Business

Morrisons is preparing to pull down the shutters on 100 loss-making convenience stores in a move that places hundreds of shop-floor jobs in jeopardy, with the Bradford-based grocer pointing the finger squarely at Labour’s tax and wage agenda for tipping the sites into terminal decline.

Britain’s fifth-largest supermarket said the shops, all of them legacy outlets from its 2022 rescue of collapsed convenience chain McColl’s, had been “challenged for a number of years” despite remedial action. The closures will be phased in over the coming months, with affected staff entering consultation.

In an unusually pointed statement, a spokesman for the group said the situation had been “exacerbated in more recent years by significant cost increases resulting from Government policy choices, which have made returning these stores to profitability even more difficult”. While bosses stopped short of naming specific measures, the timing leaves little room for ambiguity.

From 1 April, the National Living Wage rose by 50p to £12.71 an hour for those aged 21 and over, with the 18-to-20 rate climbing 85p to £10.85 and the apprentice rate up 45p to £8. Layered on top is last year’s increase in employer National Insurance contributions, which lifted the headline rate from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent and dragged the secondary threshold down from £9,100 to £5,000 — a double whammy that has fallen most heavily on retailers reliant on part-time labour.

The British Retail Consortium has warned that the combined hit added some £5bn to industry wage bills last year alone, and that as many as 160,000 retail roles could be lost over the next three years as employers re-engineer their cost base. Morrisons’ announcement is the latest data point in that grim arithmetic.

The McColl’s portfolio has proved a persistent thorn in chief executive Rami Baitiéh’s side. Morrisons paid roughly £190m to take the chain out of administration in May 2022, and almost immediately moved to shutter 132 of the worst-performing sites while converting the remainder to its Morrisons Daily fascia. The latest round of closures suggests that conversion alone has not been enough to fix the unit economics on a stubborn rump of stores.

It is also the third significant restructuring announcement from the grocer in recent months. Earlier this year, Morrisons confirmed it was closing 103 cafés, florists, pharmacies and Market Kitchens in a sweeping shake-up of in-store services, and last month staff were told the company was consulting on up to 200 head office redundancies at its Bradford headquarters as part of an artificial intelligence-driven productivity drive.

Despite the closures, Morrisons was at pains to stress that its convenience strategy is far from in retreat. The group still operates around 1,700 convenience stores alongside 497 supermarkets and employs roughly 95,000 people. It said it remained on the front foot when it came to opening “hundreds more” franchise convenience stores in the coming years, arguing that pruning the underperforming tail and bolting on capital-light franchise sites would leave its convenience estate “stronger overall”.

For SME owners watching from the sidelines, the message is sobering. When a £20bn turnover supermarket cannot make the numbers stack up on stores carrying its own brand, smaller independents operating on slimmer margins will be feeling the squeeze even more acutely. The Treasury’s own minimum wage uplift, unveiled in last autumn’s Budget, was billed as a pay rise for the lowest earners; for many small employers, it has become a stress test of their viability.

The Department for Business and Trade has been approached for comment.

Read more:
Morrisons to shut 100 convenience stores as supermarket blames Labour’s ‘policy choices’ for rising costs

Higher gilt yields and a £10.3bn debt servicing bill have wiped further fiscal headroom from Rachel Reeves’s plans, leaving the Chancellor with little wriggle room before the autumn Budget, and SMEs once again braced for the consequences.

Britain’s public finances opened the 2026/27 financial year on the back foot, with public sector net borrowing climbing to £24.3 billion in April, the highest April reading since the pandemic shutdown of 2020 and £3.4 billion above the £20.9 billion pencilled in by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Figures published on Friday by the Office for National Statistics showed the bill was £4.9 billion, or roughly a quarter, larger than the same month a year earlier, when borrowing came in at £20.2 billion and already prompted warnings about the fragility of the Treasury’s fiscal arithmetic.

