Business

Stand at Becketts this weekend as the historic demonstration runs howl past and you could be forgiven for thinking the calendar has slipped.

The blue-and-gold of a Rothmans Williams, the screaming yellow of a Benson & Hedges Jordan, a Tyrrell in Elf colours, a McLaren still wearing its day-glo Marlboro chevrons: to a certain generation these liveries are as evocative as the engine notes. Yet look closely at those sidepods and you are not looking at a paddock. You are looking at a corporate graveyard.

The British Grand Prix that surrounds them could not be more different. A record crowd of well over half a million, a sprint format, a global streaming audience raised on Drive to Survive, and a sport that, as Business Matters reported this week, is now worth £12bn a year to the UK economy. But in the 1980s and 1990s Formula One was a very different commercial proposition: a rolling billboard held together by tobacco money, corporate vanity and the occasional fraudster. The teams, Williams, McLaren, Jordan, Tyrrell, survived, evolved or were absorbed. Many of the companies whose logos paid the bills did not. Their fates read like a potted history of three decades of business upheaval.

The tobacco giants: regulated out, swallowed up

No sector defined the era like tobacco. By 1995, nine of the top ten drivers in the world championship carried a cigarette brand on their overalls, and the sport’s aesthetic was effectively designed in the marketing departments of London and Winston-Salem.

Rothmans is the most instructive case. The brand arrived at Williams in 1994 and turned the FW16 into what one Italian commentator called “a cigarette packet on four wheels”, white, blue and gold, and utterly unmistakable throughout the seasons that carried Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve to their world titles. Yet within two years of leaving the sport’s front line, Rothmans International plc ceased to exist as an independent business. In 1999 it was swallowed by British American Tobacco in a merger waved through by the European Commission, and the Rothmans, Dunhill and Player’s brands disappeared into BAT’s portfolio, where they remain. The company that once wrote some of the biggest cheques in world sport is now a line item in someone else’s annual report.

Benson & Hedges followed a similar arc. Eddie Jordan’s masterstroke in 1996 was persuading Gallaher to paint his cars gold, then yellow, spawning the Buzzin’ Hornets and Bitten & Hisses workarounds when national advertising bans began to bite. B&H stayed with Jordan until 2005, by which time the FIA had already decreed that tobacco branding would be gone by the end of 2006. Gallaher, the last great independent British tobacco house, did not long outlive the ban that ended its motor racing adventure: in April 2007 it was acquired by Japan Tobacco for around £7.5bn, then the largest ever foreign takeover by a Japanese company.

Camel, which had splashed its yellow across Lotus, Benetton and Williams, read the regulatory runes earlier than most. When France banned tobacco advertising in motorsport in 1992, R.J. Reynolds began its retreat, and by the end of 1993 the desert dromedary had largely vanished from the grid. The lesson for any business built on a single, regulation-exposed revenue stream is timeless: the writing appears on the wall long before the wall falls on you.

Only Marlboro defied gravity. Philip Morris outlasted every rival, moved its money quietly to Ferrari, and kept paying long after its name could legally appear on the cars, proof that in sponsorship, as in business, the deepest relationships survive even when the logo cannot.

The technology names: disrupted at full speed

If tobacco was regulated out of existence, the technology sponsors of the era were simply out-innovated, an irony for brands that attached themselves to the fastest-moving sport on earth.

Consider the Williams FW15C of 1993, arguably the most technologically sophisticated F1 car ever built, with its active suspension and traction control. On its flanks sat Sega, then the swaggering champion of the console wars, which even had Sonic the Hedgehog’s feet painted below the cockpit and supplied a Sonic-shaped winner’s trophy, famously lifted not by a Williams driver but by Ayrton Senna at Donington, after which McLaren mischievously painted a squashed hedgehog on his car. Sega was at its absolute commercial peak. Within eight years it was gone from the hardware business entirely: bruised by the 32X and Saturn missteps and unable to sustain the Dreamcast against Sony and Nintendo, it exited consoles in 2001 to become a software publisher. The company survives, indeed, in a pleasing footnote, Sega returned to the grid last year as a gaming partner of McLaren, the very team that once taunted its Williams deal with a squashed-hedgehog sticker, but the colossus that sponsored world champions does not.

Compaq tells the same story at corporate scale. The Texan PC maker became a principal sponsor of the BMW Williams team in 2000, its logo carried by Ralf Schumacher and a young Juan Pablo Montoya. In May 2002, mid-season, Compaq was consumed by Hewlett-Packard in one of the most contentious mergers in tech history, and, in a neat piece of symbolism, the branding on the Williams cars was changed from Compaq to HP at that year’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone. A brand that had been one of the world’s biggest computer companies was reduced to a mid-race livery swap, and eventually retired altogether.

