America’s most valuable artificial intelligence firms, has accused the Chinese e-commerce and technology giant Alibaba of “brazenly” and “illicitly” extracting the capabilities of its Claude AI model, in what it has branded the largest campaign of its kind yet seen.

In a letter to senior members of the US Senate Banking Committee, the San Francisco-based developer said operators linked to Alibaba conducted almost 29 million exchanges with Claude using roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts. The activity, it said, ran between 22 April and 5 June and amounted to “the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities” recorded to date, according to the company’s account first reported by CNBC.

The letter, addressed to committee chairman Tim Scott and ranking member Elizabeth Warren, urged Congress to penalise the companies behind such attacks and to tighten the measures designed to stop American technology being siphoned off by overseas rivals.

According to Anthropic, the operation relied on what are known as “distillation attacks”, a technique in which answers are extracted from a stronger AI model to train a weaker one, sidestepping the export controls that govern the sale of model weights themselves.

The Alibaba-linked operators are said to have targeted Claude’s most commercially valuable functions, among them agentic reasoning, software engineering proficiency and the ability to see longer, more complex tasks through to completion. Attacks of this kind, Anthropic argued, are now being run on an “industrial scale” so that Chinese firms can harvest American AI capabilities and repackage them as their own.

For Anthropic, the financial stakes are considerable. “Distillation attacks turn hundreds of billions of dollars in American investment and research and development into a massive subsidy for our geopolitical competitors,” the company wrote.

It is not the first time the firm has raised the alarm. In February, Anthropic said it had identified three separate “industrial-scale” distillation campaigns linked to the Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax. The Alibaba episode, on its figures, dwarfs all three.

The letter also pointed to alleged activity that Anthropic said could threaten the US military, citing the Department of Defense’s assessment that Alibaba, alongside the carmaker BYD and the search firm Baidu, has ties to China’s armed forces.

The companies have rejected any such suggestion. Alibaba this month filed a lawsuit against the US government seeking removal from the Pentagon’s so-called 1260H list, which designates firms judged to be Chinese military companies. From 30 June, the Defense Department will be barred from buying goods or services from any listed business.

American developers have repeatedly accused Chinese competitors of using distillation to build rival systems at a fraction of the cost of training a frontier model from scratch. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has levelled similar claims in the past.

The accusations land at a delicate juncture for Anthropic. The company is widely regarded as a leading AI developer and, alongside OpenAI, is being tipped for a stock market debut that could rank it among the most valuable businesses in the world. OpenAI has already given staff a taste of the rewards on offer, with employees recently cashing out billions of dollars in a share sale.

Yet Anthropic’s frontier technology has also become a lightning rod for security concerns. Its most advanced models, including Mythos, have alarmed governments over their capacity to find and exploit weaknesses in computer systems, prompting finance ministers to warn that the technology could threaten the stability of the banking system. Those same capabilities sit at the heart of Washington’s tightening grip on who may access the models at all, with Britain among the governments seeking an exemption from a US ban on Anthropic’s most powerful systems.

For Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses, increasingly reliant on AI tools to compete with larger rivals, the dispute is a reminder that the technology underpinning their productivity gains is now bound up in a high-stakes contest between the world’s two largest economies, one in which the rules are still being written.

The price of oil has fallen back to levels not seen since before the Iran war, handing hard-pressed UK businesses the prospect of cheaper fuel as traffic through the critical Strait of Hormuz shipping lane gradually resumes.

Brent crude, the global benchmark, briefly dipped below $72.48 (£55) a barrel, the level it sat at the day before the United States and Israel launched their attacks on Iran on 28 February, before edging back up to $73.23.

Energy markets have endured a torrid few months since Tehran retaliated by effectively closing the strait, a waterway that carries a substantial share of the world’s seaborne oil and gas. For the haulage, hospitality and agricultural firms that have watched their fuel bills balloon since the spring, the retreat in crude cannot come soon enough. Many smaller operators have spent the conflict simply trying to absorb costs they could not pass on, a squeeze Business Matters has tracked among hauliers, hotels and farms pushed into survival mode.

Crude has been falling steadily since 17 June, when Washington and Tehran signed a Memorandum of Understanding setting out a 60-day window for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme and other measures aimed at ending the war. Representatives from both sides met in Switzerland last weekend, talks that led the United States to partially lift sanctions on Iranian oil exports.