The standout figure, however, was not the headline overshoot but the cost of servicing the national debt. Interest payments alone reached £10.3 billion in April, the highest on record for the opening month of any financial year. Britain is now spending more than £100 billion a year keeping its debt pile rolling, broadly equivalent to the annual schools budget for England.

Gilt yields tighten the noose

The figures land at a delicate moment for the gilt market. Yields on 10-year UK government bonds, the standard proxy for the cost of fresh state borrowing, touched a fresh post-2008 peak last week before retreating modestly after Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor widely viewed as a potential prime ministerial challenger, publicly committed to respecting the fiscal rules should he take the top job.

That intervention steadied nerves in the City but did not undo the damage. Bond market analysts pointed out that the recent yield spike — chronicled in earlier reporting on 10-year gilts breaching the 5 per cent threshold for the first time in 18 years, will work its way into May’s borrowing figures and beyond, since each rise in yields lifts the coupon Treasury must offer on new issuance.

Higher yields will also eat into the £22 billion of headroom the Chancellor restored at the November Budget. As Business Matters has previously reported, that buffer was already exposed to political U-turns, weaker migration assumptions and softer growth, a combination that has historically been enough to push a chancellor towards either tax rises or spending cuts.

IMF endorsement, but with a warning

The International Monetary Fund, wrapping up its 2026 Article IV mission to the UK earlier this week, applauded the deficit reduction targets baked into the government’s fiscal rules and the recent decision to make the autumn Budget the sole fiscal event. But the Fund also warned that any attempt to dilute the path of consolidation would risk a sharp reaction in the gilt market, precisely the dynamic that has rattled investors over the past fortnight.

For all the pressure on the Treasury, there was a sliver of good news in the data. The ONS revised down its full-year borrowing estimate for 2025/26 by £3 billion, taking it to the lowest level since the pandemic six years ago. Tax receipts were also higher than a year earlier, though the gain was more than offset by additional spending on benefits and other day-to-day running costs.

Grant Fitzner, the ONS’s chief economist, struck a sober note: “Borrowing this month was substantially higher than in April last year and although receipts increased compared with April 2025, this was more than offset by higher spending on benefits and other costs.”

SME implications: cooler tills, costlier money

For small and medium-sized businesses, the read-across is twofold. First, the cost of credit. Gilt yields underpin the swap rates that determine fixed-rate business loans and commercial mortgages, meaning that the higher cost of government borrowing is already feeding through to the lending desks of the high street and challenger banks. Owner-managers refinancing this summer should expect quotes to come in stickier than they would have done in the spring.

Second, demand. Separate ONS data published on Friday showed retail sales volumes contracting by 0.4 per cent in April after a feeble 0.1 per cent gain in March, a reminder that the consumer engine is sputtering even before any further fiscal tightening lands in the autumn. Hospitality, fashion and homewares operators in particular will be watching May’s figures closely.

The political calculus is sharpening too. With the fiscal buffer thinning, the Treasury’s scope to extend business rates relief, freeze fuel duty again or shelter SMEs from further employer National Insurance rises looks more constrained by the week. Whether the Chancellor opts to plug the gap through fresh revenue measures, departmental squeezes or by quietly loosening the fiscal rules will define the autumn for Britain’s 5.5 million small businesses.

For now, the message from April’s numbers is blunt: the debt interest bill is no longer a line item to be glossed over in the Budget Red Book, it is the story.

Read more:
April borrowing surges to £24.3bn as debt interest bill breaks month record

Britain’s biggest car manufacturer has, for the first time in its history, cracked open the door to assembling Range Rovers and Land Rover Defenders on American soil, a move that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, and one that has been forced squarely onto the agenda by Donald Trump’s tariff regime.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the Solihull-based jewel of the West Midlands automotive cluster, has confirmed it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Stellantis, the Franco-Italian-American group behind Vauxhall, Peugeot, Fiat, Jeep and Chrysler, “to explore opportunities to collaborate on product development in the United States”. Both companies were tight-lipped on the detail, but the framing in their joint statement — references to “potential transactions” and “complementary capabilities”, left City analysts in little doubt that something rather more significant than a polite engineering chat is on the table.