The telecoms adventure: two crashes for the price of one

The dot-com era brought a new breed of sponsor, and no partnership captured its giddiness better than Orange and Arrows. The mobile operator’s papaya livery made the 2000 Arrows A21 one of the best-looking cars on the grid, but the relationship delivered a double collapse. Arrows, run by the flamboyant Tom Walkinshaw, ran out of money and folded during 2002, its cars famously failing to appear at races while lawyers argued. Orange declined to renew and retreated from the sport. The sponsor fared better than the team, but not as an independent company: it had already been bought by France Télécom in 2000 at the very top of the telecoms bubble. The twist is that the brand ultimately devoured its owner, France Télécom judged the Orange name so much stronger than its own that in 2013 it renamed the entire group Orange S.A. Sometimes the sponsorship asset outlives the balance sheet that acquired it.

The cautionary tale: when the money was never real

And then there were the sponsors who were not what they seemed. Leyton House, the Japanese property and leisure group whose turquoise March cars very nearly won the 1990 French Grand Prix with Ivan Capelli, collapsed in scandal when founder Akira Akagi was arrested in 1991 over a fraud involving Fuji Bank. The team died with him, and F1 learned, not for the last time, as anyone who remembers more recent crypto logos will attest, that due diligence on a sponsor’s money matters as much as the size of the cheque.

What the survivors teach us

It would be wrong to paint the whole era as a graveyard. Canon, which backed Williams through its Mansell-Piquet pomp, remains a global imaging power. Elf, the French fuel brand on every Tyrrell and Renault of the period, lives on inside TotalEnergies, still in the sport today. And the teams themselves proved remarkably durable assets: Tyrrell’s entry was sold to BAT and became BAR, then Honda, then Brawn, and is today Mercedes-AMG F1; Jordan’s Silverstone factory now houses Aston Martin’s title challengers. In Formula One, as sponsorship strategist and author Jackie Fast, whose best-selling book PINPOINT chronicles what actually works in sponsorship, might observe, the platform has consistently outlived the brands that paid for it.

That, perhaps, is the real business story hiding in this weekend’s nostalgia. A grid livery is a leading indicator: it tells you which sectors have cash, confidence and something to prove. In 1986 that meant cigarettes; in 1993, video games; in 2000, PC makers and telecoms; today it is crypto exchanges, cloud computing and logistics giants, sectors whose own thirty-year survival is anything but guaranteed. The sport’s £12bn UK footprint suggests Formula One itself has never been healthier. History suggests the same cannot be assumed of the names painted on its cars.

So when the old Rothmans Williams crackles past the pits this afternoon, spare a thought not just for the drivers who wrestled it, but for the marketing directors who signed the deals, men and women who believed, entirely reasonably, that their brands were as permanent as the sport they adorned. Formula One is still here. Rothmans, Gallaher, Compaq, Leyton House and Sega’s console empire are not. In business, as at Becketts, nothing stays flat-out forever.

Rishi Sunak has conceded that the multi-billion-pound business support schemes he designed as chancellor during the pandemic propped up companies that “would and should” have gone under, in a striking admission that has reignited the debate over how far the state should go to keep struggling firms alive.

Writing in The Times to coincide with America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, the former prime minister argued that Britain must learn to embrace the “creative destruction” that has powered the US economy ahead of its rivals, even if that means watching more businesses fail.

“It is never easy to sit in the Treasury and watch a business go under, but intervening is nearly always the wrong thing to do,” Sunak wrote, adding that the rush to assemble Covid support schemes left no time to distinguish between fundamentally weak firms and viable businesses knocked sideways by lockdowns. “As chancellor, this was one of the things I worried about most: had these interventions upended the natural processes of the economy? I fear they did.”

The intervention will resonate uncomfortably with the hundreds of thousands of small business owners who credit furlough, bounce back loans and business rates relief with their survival, but Sunak’s diagnosis of the UK’s underlying malaise is harder to dismiss.

At the heart of his argument is the claim that Britain’s economy has lost its dynamism. Nearly one in ten listed UK firms is now a so-called zombie company, generating just enough cash to service its debts and little else, a figure that has doubled since the financial crisis. As Business Matters reported earlier this year, a fresh wave of zombie firms is already facing collapse as HMRC begins to call in pandemic-era tax arrears.

Sunak points to OECD research on declining business dynamism showing that firm entry and exit rates have fallen by around three percentage points across the developed world since 2000. Before the financial crisis, the churn of firms entering and leaving the market added an estimated 0.7 per cent to UK productivity growth. That contribution has since collapsed to just 0.1 per cent.