The number of vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz has risen sharply since the agreement was struck, according to maritime intelligence firm Kpler. Its latest figures suggest 284 vessels made the transit from 18 June, the day after the deal was signed, although that remains well below the pre-conflict average of around 138 crossings a day. The ships passing through in recent days have included those carrying crude oil, liquefied natural gas, fertiliser and other goods, Kpler told the BBC.

The United States and Iran have also established a “communication line” to prevent misunderstandings “with the aim of safe passage for commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz”, mediators Qatar and Pakistan said in a joint statement on Monday.

Dimitris Maniatis, chief executive of maritime risk advisory firm Marisks, which is working with ships stranded in the region, described a “tremendous shift”, with far more vessels using the strait in recent days. A limited number of ships can cross a northern passageway with the permission of Iranian authorities, he said, while the US navy has set out a southern route cleared of mines and other obstacles laid during the war. Even so, traffic remains below the pre-war norm, when more than 100 ships a day used the route.

For drivers and the firms that run vans and lorries, attention has now turned to how quickly the fall in crude feeds through to the forecourt.

“On the back of the lowest oil price since before the Iran war started, drivers should see the average price of petrol fall below 150p [a litre] in the next week or so,” said Simon Williams, head of policy at the RAC. He added that diesel “ought to go back under 160p”. Petrol peaked at 159.53p a litre on 28 May, according to the motoring group, while diesel has eased from a high of 191.54p on 15 April. Drivers can track the daily averages through the RAC’s Fuel Watch data, and the longer-term trend is laid out in the House of Commons Library’s briefing on petrol and diesel prices.

In the United States, the average price of regular petrol has slipped to around $3.93 a gallon after touching $4 in April, its highest since 2022, though it remains well above pre-war levels.

The pace of those falls has become political. President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered an investigation into the major energy companies, accusing Shell, ExxonMobil and others of “gouging” drivers by failing to cut pump prices even as crude costs tumbled. “Oil prices have come down so much and we are not seeing anything at the pump by comparison the way they should be,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. The American Petroleum Institute, which represents the US oil and gas industry, countered that fuel prices “don’t move in lockstep with crude oil”.

British energy firms have faced similar accusations of unfairly inflating petrol prices since the war began. Last month, however, the UK competition watchdog said it had found no widespread evidence of profiteering, noting that average margins were “broadly unchanged” between February and March.

For now, the direction of travel offers a measure of comfort to the millions of smaller firms for whom fuel is an unavoidable line on the balance sheet, and for whom relief has been a long time coming. Whether the easing endures will depend on whether the fragile peace holds, and on how far the broader pressure of stubbornly high energy costs on UK business continues to bite.

Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, are among a group of individuals now being sued personally as liquidators attempt to recover the millions owed to the taxpayer by his collapsed company, PPE Medpro.

The move marks a sharp escalation in a saga that has come to symbolise the cost of pandemic-era procurement. Having already secured a £122m judgment plus interest against the firm last year, the government is watching as the joint liquidators from Interpath Advisory pursue those who stood behind it. A High Court ruling found that PPE Medpro had breached its contract to supply sterile surgical gowns at the height of the Covid-19 crisis.

Interpath has launched a case against six individuals and five companies linked to the firm, after PPE Medpro was placed into liquidation. Mone and Barrowman have been approached for comment.

PPE Medpro was set up in 2020 as Whitehall scrambled to secure protective equipment for frontline health workers during the most acute phase of the outbreak. It won its first government contract to supply masks through the now-notorious “VIP lane”, following a recommendation by Baroness Mone, who sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer. The fast-track route, used for politically connected suppliers, has since drawn heavy criticism from the Commons Public Accounts Committee and become emblematic of how billions were spent under pressure.

By the end of 2022, however, the government had sued the firm, claiming the medical gowns it supplied did not meet the relevant healthcare standards. Last year the High Court found in the government’s favour, ruling that PPE Medpro had failed to prove whether or not its surgical gowns, intended for NHS workers, had undergone a validated sterilisation process.