For an industry that has spent the past 18 months trying to second-guess the White House, the timing is hardly accidental. Under the UK-US Economic Prosperity Deal struck in May 2025, British carmakers can export a maximum of 100,000 vehicles a year to America at a preferential 10 per cent tariff rate; anything above the quota is hit with a punitive 27.5 per cent levy, according to the House of Commons Library briefing on US trade tariffs. For JLR, which produces well in excess of 300,000 cars a year and has traditionally sent roughly a third of them across the Atlantic, the maths are brutal. The cap is, in effect, a glass ceiling on its single most lucrative export market.

PB Balaji, JLR’s chief executive, framed the move as strategic evolution rather than retreat. “As we continue to evolve JLR for the future, collaboration will play an important role in unlocking new opportunities,” he said. “Working with Stellantis allows us to explore complementary capabilities in product and technology development that support our long-term growth plans for the US market.”

His opposite number at Stellantis, Antonio Filosa, was similarly measured: “By working with partners to explore synergies in areas such as product and technology development, we can create meaningful benefits for both sides while remaining focused on delivering the products and experiences our customers love.”

From solihull to Ohio?

The industrial logic is compelling. JLR has already paused shipments to the US once this year as the tariffs bit, exposing the fragility of a model that depends on shipping high-margin luxury SUVs across the Atlantic. Stellantis, by contrast, runs an enviable network of assembly plants across Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, much of it underutilised since the wider slowdown in mid-market American demand and a strategic retreat from its all-electric ambitions, as chronicled in the group’s recent €22bn write-down.

Plugging JLR’s premium product into spare Stellantis capacity would, in theory, give both sides something they badly need. JLR would get a tariff-free route to the world’s most profitable luxury car market. Stellantis, whose Jeep, Ram and Chrysler brands sit firmly in the mass-market middle, would gain access to a slice of the premium pie that has long eluded it. The Wrangler-style Defender pairing in particular looks an obvious fit; the Range Rover, retailing at well over $100,000 in the US, less obviously so.

What both companies will be acutely aware of is that the perceived “Britishness” of the marques is itself part of the product. When Ford bought Jaguar for $2.4 billion in 1989 and added Land Rover from BMW for $2.7 billion in 2000, eventually merging them into JLR in 2002, the American giant pointedly refused to build either brand on its home turf. To do so, Ford executives privately argued, would dilute the very quintessence customers were paying for. Tata of India, which scooped up the business in 2008 when Ford was on its knees in the global financial crisis, has stuck broadly to the same line, investing heavily in UK production, including the Defender it now also builds in Nitra, Slovakia, which is itself caught by the Trump tariffs.

Takeover by stealth?

The City will inevitably read the small print of any MoU through the lens of consolidation. JLR is, by global standards, a minnow, the largest automotive employer in Britain, certainly, but a fraction of the size of Volkswagen, Toyota or indeed Stellantis. The argument that its long-term independence is unsustainable in an industry being reshaped by electrification, Chinese competition and tariff walls has been doing the rounds in Mayfair for the best part of a decade.

The language of the memorandum, “potential transactions”, “synergies”, “complementary capabilities”, is precisely the vocabulary of deals that begin as joint ventures and end, several years later, in full-blown mergers. It would be a brave SME supplier in the West Midlands who bet against further integration in the medium term.

For Tata, the calculation is delicate. JLR remains a strategically important asset and a significant contributor to group profits. But the family-controlled Indian conglomerate has shown before, most notably with Corus, the former British Steel, that it is unsentimental about underperforming foreign acquisitions when the global economics turn. A US production deal that quietly evolves into a deeper relationship with Stellantis would, in that light, be neither a surrender nor a surprise.