The contrast with the United States is stark. The median age of America’s 20 largest listed companies has fallen from 124 years in 2010 to 50 in 2025, as new technology firms displaced older incumbents. In the UK, the equivalent figure has risen from 94 to 121 over the same period.

The result, Sunak argues, is an economy in which neither labour nor capital flows to where it is most productive. UK GDP per head now sits 42 per cent below America’s, and Office for National Statistics comparisons show British output per hour worked has trailed the US, France and Germany for four decades, though as Business Matters has previously explored, not everyone accepts the conventional reading of Britain’s productivity numbers.

Sunak attributes American outperformance to four factors: cheap and abundant energy, with British firms paying four times as much for power as their US counterparts; faster technology adoption; the dollar’s reserve currency status; and, above all, a culture that treats business failure as a normal part of entrepreneurship rather than a political emergency.

The former Conservative leader reserved particular criticism for the Employment Rights Act, which he described as “sclerosis-inducing” legislation that has undermined Britain’s flexible labour market, and which he said any future government serious about growth would have to repeal. The legislation, which cleared its final parliamentary hurdle last year, has drawn repeated warnings from small firms over hiring costs and tribunal risk.

His conclusion is unlikely to win many votes, but it is refreshingly candid for a former occupant of Number 11: “We can’t, and shouldn’t wish to, save every business. We must learn to love creative destruction or see our economic power destroyed.”

For SME owners, the message cuts both ways. A more dynamic economy promises cheaper capital, better staff and bigger opportunities for the productive majority. But it also means that the next time a crisis hits, the safety net may be considerably smaller.

Amazon has passed the milestone it needed to switch on its long-awaited Leo satellite broadband service, deploying enough satellites to begin initial coverage later this year, with the UK confirmed among the first wave of markets.

The breakthrough came in the early hours of 2 July, when a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifted 29 satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral, the final Atlas V mission in Amazon’s launch programme. The flight took the constellation to 396 spacecraft, tying the record for the heaviest payload the veteran rocket has ever carried.

Chris Weber, vice president of Amazon’s Leo business, said the constellation was now large enough “to support continuous service across initial latitudes”. He added: “Still lots of work ahead, including raising all these new satellites to their assigned altitude, but we’ve completed enough launches for initial service this year, and future missions just add coverage and capacity.”

For Jeff Bezos’s answer to Elon Musk’s Starlink, the announcement marks the end of a lengthy and at times fraught deployment phase. Amazon, which rebranded the project from Kuiper to Leo last year, holds FCC authorisation for a constellation of around 3,236 satellites and had faced a regulatory deadline to orbit half of them by mid-2026, though the US regulator has since shown flexibility on timing, according to CNBC.

What it means for UK businesses

An enterprise and government preview has been under way since late 2025, but the consumer rollout is targeted for mid-to-late 2026 in priority markets including the UK, US, Canada, France and Germany. Britain’s early place in the queue owes much to Ofcom approval already being in place, though coverage will initially be limited to certain latitudes and broaden as more satellites launch. Full availability could stretch into 2027 depending on the pace of deployment.

The service is designed to deliver speeds from 25Mbps up to 400Mbps and beyond, with gigabit-capable terminals using advanced phased-array antennas, and latency low enough for video calls and streaming. Beyond fixed home broadband, particularly for rural and underserved parts of the UK, Amazon is targeting portable connections, in-flight Wi-Fi through partnerships such as its JetBlue deal, and enterprise and government applications. Customer terminals are in testing, and would-be users can join the waitlist at leo.amazon.com.

An uphill battle against Starlink

Amazon enters the market a long way behind. Starlink has thousands of satellites in orbit, millions of customers worldwide and a growing UK footprint, having recently undercut BT with £35-a-month broadband and secured new Ofcom spectrum licences to expand capacity at its British ground stations.

Even so, the arrival of a deep-pocketed second player should be welcome news for the estimated hundreds of thousands of UK premises still beyond the reach of full-fibre networks. Competition on price, hardware and service quality has been conspicuously absent from the satellite broadband market to date, and Amazon’s entry, backed by its logistics, retail and AWS cloud infrastructure, is the first credible challenge to Starlink’s dominance.

For rural firms weighing up connectivity options, the sensible play is to watch how the initial rollout performs. Timelines in the satellite business have a habit of slipping, but for the first time the UK is months, not years, away from a genuine two-horse race in the sky.

There is a phrase beloved of every business school lecturer, every venture capitalist and every man who has ever worn a gilet to a breakfast meeting: the level playing field.