Winning the case was one thing; recovering the money quite another. The company itself held less than £1m on its balance sheet and was put into liquidation in December 2025. Wes Streeting, then health secretary, accused PPE Medpro of putting “NHS staff and patients in danger with substandard kit whilst lining their own pockets with taxpayers’ money at a time of national crisis”, and pledged to pursue the firm with “everything we’ve got”.

For business owners watching from the sidelines, the personal dimension is the striking part. Barrowman and Mone were never directors of PPE Medpro, and for a long time denied any connection to it at all. That position unravelled in 2023, when Barrowman confirmed in a BBC interview that he was the company’s ultimate beneficial owner, and Mone admitted she was a beneficiary of a trust that had received some of the firm’s profits.

The individuals being sued also include four former directors of PPE Medpro, among them Arthur Lancaster, an accountant and business associate of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Lancaster has been approached for comment. News of the case was first reported by the tax expert Dan Neidle.

The liquidators are not the only creditors circling. It emerged last year that HMRC had also lodged a £39m claim against PPE Medpro for tax it says the company owed.

The Department of Health and Social Care said the recovery of funds was a matter for the appointed liquidators and that it would not be appropriate for ministers to intervene, though it added that the government had been clear it expects robust action. Interpath declined to comment. Separately, the National Crime Agency is continuing a criminal investigation into PPE Medpro.

For the SME community, the case is fast becoming a reference point on the limits of the corporate veil. Where a company has been emptied of cash and wound up, liquidators retain real teeth, and ultimate beneficial owners can find the spotlight turning squarely on them.

Apple has raised the price of its iPads and MacBooks by as much as 25 per cent, conceding that it can no longer shield customers from the spiralling cost of memory and storage chips, the very components now being hoovered up by the artificial intelligence industry’s relentless data centre build-out.

The increases spare the iPhone, still comfortably the company’s biggest earner. They do, however, land squarely on the MacBook Neo, the entry-level laptop Apple launched to prise market share away from cheaper Windows and Chrome machines. Its starting price has jumped from $599 to $699 just months after it went on sale, blunting much of the pricing advantage that made it such a disruptive proposition in the first place.

That even Apple, a company whose supply-chain muscle is the envy of the technology world, has been forced to act tells you how acute the squeeze has become. The world’s most valuable consumer electronics maker is not immune to a memory price surge that has darkened the outlook for the entire hardware sector.

The numbers behind the retreat are sobering. The research firm IDC expects the global smartphone market to suffer its steepest-ever annual decline this year, falling close to 14 per cent, while the PC market is forecast to shrink by 11.3 per cent. According to IDC’s latest analysis, the memory crisis is the single biggest factor dragging shipments lower, with average selling prices being pushed to record highs even as fewer devices leave the shelves.

The root of the problem lies upstream. Memory makers such as Micron have spent recent months prioritising orders from AI chipmakers like Nvidia, a strategy that has delivered record profits but left precious little supply for the manufacturers of phones, tablets and laptops. Those firms have, in turn, been left with little choice but to raise prices.

Apple did not dress up the situation. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” the company said on Thursday. “We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products. We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.”

The repricing is broad. A MacBook Air with 512 gigabytes of storage has climbed 18 per cent, from $1,099 to $1,299, while the MacBook Pro with 1 terabyte of storage has risen by a similar margin, from $1,699 to $1,999. The sharpest jump falls on an iPad Air with 128 gigabytes of storage, up just over 25 per cent from $599 to $749.

Apple had seen this coming. In April the company said existing inventories had helped it keep gross margins above Wall Street’s expectations, but warned that “significantly higher” memory costs would start to catch up by the end of this month, with profitability expected to dip. On a call with analysts, chief executive Tim Cook was blunt about the road ahead: “Beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business.” It is a theme we explored when Cook first signalled the rises were unavoidable.

The scale of the underlying shock is extraordinary. The price of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, found in virtually every modern gadget, rose by as much as 98 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 and is set to climb by a further 58 to 63 per cent this quarter, according to market research from TrendForce, which has repeatedly revised its forecasts upward as the imbalance deepens.

This so-called RAMageddon has been driven by the boom in AI data centre construction, with Nvidia and its peers signing long-term deals to lock in supply. Micron said on Wednesday it had secured $22 billion (£16.7 billion) in such long-term commitments, a sum that underlines just how much capacity is being diverted away from consumer devices and towards the AI build-out, the same demand fuelling the latest generation of AI-focused silicon.