The wider british picture

JLR is not alone in its predicament. Mini, Bentley, Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin all export a disproportionate share of their UK output to the United States, and all are now operating inside the same 100,000-vehicle British quota. None of them has the volume to justify its own American assembly line. If JLR, by far the largest of the group, succeeds in finding a tariff workaround through a partner, expect others to consider whether contract assembly inside the US, perhaps via the same Stellantis route, might be the only way to defend their American sales.

For the West Midlands, the political optics are uncomfortable. The Solihull plant remains the spiritual home of Land Rover and one of the largest manufacturing employers in the region. Any meaningful shift of premium production to the United States, even at the margins, will inevitably raise questions in Westminster about whether the UK has done enough to anchor high-value manufacturing onshore, particularly given the size of the public guarantees that have already flowed JLR’s way in the wake of last autumn’s cyberattack.

The official line from Coventry, of course, is that this is about growth in the US, not retrenchment in the UK. As ever in the car industry, the truth will be in the binding contracts that follow this opening, deliberately non-committal MoU, and in how aggressively Mr Trump’s trade negotiators decide to police the rules of origin around any vehicles that emerge with Range Rover or Defender badges on the bonnet.

For now, though, a Rubicon has been crossed. After more than 75 years of insisting that Range Rovers and Defenders could only be properly built within sight of a damp British hillside, Britain’s flagship luxury carmaker has formally acknowledged that the road to its biggest market may, in future, run through an American factory gate.

Read more:
Jaguar Land Rover eyes American tie-up with Stellantis to sidestep Trump tariffs

Britain’s largest online retailer has waded into one of the most uncomfortable debates in Westminster and the boardroom: who, exactly, is to blame for almost a million young people sitting outside the labour market?

The answer, according to Amazon’s UK country manager John Boumphrey, is not the young people themselves.

In a candid interview with the BBC’s Big Boss series, Boumphrey said the prevailing narrative that Generation Z lacks motivation, resilience or grit simply does not square with what his managers see on the warehouse floor. “We have to stop blaming young people,” he said, arguing that the education system is no longer “producing young people who are ready for work”.

Coming from the man who runs an operation employing 75,000 people across roughly 100 UK sites — half of them recruited straight out of school, college or unemployment — the intervention will sting employers who have spent the past 18 months grumbling about a “soft” younger workforce.

A million reasons to pay attention

The numbers behind Boumphrey’s comments are sobering. Almost a million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK are now classified as NEET — not in education, employment or training — a figure that has hovered uncomfortably close to seven-figure territory for more than a year, according to the Office for National Statistics. At the same time, the headline unemployment rate ticked up to 5 per cent in the three months to March, from 4.9 per cent a month earlier.

For SME owners, who account for the lion’s share of first jobs in Britain, the picture is grimmer still. Hospitality has retrenched, graduate schemes have thinned and entry-level vacancies in retail have collapsed, leaving fewer of the rungs school leavers traditionally use to climb into work. Business Matters has tracked the trend through the year, including in our recent report on how the NEET rate is closing in on the one-million mark.

Boumphrey’s argument is that the diagnosis matters. “I think too often you read about young people that somehow they lack motivation, they lack resilience, they lack the will to develop skills,” he said. “That is not our experience. We work with some individuals who are probably furthest from work and that’s where we actually see the biggest transformation.”

The case for compulsory work experience

His proposed remedy is unfashionably practical: make a stint of work experience mandatory for every over-16 in the country.

He argues that even a single week on a real shop floor, in a logistics hub or in an office teaches the soft skills schools struggle to deliver. “If you get a T-level student, they come in for a week, they understand the value of teamwork, of communication and problem solving,” he said. “It’s not a motivation problem, it’s a system problem, and that requires a system response.”

The T-level itself, introduced in 2020 and structured around a mandatory industry placement of at least 315 hours, has been quietly absorbed by larger employers but remains a foreign concept to many smaller firms. As Business Matters has set out before, T-levels carry real upside for SME employers willing to host a placement, not least because they create a low-risk pipeline of pre-trained recruits.