It is the founding myth of competition itself, the idea that we all start from the same line, breathe the same air and sweat, roughly speaking, the same sweat. And this summer, FIFA has taken that noble concept, marched it into the Philadelphia sunshine and left it there to blister.

Because let us be clear about what is actually happening at this World Cup. On Saturday afternoon, France and Paraguay were sent out to play knockout football in Philadelphia with the heat index nudging an obscene 40C, the sort of temperature at which sensible nations close the shops, draw the shutters and lie down until October. Meanwhile, other teams in this very same tournament have spent a month wafting about in Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, three fully enclosed, climate-controlled pleasure domes where the thermostat sits at a serene 22C, roughly a fifth of all matches are being played in air-conditioned comfort, and the greatest physical hazard is an over-chilled bottle of Gatorade.

That is not a level playing field. That is not even the same sport. That is judging oranges against oranges, yes, but one orange has been kept in the fridge and the other has been left on the dashboard of a Ford Focus in a Texas car park.

And tonight it gets better, or worse, depending on whether you are English. England face Mexico at the Estadio Azteca, a cathedral of footballing suffering that sits 2,240 metres above sea level, where the air is thin, the oxygen is rationed and the home side has been living, training and playing up in the clouds all tournament. Mexico have played three of their four matches at the Azteca. England have had a few days to acclimatise to conditions that physiologists suggest need weeks. It is the sporting equivalent of asking a Surrey accountancy firm to pitch for a contract in Mexico City, in Spanish, while mildly concussed.

Now, I can already hear the rejoinder. Sport has always had its quirks of geography. True enough. But there is a difference between charming local variation and a structural inequality baked into the draw. When one quarter-finalist has spent the group stage at a constant 22C and another has been slow-roasted in Miami and Monterrey at wet-bulb temperatures the medics politely describe as dangerous, the bracket itself becomes a lottery of thermodynamics. Uzbekistan, delightfully, drew the coolest schedule of the lot. Tunisia drew the hottest. Neither earned it. The air conditioning did.

FIFA’s answer to all this has been the cooling break, that strange little ritual in which 22 millionaires gather round a cool box like wildebeest at a watering hole while the referee studies his watch. It is a sticking plaster on a sunburn. A three-minute pause does not undo 87 minutes of playing in conditions that would get a building site shut down in Britain, and everyone from the players’ union to the team doctors knows it.

Business readers will recognise this pattern instantly, because it is how markets fail. It is the incumbent with the subsidised energy contract competing against the start-up paying spot prices. We would call it an uneven regulatory environment and write furious letters about it. FIFA calls it a tournament.

And here is the properly British irony: while the players wilt, the UK economy is having a lovely time of it. The tills are singing to the tune of a £3.8 billion World Cup spending boost for pubs, bookmakers and takeaways, and smart small firms are already thinking MATCH to win the event economy. The only heat map that matters in Britain this month is the one showing which beer gardens have a big screen.

Tonight’s kick-off lands at 1am UK time, which is why unions are begging employers to allow flexible working on Monday morning, and why half the nation’s middle managers will be conducting their 9am stand-up from behind sunglasses. Spare a thought, as you yawn, for Harry Kane and colleagues, who will be conducting theirs at altitude, on 40 per cent less oxygen, against 87,000 Mexicans who regard the Azteca as a family heirloom.

So no, this World Cup is not judging oranges with oranges. It is a magnificent, chaotic, occasionally dangerous experiment in competitive inequality, and whoever lifts the trophy will deserve an asterisk shaped like a thermometer. If England prevail tonight, breathless in every sense, it will rank among our finest away days. And if we lose, well, at least we will have the excuse ready before kick-off. Which, as any England fan will tell you, is the true national sport.

Piers Morgan’s Uncensored has been valued at $145 million (around £108 million) by investors, just 18 months after the broadcaster took full ownership of the brand, and five years after ITV parted company with him over his refusal to apologise for comments about Meghan Markle.

Morgan confirmed the figure in an interview with Karl Stefanovic on Australia’s Today show, days after closing a $27 million funding round for the business. The raise was led by Raine and Greek media group Antenna, with strategic backers including Elisabeth Murdoch and the billionaire Reuben brothers, Simon and David.

“We announced yesterday we’ve just finished an investor round on Uncensored,” Morgan said. “The investors have valued the business $145 million US.”

The valuation caps a remarkable turnaround for a presenter who walked off the Good Morning Britain set in March 2021 and left ITV shortly afterwards, having refused to apologise for his remarks about the Duchess of Sussex. Set against his reported £1.1 million-a-year ITV salary, the valuation is worth roughly a century of his old pay packet.