Ben Bajarin, chief executive of the technology consulting firm Creative Strategies, sees little relief on the horizon. “The memory environment is tough and remains structurally tough for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We had already had signals Apple would need to raise prices, and with their supply chain as good as anyone, there is concern the rest of the industry may have to raise prices even more than Apple.”

For Apple, the timing is awkward. The MacBook Neo had helped underpin a bullish sales forecast for the June quarter and prompted some industry watchers to revise their PC estimates upward. It has now surrendered a meaningful chunk of its price advantage over rivals such as the latest Chromebooks from Lenovo and Asus, and the XPS 13 laptop unveiled by Dell last month.

The wider lesson is harder to ignore. If the most formidable buyer in consumer electronics, fresh from posting record iPhone numbers, cannot hold the line on pricing, the smaller manufacturers further down the chain have even less room to manoeuvre. For consumers, and for the small businesses that kit out their teams with this hardware, the era of steadily cheaper computing power may, at least for now, be on pause.

The next prime minister must back companies rather than tax them if Britain is to lift a “cost of doing business crisis” that is throttling growth, the head of the British Chambers of Commerce will warn this week.

Shevaun Haviland, director-general of one of Britain’s big five business lobby groups, will address political and corporate leaders at the BCC’s annual conference in London on Thursday, against a backdrop of mounting speculation that Andy Burnham will enter No 10 next month following Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation on Monday.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride and Andy Haldane, the BCC president, are also due to speak, alongside senior figures from Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party. Haldane, the Bank of England’s former chief economist, has been appointed to lead the BCC and is understood to be advising Burnham as the Greater Manchester mayor races to build out a policy platform.

Reeves is expected to tell delegates that the government remains focused on delivering economic stability and certainty, and to restate the growth opportunities she set out in her Mais Lecture in March, including the Oxford-Cambridge technology supercluster.

In her own address, Haviland is expected to warn the next administration that further business taxes “would be a road to ruin” and the “quickest way to destroy the fragile confidence that we have left”.

She will say: “The difficult truth is, whoever leads the UK, the primary challenge remains the same: delivering growth. Despite all our strengths, we are failing to fulfil our potential. Businesses can feel it and voters can feel it too.”

Haviland is expected to single out policy choices over the past decade for making “doing business even tougher”. She will say: “At a time of huge economic shocks and global headwinds, successive UK governments have chosen to pile more and more cost on companies. That is no way to run an economy.”

Her intervention chimes with survey evidence showing business confidence sinking to a two-year low amid tax rises and global trade tensions, a backdrop that has left many firms reluctant to commit to new investment.

Haviland will warn that whoever sits in No 10, or the Treasury, must grasp that a lack of confidence is undermining the country’s ambition, ideas, talent and, ultimately, its growth.

“Weak confidence reduces appetite for risk, which reduces investment, which hampers growth, which knocks confidence further,” she will say. “And this circular crisis of confidence is now shackling ambition, blocking the actions needed to invest, innovate and trade.”

She will add: “Businesses can only deliver growth if the environment they operate in gives them the confidence to act. And that is where political leadership can make all the difference.”

The director-general, who leads an organisation representing tens of thousands of companies through its national network of accredited chambers, will also repeat calls for co-operation between government and unions to stop the Employment Rights Act having a “similar confidence crushing effect”.

Her warning lands amid a chorus from other large business groups. The Confederation of British Industry has cautioned this week that the cost of doing business is nearing a “tipping point”, with its leadership pressing for stability and against further tax rises on firms.

The concern across the sector is consistent: that the cumulative weight of taxation and regulation is eroding the very investment the country needs. Research has previously suggested that Reeves’s tax plans risk driving businesses overseas, a flight that would compound rather than cure Britain’s growth problem.

For Haviland, the message to the incoming prime minister is blunt. Growth will not be legislated or taxed into existence; it has to be earned by giving companies a reason to believe again.

Elon Musk has lost his trillionaire status barely weeks after claiming it, as shares in SpaceX and the electric carmaker Tesla came under heavy pressure this week.

The entrepreneur’s total net worth slipped to $957bn on Wednesday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the daily ranking of the world’s richest people. It is a striking reversal for a businessman who, only this month, became the first person in history to be valued at more than $1tn.