The Amazon paradox

The irony, Boumphrey concedes, is that his own business cannot find enough of the workers it needs. Amazon has just over 100 premises in the UK, including 30 fulfilment centres, and is on course to add several more on the back of its £40bn UK expansion programme. Yet roles built around its newer robotic infrastructure — mechatronics engineers, robotics technicians, maintenance specialists — sit stubbornly unfilled.

“When Amazon introduced robots into its warehouses there was some concern they would replace people,” he said. “Actually, the reverse happened. We ended up employing more people. Mechatronics engineers, people who can actually maintain the robots, people who are technicians, they’re not roles that exist. We can’t find enough people to fill those roles.”

His proposed fix is regional and collaborative: business, local authorities and further education colleges sitting around the same table to map skills gaps in each travel-to-work area, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all national curriculum.

Tax, scale and the political subtext

The Amazon UK boss could hardly avoid the perennial question of tax, given the group’s scale and its political profile. He claimed the company contributed “more than £5.8bn” in the UK last year and insisted Amazon pays “all the tax we’re meant to pay”. The wider contribution, he argued, must also be measured in the 75,000 jobs the company underwrites.

Amazon now accounts for roughly 30 per cent of all online sales in the UK and, earlier this year, overtook Walmart as the world’s largest company by annual revenue. That scale gives Boumphrey a louder microphone than most when he tells policymakers and fellow employers that the country’s youth jobs problem is structural, not generational.

For SME owners watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is uncomfortable but useful. The labour market is not short of young people who want to work. It is short of pathways that prepare them to do so — and, increasingly, short of employers prepared to build those pathways themselves.

Read more:
Blame the system, not the school leavers for youth unemployment, says Amazon’s UK boss

British families planning a getaway this summer could find the cost of flying creeping up again, after it emerged that Treasury officials are quietly drawing up plans for a £1bn VAT raid on the fees airports charge airlines, a move the industry has branded a stealth tax on holidaymakers and exporters alike.

The proposals, being worked up inside HMRC, would impose the standard 20 per cent rate of VAT on top of the per-passenger charges levied by airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester for the use of runways, terminals and ground services. Those fees are almost always passed straight through to passengers in the ticket price, meaning the burden would land squarely on travellers and the small and medium-sized businesses that depend on affordable air travel to reach overseas customers.

At Heathrow, where the regulated charge currently sits at around £24 a head, the change would add close to £5 to the cost of every passenger — before a single penny of Air Passenger Duty, fuel surcharge or booking fee has been added. The official APD rates published by HMRC already range from £15 to £106 for an economy seat depending on distance, and rose again from April under increases pencilled in at the Autumn Budget.

A retrospective sting

What is alarming airlines and airports most is not just the prospect of a new levy, but the possibility that Whitehall might backdate it. Industry sources tell Business Matters that ministers are exploring whether to apply the charge as far back as four years, the maximum permitted under current legislation, generating an immediate windfall for the Exchequer running to around £1bn from Heathrow alone.

Heathrow generated £1.13bn in revenue from passenger charges last year, while Gatwick reported £607m and Manchester Airports Group, owner of Manchester and Stansted, recorded £470m. Factoring in smaller hubs, the total VAT take could comfortably top £1.5bn, although officials have yet to clarify whether the tax would bite on both outbound and inbound legs.

One airline industry insider described the plan as “a stealth tax on families at a time when the cost-of-living crisis means many people are already struggling to afford a holiday”. The warning lands alongside fresh evidence that Britons are already tightening their belts on travel, Barclays data recently showed holiday spending falling for the first time since the pandemic as cost-of-living and Iran conflict fears bite.

Reeves giveth, HMRC taketh away

The disclosure could hardly come at a more awkward moment for the Chancellor. Even as her officials sharpen the pencil on aviation VAT, Rachel Reeves was on her feet in the Commons unveiling a £1bn cost-of-living package designed to take the sting out of the school summer holidays.