From one-man show to media network

Morgan bought the Uncensored brand outright from Rupert Murdoch’s News UK in early 2025, abandoning linear television for a YouTube-first model. “I’ve only owned it a year and a half,” he told Stefanovic. “We’ve got a business worth nearly $150 million in 18 months.”

The channel now has around 4.4 million subscribers and, according to Morgan, “generates a lot of cash from advertising and sponsorships”, all without a marketing budget. “We don’t pay anyone to market our content. We do it all ourselves,” he said.

Crucially for investors, Morgan has been deliberate about building a business that can outlive its founder’s on-screen presence. “I knew I had to build a business which would actually in the end become much less reliant on me. So I decided to take Uncensored as the brand of the business,” he said.

That strategy is already visible in the company’s expanding slate. Uncensored has struck partnerships with Paramount UK and Channel 5 to bring its shows to broadcast television, alongside a long-form interview series co-produced with Time Studios. Its newest vertical, World Cup Uncensored, has been an immediate hit.

“We’ve just done World Cup Uncensored, and that’s blown up as well,” Morgan said. “We’re doing bigger numbers than Gary Lineker’s show, which Netflix paid $14 million for,” a reference to The Rest Is Football, which the streamer is reportedly paying around £14 million to run daily throughout the tournament.

The economics of walking away

The round confirms the trajectory first reported in December, when Business Matters revealed Uncensored was closing in on a £100 million valuation with Raine’s backing. At the time, insiders said the ambition was to build a billion-dollar company within a few years.

For all the showmanship, the underlying lesson is one any business owner will recognise: ownership of the asset, not salary from an employer, is where value compounds. Morgan spent decades as highly paid talent for other people’s businesses. It took just 18 months of owning his own for his equity to dwarf everything that came before, a pattern now pulling television’s biggest names towards YouTube and away from the traditional broadcasters that once employed them.

“I think the sky’s the limit for this stuff,” Morgan said. On the evidence of the past 18 months, few investors would bet against him.

Most online businesses set up their payment processing the same way: pick a well-known provider, integrate it, and move on. For a while, that works. But as a business grows, that single-provider setup starts to show its limits in ways that are easy to miss until they become expensive.

Failed transactions, provider outages, weak approval rates in specific markets, no fallback when something breaks, reporting spread across systems that don’t talk to each other. These are not edge cases. They are predictable consequences of scaling a business on payment infrastructure that was not designed to handle complexity.

The businesses solving this problem early are the ones moving to payment orchestration.

What Payment Orchestration Actually Means in Practice

Payment orchestration is a layer that sits above your payment providers and manages how transactions flow between them. Instead of being locked into one gateway, you connect multiple providers through a single integration and define rules for how your payments move.

That might mean routing UK card transactions to one acquirer, European payments to another, and automatically retrying a failed transaction through a backup provider before the customer ever sees a decline. It might mean applying different fraud rules by region, or having clean consolidated reporting across every provider in one place rather than logging into five dashboards separately.

The practical result is more control over what happens to each transaction, less dependency on any single provider, and a payment setup that can grow without requiring a new integration every time something changes.

Where the Revenue Leakage Hides

One of the less obvious costs of basic payment infrastructure is authorisation rate loss. Most businesses track revenue, but not the gap between attempted transactions and successful ones. That gap is often larger than expected.

A checkout that converts well but sends every transaction to a single provider will still lose a meaningful percentage to declines that have nothing to do with the customer’s ability to pay. Wrong routing for the card type, the currency, or the region accounts for a lot of those failures. So does having no retry logic when a provider returns a soft decline.

For a business doing a few hundred transactions a month, the numbers are small. For a business processing at scale, closing even a two or three percentage point gap in authorisation rates translates into real revenue recovered without changing anything about the product or the marketing.

The Multi-Provider Argument Is Not Just About Redundancy

Businesses often add a second payment provider primarily for resilience. If one goes down, the other keeps transactions running. That is a valid reason, but it undersells what a multi-provider setup actually makes possible.

Different providers perform differently across card types, currencies, and geographies. An acquirer with strong performance for UK Visa cards may not be the best option for cross-border transactions or for certain local payment methods. When you have only one provider, you have no choice but to accept their performance across every scenario. When you have several, and the routing logic to direct transactions appropriately, you can optimise for approval rates rather than just accepting the average.

For businesses expanding into new markets, this becomes increasingly important. Payment behaviour varies by country in ways that are not always obvious until the decline data starts coming in. Having the infrastructure to respond to that data, by adjusting routing rules without a new integration project, is a real operational advantage.

Why Startups and Scale-Ups Are Paying Attention

Payment orchestration used to be something only large enterprises could access, either by building it internally or by negotiating custom arrangements with major processors. That has changed. Modern platforms have made orchestration accessible to businesses at much earlier stages of growth.