Musk crossed that threshold when SpaceX made its long-awaited stock market debut. The aerospace group raised a record-breaking $75bn at a valuation of $1.75tn, instantly placing it among the most valuable companies on the planet and turbo-charging its founder’s paper fortune.

The shares have been anything but settled since. After listing, the stock surged, briefly carrying SpaceX above a $2tn valuation and lifting Musk’s estimated wealth to $1.1tn. They have since fallen sharply from that peak, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars from the company’s market value.

The slide appears to have been amplified by SpaceX’s relatively small public float. With only a modest slice of the company freely traded, comparatively limited volumes have been enough to trigger outsized swings in the price, a dynamic familiar to anyone who has watched thinly traded listings whip about in their early sessions.

Some investors also pointed to the group’s $25bn bond sale, completed this week, which SpaceX said would help repay a bridging loan taken out in March. The fundraising is a reminder of the sheer capital intensity of the business, a venture that consumes cash at a pace few firms could sustain.

SpaceX shares fell a further 0.8 per cent on Wednesday to $154.83 in New York. Tesla, where Musk remains chief executive, dropped 1.6 per cent to $375.61, extending a difficult run for a company that has already been wrestling with questions over its leadership and direction.

Tesla has been swept up in a broader sell-off across technology and growth stocks, as investors reassess lofty valuations. Sentiment soured further after a Bank of America report forecast three US interest rate rises this year to counter rising inflation, while Goldman Sachs unsettled markets by drawing comparisons between today’s technology rally and the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s.

In a note flagging the tension between strong fundamentals and stretched valuations, analysts at the investment bank wrote: “The macro story around AI still looks quite secure, especially compared to the late 1990s. The investment boom still appears to have room to grow, in the absence of unexpected shocks, so the outlook for beneficiaries of that boom still looks supportive. But the market has continued to boost the value it is assigning to those future gains, making it more vulnerable to any news that challenges that optimistic assessment.”

For all the drama, Musk remains comfortably the world’s richest person, and his trillionaire milestone may yet prove a question of timing rather than a closed chapter, particularly given the $1tn Tesla pay package his shareholders approved. According to the Bloomberg index, the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rank second and third, with $297bn and $276bn respectively, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos follows on $257bn.

Whether this week marks a blip or the start of a longer correction, it underlines an uncomfortable truth for founder-led growth companies: when a fortune is built almost entirely on the share price of two volatile businesses, the path back below $1tn can be every bit as swift as the climb above it.

Geopolitical uncertainty has become the single biggest risk hanging over the shipping industry, with vessels and cargo worth roughly $125 billion still stranded in the Persian Gulf, waiting for transit through the Strait of Hormuz to resume, according to Allianz Commercial.

In its latest industry review, published on Wednesday, the insurer said the closure and reported mining of the strait were only the most recent in a run of disruptions to batter global shipping. For owner-managed firms and exporters watching freight costs climb, it is another reminder of how quickly a distant conflict can land on the balance sheet at home.

The developments point to what Allianz calls a “new maritime order”: escalating security risks along the world’s most strategic shipping corridors, established trade routes thrown into disarray, persistent uncertainty, higher risk premiums and a renewed emphasis on resilience over cost efficiency.

Allianz’s data shows that around 1,150 cargo-carrying vessels and as many as 20,000 seafarers are currently stuck in the Gulf. Behind the headline figure sits a human one: crews who have spent months on board, facing the constant threat of attack and the mental strain that comes with it.

Thomas Lillelund, chief executive of Allianz Commercial, said the industry had gone from decades of relative calm, with steady trade flows and largely predictable operating conditions, to a far more complex and volatile environment.

“The Middle East conflict and Strait of Hormuz closure is just the latest in a series of severe interruptions to hit shipowners and cargo operators,” he said. “Resilience, geopolitics and efficiency must be balanced in an increasingly unpredictable world, where the cost of uncertainty is reshaping the shipping industry.”

The strait matters far beyond the insurance market. The US Energy Information Administration describes it as the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint, carrying around a fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption, with very few alternative routes if it closes. That helps explain why disruption there has already pushed oil prices close to $120 a barrel and why the International Energy Agency has warned of a 1.8 million barrel-a-day shortfall this year.