From 25 June to 1 September, theme parks, zoos, museums, cinemas, soft play centres and theatres will charge a reduced 5 per cent rate of VAT in place of the usual 20 per cent. Children’s meals are included in the cut, which the Treasury values at £300m. The Government claims the measure will shave £20 off a theme-park day out for a family of four, £1.50 off cinema tickets and £2 off a family meal.

Fuel duty will be frozen for the rest of the year, free bus travel will be offered to children throughout August, and import taxes have been trimmed on a basket of staple foods. The energy-intensive chemicals and ceramics sectors, meanwhile, will share a £470m lifeline aimed at protecting jobs in some of the country’s most exposed manufacturing hubs.

Ms Reeves told MPs the package would be paid for by raising “hundreds of millions of pounds a year” from oil and gas majors such as BP and Shell, with the Office for Budget Responsibility due to assess the impact at the autumn fiscal event. Broader support on household energy bills was held in reserve, with the Chancellor signalling that targeted help would follow in the autumn “if bills continue to rise”.

The hospitality and visitor economy were quick to welcome the move. Fiona Eastwood, chief executive of Merlin Entertainments, which operates Alton Towers and Legoland, confirmed the discounted rate would apply to both admission tickets and children’s meals. Kate Nicholls, chair of UKHospitality, said it was “the quickest and simplest way to lower prices and boost consumer confidence”.

Aviation cries foul

The aviation sector, however, is in no mood to applaud. An Airlines UK spokesman said: “The UK is already one of the most overtaxed aviation markets in the world and, as the cost burden increases, we risk becoming even more uncompetitive. The only people cheering a move like this would be those running rival airports overseas.”

Industry analysis backs the point. The Office for Budget Responsibility already forecasts APD will raise close to £5bn a year by the end of the decade, while Airlines UK research suggests mandatory taxes can account for as much as half the price of an off-peak short-haul ticket. Bolting VAT on to airport charges would compound a tax burden that low-cost carriers say is already pushing routes, and the SME-friendly connectivity that comes with them, into mainland Europe.

Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, was blunter still: “Any additional tax on aviation is a tax on doing business, a brake on exports or an attack on hard-working families. No government on the side of growth would indulge this idea.”

The proposals may also collide with international aviation rules, which broadly exempt airfares from VAT. Heathrow is understood to be taking specialist tax advice, while one industry source characterised the work inside HMRC as a “fishing trip” by officials looking for new revenue. “It’s a very technical conversation, with HMRC trying to work out if they can capture additional tax revenue,” the source said. “The question is whether it’s going to move forward and, if it does, whether it is going to hit passengers.”

What it means for SMEs

For Britain’s small and mid-sized businesses, the stakes are real. Air freight, sales travel and trade-show attendance all sit downstream of airport economics, and any uplift in landing charges feeds quickly into per-trip costs. It is also the second time in twelve months that the regulator has tangled with the Heathrow pricing model, earlier this year Heathrow was forced into a bigger cut of passenger landing fees by the Civil Aviation Authority, capping charges below the level the airport had sought.

Airports are unlikely to absorb a new VAT charge in-house. Heathrow has been lobbying loudly for measures to restore competitiveness, including the reinstatement of VAT-free shopping for international visitors, warning that the UK is losing ground to European rivals on tax. Adding a fresh 20 per cent layer to its core regulated charge would, the airport believes, run directly counter to the Government’s own growth narrative.

A government spokesman insisted there was no formal policy change in train, telling reporters: “The Government is not considering any changes to tax rules in this area. HMRC routinely engage businesses on how existing tax rules are being applied.”

That is unlikely to settle nerves in boardrooms in West London or aboard the airlines. For now, families booking summer flights can enjoy a temporary VAT cut at the theme-park turnstile, but the smart money in the aviation lobby is on a rather chillier autumn at the airport check-in desk.