For a startup that is expanding from one market to several, or a scale-up that has outgrown its first payment setup, a payment orchestrator can replace a significant amount of bespoke engineering work. Rather than building routing logic, retry mechanisms, provider failover, and consolidated reporting from scratch, the infrastructure is already there. The business configures it for their needs and connects the providers they want to work with.

The time-to-value argument is particularly relevant for teams without large payment engineering resources. Getting a more resilient, better-performing payment setup does not have to mean a six-month build project.

What to Look for When Evaluating Options

Not all orchestration platforms are built the same way, and a few things are worth thinking through before committing to one.

Connector coverage for your actual markets. The list of supported providers matters less than whether the specific providers and payment methods you need are properly supported. That includes the full flow: authorisations, refunds, recurring payments, 3DS, chargebacks. A technically available connector that only handles basic authorisations will leave gaps.

Routing flexibility. The ability to define routing rules yourself, understand why a transaction was routed a certain way, and adjust rules without raising an engineering ticket is what makes orchestration genuinely useful. A black-box approach to routing undermines the whole point.

Reporting across providers. If the platform consolidates transaction data from all your providers into one place, your operations team saves significant time. If it does not, you have added a new tool without solving the fragmentation problem.

Integration with fraud tools. Payment fraud management works better when it is connected to the routing layer rather than bolted on separately. Orchestration platforms that include fraud tooling, or integrate cleanly with specialist providers, give you more options.

Simplicity of setup. The best orchestration platforms are designed so that getting connected and configuring your first routing rules does not require months of work. If the onboarding process is complex enough to require significant internal resource, that cost should be factored into the comparison.

The Bigger Picture for Business Owners

The way payments are set up in a business reflects assumptions made early, often when the business was much smaller. A single payment provider made sense at the start. It usually does not make the same sense once a business is operating across multiple markets, processing meaningful volume, and competing in environments where checkout conversion rates matter.

The businesses that perform best on payment metrics tend to be the ones that treat the payment layer as something worth actively managing, not just a cost of doing business to be set up once and forgotten. That means understanding where transactions are failing, which providers are performing, and having the infrastructure to act on that information.

For UK startups and growing online businesses, the tools to do that are now much more accessible than they were a few years ago. The question is not really whether payment orchestration is worth it. It is whether the cost of not addressing it, in lost revenue, operational inefficiency, and slow market expansion, is worth accepting.

For most businesses that have hit the growth stage, it is not.

German employees will be required to visit a doctor in person and obtain a sick note on the first day of illness, under tough new rules unveiled by Chancellor Friedrich Merz as part of a sweeping package to revive the country’s stagnant economy.

The measure scraps the current system, under which workers could secure a certificate over the phone and did not need one at all until their third day off. It is a marked contrast with Britain, where employees can self-certify for a full seven days before a fit note is required.

“The number of sick days is too high,” Merz told journalists. “We are creating a set of tools that will enable those involved, both employees and companies, to correct this. We know this is a tough decision. But we can no longer afford the competitive disadvantage caused by prolonged absences from work.”

Germans take an average of roughly 15 working days of sick leave a year, according to figures from the Federal Statistical Office, lower than France and most Nordic countries but well above Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland and Italy. By comparison, the latest Office for National Statistics data shows around 149 million working days were lost to sickness or injury in the UK last year, some 2 per cent of all working hours, or just over four days per worker. British absence rates have nonetheless been climbing, with UK sick days recently hitting a 15-year high, driven in large part by mental health conditions.

While employers’ groups welcomed the German move, it has infuriated the country’s powerful trade unions. Frank Werneke, head of the services union Verdi, accused Merz of fostering “a culture of distrust of employees”.

Doctors are equally unimpressed, warning the requirement will overwhelm general practice with appointments that serve no clinical purpose. “Our practices would be flooded with patients who don’t need in-person care and would be better off in bed,” said the German Association of Family Physicians, which branded the measure “an absolute catastrophe”.

The sick note crackdown forms part of a broader reform programme negotiated between Merz’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union and its coalition partner, the centre-left Social Democrats. Alongside a promised bonfire of red tape, the retirement age could rise gradually from 67 to as high as 70 in the coming decades, while tax cuts for lower and middle earners will be funded by higher rates on incomes above €250,000 (£215,000).

For UK business owners watching from across the Channel, the episode is a reminder that absence management remains a live policy battleground, and that handling staff sickness fairly and lawfully is as much about trust and process as it is about cost. It also underlines how seriously Germany’s slowdown is being taken in Berlin: sluggish growth in Europe’s largest economy is one of the factors expected to shape the continent’s economic pecking order through 2040.