Allianz was at pains to stress that marine insurance has remained available throughout the conflict, albeit at higher hull and cargo premiums. The bigger problem for shipowners, it said, has been less about insurance and more about the basic risk to vessels and crews when sailing through an active conflict zone.

Even if the US and Iran peace agreement holds and the strait reopens, the insurer cautioned, owners will want firm assurances of safe passage, especially if traffic is to return to pre-war levels of up to 140 vessels a day.

“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz sets a dangerous precedent and raises questions around the long-term future of this and other critical chokepoints,” said Captain Rahul Khanna, global head of marine risk consulting at Allianz Commercial.

“What is becoming clear is that we have to pay a price for uncertainty, shifting from ‘just-in-time’ to ‘just-in-case’ supply chains, and prioritising resilience over cost efficiency.”

For UK firms, the lesson is uncomfortably familiar. The pandemic, the Suez blockage and the Red Sea attacks each exposed how exposed lean, just-in-time supply chains can be, and the Gulf crisis is now adding fresh insurance and freight costs to goods that have barely left port. Resilience, once treated as an optional extra, is fast becoming a competitive necessity, which is one reason a growing number of smaller exporters are rethinking their routes to market and diversifying their sales channels to spread the risk.

The full picture is set out in Allianz Commercial’s Safety and Shipping Review, which notes that, even as long-term safety records improve, the structural risks facing global trade are intensifying. For an industry that has long competed on cost, the price of certainty is suddenly the figure that matters most.

For UK small businesses, the question of how long to hold onto customer data is not as simple as picking a number and sticking with it. There is no single fixed retention period under UK GDPR.

Instead, the law requires that personal data be kept only for as long as necessary for the purpose it was originally collected — and businesses must be able to justify that decision in writing.

This places a real operational burden on SMBs. A business that collects email addresses for a newsletter campaign, stores payment details for recurring orders, and logs support conversations is already dealing with several categories of data, each with its own appropriate lifespan. Getting this wrong is not a minor administrative failing — it is a compliance risk with financial consequences.

What GDPR Says About Data Retention

UK GDPR’s storage limitation principle is clear in direction but silent on specifics. It tells organisations not to hold personal data longer than necessary, but it does not tell them exactly how long “necessary” means for any given category. The practical implication is that every SMB needs a documented retention policy that explains, category by category, why data is being kept and when it will be deleted or anonymised.

Standard business records — invoices, contracts, VAT-related documents — often need to be retained for six or seven years under tax and accounting rules. Consumer-facing records, however, are a different matter. Inactive customer accounts, expired marketing leads, and closed support tickets should be reviewed separately and deleted once they no longer serve a clear, documented purpose. Without that discipline, data quietly accumulates, and so does risk.

Which Data Types Carry Stricter Limits

Not all consumer data deserves the same retention window. Payment and financial records carry longer obligations because of tax law and potential disputes. Marketing consent records should be kept long enough to demonstrate compliance with PECR if challenged, but deleted when consent lapses. Special category data — which includes health, biometric, and certain demographic information — requires a higher standard of justification for retention and tighter access controls throughout its life.

Digital-native businesses, including online platforms and subscription services, now face growing user expectations around data minimisation. Sectors that have developed strong frameworks around user transparency offer useful benchmarks — fintech apps, healthtech platforms, and iGaming services like betting in the UK without registration have all been pushed by regulation to minimise data collected upfront, reshaping how compliance pressure translates into practical data handling across industries.

According to a Computer Weekly data retention analysis, a category-by-category approach rather than a blanket policy is now widely regarded as best practice for UK organisations.

Industries Where Retention Rules Differ

Sector-specific rules complicate matters considerably for businesses that assume general GDPR guidance is enough. Healthcare providers may need to retain patient-adjacent records for years beyond what a standard retail business would ever consider. Financial services firms operating under FCA supervision and anti-money-laundering regulations face their own mandatory minimums that override what GDPR alone would suggest. Payroll and HR outsourcing firms sit in similarly complex territory.

The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, which became law on 19 June 2025, has begun updating and formalising parts of the UK GDPR framework. As detailed in Osborne Clarke’s legal analysis, the Act puts some ICO guidance points onto a firmer statutory footing, including proportionality expectations around subject access requests. For sector-specific SMBs, this means the compliance baseline is now slightly higher than it was a year ago.

Steps SMBs Should Take Right Now

The first practical step is building a data map — a clear record of what personal data the business holds, where it sits, why it was collected, and how long it will be kept. Without this foundation, it is impossible to enforce a retention schedule or respond credibly to a subject access request or complaint. This does not require specialist software; a well-maintained spreadsheet can serve the purpose for most small businesses.

The financial case for action is compelling. Last year, the average cost of a data breach for a UK SME reached £6,400, according to the Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey. Holding unnecessary data directly inflates that risk. SMBs that set firm deletion or anonymisation dates, review their retention schedules annually, and document their reasoning are not just meeting legal requirements — they are actively reducing their exposure to a cost that can be genuinely damaging at small-business scale.

I am writing this with a damp tea towel round my neck, a fan pointed at my face like an interrogation lamp, and the distinct sense that my office has been relocated to the inside of a panini press.

Outside, the Met Office has slapped a red extreme heat warning across half the country and Britain is on course to beat its June temperature record by a margin that would embarrass a sprinter. Forty degrees. In England. In a country that historically considers a barbecue a high-risk gamble.

And do you know what our political class has decided to do about it? Reverse. Gently, apologetically, but unmistakably into the hedge.

Let me be unfashionably blunt, because that is what an oven does to a man’s patience. On the single clearest day of evidence we have ever had, every major party in this country is busy softening, fudging or flat-out binning the one policy designed to stop the thermometer doing this again. And they are all, to a man and woman, doing it because they have caught a nasty case of Faragitis.

This is the bit that genuinely astonishes me. Reform has been admirably honest about its position, which is that net zero belongs, in deputy leader Richard Tice’s words, “in the dustbin”. The party wants to axe the energy department, rip up fracking restrictions and, in a phrase imported wholesale from across the Atlantic, “drill, baby, drill”. You can read it in their own words on Business Matters, and I almost respect the clarity. At least you know where you are with a man who wants to set fire to the future to save four quid on his gas bill this winter.

The line, of course, runs straight back to Donald Trump, a man who has spent years insisting that wind turbines cause cancer, kill whales and personally ruin his golf views. Farage admires Trump, Reform borrows the soundbites, and now, terrifyingly, everyone else is borrowing them from Reform. The Conservatives, who once hugged a husky for a photo opportunity, last year ditched their commitment to net zero by 2050 altogether, a move even the trade press called reckless. Labour says the right things about offshore wind, then triangulates so frantically over every actual decision that you suspect Ed Miliband is the only true believer left and they keep him in a cupboard.

It is the great British political pastime: find out what the loudest man in the pub thinks, then sprint to agree with him before last orders.

Here is my problem, and it is a businessman’s problem rather than a hippie’s. The “drill, baby, drill” crowd present themselves as the hard-headed realists and everyone else as woolly idealists. They have it precisely upside down. The realism is on the other side of the argument.

The Climate Change Committee, hardly a den of placard-waving radicals, has crunched the numbers and found that the entire cost of reaching net zero by 2050 is smaller than the hit we took from one fossil fuel price shock in 2022. One. For every pound spent, the benefits come back somewhere between two and four times over. Faster electrification, heat pumps and electric cars do not bankrupt households, they put money back in people’s pockets. The expensive option, the genuinely reckless one, is staying hooked on a commodity whose price is set by despots and weather systems we do not control.

And this is before we get to the actual business case, which is enormous and which we keep pretending is a cost rather than the single biggest growth opportunity of our lifetimes. The UK net zero economy already generates around £105 billion in value and supports more than a million jobs, the overwhelming majority of them in small and medium-sized firms, as Business Matters laid out in its coverage of the seventh carbon budget. When politicians wobble on targets, they are not protecting business. They are kneecapping the fastest-growing part of it and handing the lead to the Chinese, the Americans and anyone else with the nerve to commit.

I have written before that British businesses must not retreat from net zero, and on the hottest day in our recorded history I will say it louder, sweat and all. Doubling down is not the brave green gesture. It is the boring, sensible, profitable thing to do, which is precisely why no politician chasing Farage’s vote will say it.

So here is my modest proposal. Turn the fans off in Westminster for a week. Let them legislate at forty degrees, like the rest of us are trying to work. They will discover their convictions remarkably quickly. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my tea towel needs wringing out.