Carsten Brzeski, an economist at Dutch bank ING, said the reforms were overdue but should not be oversold. “It may have taken longer than many hoped, but Germany’s long-awaited summer of reforms has finally arrived,” he said. “It is not a package that will morph a stagnating economy into a booming economy overnight. But it is a package that could create the preconditions, the framework, for future growth.”

Union leaders are calling on employers to let staff work from home on Monday, after England’s World Cup last-16 tie against Mexico kicks off at 1am BST.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has appealed to businesses to show “common sense” and allow football fans to work flexibly following the match, whether by working from home, starting later or swapping shifts.

Paul Nowak, the TUC general secretary and a self-confessed England and Everton fan, admitted the scheduling was far from ideal for supporters. “That’s why we are appealing to employers to show some common sense and understanding by allowing their staff to work flexibly where possible,” he said.

The plea comes as separate research suggests more than half of bosses have no plans to make any special arrangements for the fixture. Just one in five employers intend to offer flexible working during the tournament, according to a poll of more than 1,100 managers by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), a striking gap given the £3.8bn windfall the World Cup is expected to deliver for British business.

Petra Wilton of the CMI said: “We’re not saying every England win deserves a bank holiday, but if millions of people have stayed up until 3am supporting their team, asking employers to let them start a little later the next morning is simply common sense. We’re saying to employers across the country, ‘Let them start late.’”

Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed that British pubs can stay open through the night for the tie, which takes place at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. Should the match go to extra time, it could run as late as 4am.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which represents HR professionals, has encouraged employers to allow workers to take annual leave, swap shifts or make up time later in the week, echoing its broader guidance on handling major sporting events in the workplace.

“Employers are under no obligation to make special arrangements around World Cup matches; however, some may choose to offer flexibility where this works for the business and does not impact performance,” said David D’Souza of the CIPD.

For smaller firms, the calculation may be more nuanced. With research showing that rigid office mandates are already driving workers to seek more flexible roles elsewhere, a well-handled World Cup could prove a cheap win for morale and retention. Acas has urged employers to get their team line-up sorted before kick-off, advising that agreements covering time off, sickness absence and flexible hours are put in place ahead of matches rather than argued over the morning after.

Employment lawyers, meanwhile, have warned fans against pulling a sickie. Samir Moftah, head of employment law at Manak Solicitors, said: “Intentionally deceiving your employer about your health can constitute misconduct and, in certain situations, gross misconduct.” Employees found to have falsely claimed sickness absence could face disciplinary action, and dismissal in the most serious cases.

The debate over Monday morning extends beyond the workplace. After England’s last-32 victory over the Democratic Republic of the Congo, head coach Thomas Tuchel asked parents to let their children skip school to cheer the side on. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, responded that while the decision rested with parents, “children can be in school the next day.”

For SMEs weighing up how to respond, the tournament is as much an opportunity as a headache, and those thinking strategically about the World Cup event economy may find that a little flexibility on Monday pays dividends long after the final whistle.

The NHS is to offer rewards to people who walk for half an hour a day, in the first scheme of its kind to pay Britons back for getting active.

NHS England will launch its “marathon a month” challenge early next year, asking participants to walk for around 30 minutes daily. Those who manage it every day will cover roughly 26 miles over the month, the distance of a marathon, logging their progress online or via a phone or smartwatch.

Complete the challenge and rewards follow, potentially including incentives and discounts, although the organising team has yet to confirm precisely what is on offer. Vouchers are one option under consideration, and the presence on the team of Sir Keith Mills, the founder of Air Miles and Nectar, suggests the architecture of Britain’s best-known loyalty schemes will be brought to bear on the nation’s step count.

Crucially for taxpayers, the NHS will not be footing the bill for the rewards. NHS England is covering the initial set-up, but the wider plan is to draw in philanthropic backing from major corporates as the scheme rolls out, with public and private sector partners running the programme. GPs and other health staff will be encouraged to promote it to patients.

The scheme is being developed with Sir Brendan Foster, the Olympic medallist and founder of the Great North Run, who was asked by NHS England to build a campaign to get people walking as part of the government’s 10-year health plan for England.

“I’m known for running, but the ambition here is far simpler. We just want people to walk. Simple,” he says.

The aim is to sign up more than 100,000 people, with daily stats recorded digitally. If the target is hit, Sir Brendan says it would count as the biggest marathon in history. He is banking on “streak” culture, the habit-forming mechanic behind Snapchat and Duolingo, to keep participants going.

The under-25s Business Matters spoke to were broadly upbeat. One said the gamified challenge would push her to be more active, admitting that not wanting to break a streak is a powerful motivator for her and her friends. Another, who already clocks up roughly a marathon’s worth of walking each month, said he would happily take a free reward for something he is already doing.

The numbers behind the initiative are stark. Physical inactivity is associated with one in six deaths, according to official public health guidance, and a person is classified as inactive if they do less than 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week. Sport England’s Active Lives survey showed that in the year to November 2025 nearly a quarter of adults, around 12 million people, fell into that category.

“If someone walks 30 minutes five times a week, they could gain up to four extra years of healthy life,” Sir Brendan says.

For employers, the scheme lands at a moment when workforce health has become a boardroom issue. Business groups have already backed the Keep Britain Working review amid mounting fiscal pressure from economic inactivity, and there has been a marked rise in UK employers using wellbeing strategies to lift engagement and cut absenteeism. A state-backed incentive scheme that nudges staff out of the door at lunchtime may prove a useful, and free, addition to the corporate wellbeing toolkit.

The potential savings for the health service are significant too, at a time when technology is already being deployed to claw back hundreds of millions in NHS costs.

Not everyone believes incentives alone will shift the dial. Sonia Pombo, head of research and impact at Action on Salt & Sugar, says: “Encouraging people to build regular movement into their daily lives can support better health, and making it simple, achievable and rewarding may help more people get started. But we cannot rely on individual behaviour change alone. If the government is serious about improving the nation’s health, particularly for children, it must pair initiatives like this with stronger prevention measures.”

Full details of the scheme, including how to sign up, will be released in the coming months.

Business owners could face fines even when they pay their PAYE and VAT in full and on time, simply for using the wrong payment channel, under new rules being consulted on by HMRC.

The government is seeking views on plans to require businesses to pay their PAYE and VAT return liabilities by Direct Debit, with the aim of reducing late payment, limiting the flow of debt and simplifying the payment process to cut errors. The consultation runs until 16 August 2026.

Responses from the business community and tax agents will, HMRC says, help determine the scope of any changes, whether safeguards are needed, and which taxpayers should be excepted from the requirement. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales notes that exceptions are proposed for those without UK bank accounts, the digitally excluded and payments above £20 million.

The sting, however, is in the enforcement. If Direct Debit becomes mandatory, a penalty could apply where a payment is made through another channel, even if the tax is paid in full and on time. That has raised eyebrows among accountants and business owners, not least because late payment already carries interest and penalties under the existing regime.

Harvey Dhillon, founder and chief executive of small business accountants Zmartly, said the underlying move was, “for once, a sensible fix”.

“The late-payment penalties I see are rarely from firms that cannot pay, but from a wrong reference or the right money hitting the wrong period, and Direct Debit quietly ends that. That part is genuinely good,” he said.

But he questioned the prospect of fines for those who pay on time by other means: “When did paying your tax in full and on time become something HMRC could fine you for? That is the oddity in this consultation. A charge that can land even when the tax is paid in full and on time, purely because it went by bank transfer, is a fine for using the wrong envelope.

“The one caught is the careful business that always pays, not the debtor this is meant to chase. So before 16 August, set up the Direct Debit, but tell the consultation that method is not the same as payment.”

Tony Redondo, founder of Newquay-based Cosmos Currency Exchange, warned the switch could cause cash flow problems for firms that time their payments deliberately, a discipline that matters given the consequences of missing a tax or VAT deadline.

“HMRC frames it as efficiency, and cutting the tax gap caused by manual errors. But businesses use Faster Payments and CHAPS deliberately for cash flow control. A mandatory Direct Debit hands HMRC a preferred creditor’s schedule, not yours,” he said.

“Worse, HMRC is consulting on penalising businesses that pay in full and on time, simply for using the ‘wrong’ channel. That flips compliance on its head. You’re punished not for failing to pay, but for failing to use their preferred technology. It treats SMEs like errant children.”

There is a further wrinkle for the many owners who pay their tax by card. Rob Burgess, founder of London-based Head for Points, said the changes would be “very handy for HMRC and very inconvenient for those of us who don’t want the trouble of ensuring the right sum is in the right bank account on a specific day”.

“Another tranche of people it will affect are those who choose to earn rewards points and other benefits on card payments, plus those using certain credit cards also enjoy a period of interest-free credit,” he added.

“If you are currently earning points from paying VAT or PAYE via a card, you should complete the consultation questionnaire with good reasons why Direct Debit is not suitable for you and similar businesses.”

The government says it recognises that some businesses may face challenges in paying by Direct Debit, such as managing cash flow and adapting to new processes, and stresses that consultation feedback will directly inform its approach. Given that more than a million taxpayers already fall foul of HMRC deadlines each January, business owners may conclude it is a consultation worth responding to.