Read more:
Labour eyes £1bn VAT raid on airport charges in stealth blow to family holidays

After years of quiet desperation in Stoke-on-Trent, the kilns finally have something to celebrate. The government has unveiled a £120 million support package for the UK ceramics industry, ending a prolonged lobbying campaign by manufacturers and trade bodies who had warned that one of Britain’s oldest industrial sectors was being allowed to slip away.

The funding, announced by business secretary Peter Kyle alongside chancellor Rachel Reeves, is split evenly: £60 million in capital grants to help manufacturers invest in new equipment, energy efficiency and decarbonisation, and a further £60 million to ease the punishing operational costs that have brought several household names to their knees. Eligible firms across refractory products, clay building materials, household ceramics and technical ceramics will be able to apply when the scheme opens later this summer, according to the official announcement from the Department for Business and Trade.

For Rob Flello, chief executive of trade body Ceramics UK, the package is vindication of a campaign that has at times felt like shouting into a void. He said he was “delighted” with the decision, calling it “a fantastic recognition of the importance of the UK ceramics industry,” and confirmed that Ceramics UK had been asked to work directly with civil servants on the scheme’s design and delivery.

“We’ve got manufacturers that have been around for many hundreds of years,” Flello added. “We want to have manufacturers that are around for the next few hundred years. It’s really about making sure this money is spent wisely and well, and achieves the maximum potential it can.”

He conceded the funding had come too late for some firms, but said it had been “long fought for” and represented a hard-won breakthrough after sustained lobbying.

A sector hit by every conceivable headwind

The relief, while substantial, lands on an industry that has been battered by an unusually brutal cocktail of pressures. Gas accounts for roughly 90 per cent of the energy consumed in ceramics production, a structural reliance that has left the sector painfully exposed to the price shocks triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Previous government support targeted largely at electricity bills, manufacturers complain, has offered only marginal relief.

That frustration has been simmering for some time. Earlier this year, the trade union GMB publicly criticised the design of the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme, arguing that ceramics and brickmaking had been overlooked in favour of electricity-intensive industries — a perceived snub that galvanised the lobbying effort behind the new package.

The damage of the past few years is visible across north Staffordshire. The number of ceramics firms in the area has fallen from 137 in 2018 to 123 in 2024, according to research commissioned by Stoke-on-Trent City Council and compiled by Kada and Ortus Economic Research. Denby Pottery in Derbyshire entered administration earlier this year, citing rising energy and labour costs; manufacturing at the site ceased in April with the loss of more than 100 jobs. Royal Stafford has also collapsed. Moorcroft, the storied Stoke-on-Trent maker, only survived after being rescued by its founder’s grandson last year.

Iain Martin, chief executive of Emma Bridgewater, whose own business has absorbed a £1.4 million loss against the backdrop of soaring input costs, described the announcement as “positive” after a long run of bad news.

“We’re very grateful for any support we can get,” he said. The industry, he added, had faced “quite severe headwinds in the past few years” around energy costs, labour costs and competition from overseas. “This represents a very welcome support from the government, which I think the whole industry will be very pleased with.”

He noted that “significant British brands” had “fallen over” in recent times. “There are 120 brands left and we have a future,” he said. “The money can’t come soon enough really.”

Why Whitehall blinked

The political calculation behind the funding is not difficult to read. Rachel Reeves and Peter Kyle have framed the package as part of a wider commitment to economic resilience and to safeguarding the industrial base that supplies sectors regarded as strategically critical.

“At a time of global uncertainty it’s never been more important to ensure Britain’s resilience and back the industries our country depends on,” Kyle said. “This funding will support thousands of jobs and put businesses on a secure footing for the long term.”

Reeves echoed the point, noting that “the chemicals and ceramics industries underpin our economic resilience and support skilled jobs across the UK.” The wider announcement also included £350 million for the chemicals sector, reflecting concern in the Treasury that energy-intensive manufacturing in Britain has been quietly losing ground to European rivals.

The research commissioned by Stoke-on-Trent City Council made the case bluntly: ceramics is a “vital component” of supply chains across aerospace, defence, clean energy and electronics. Advanced and technical ceramics, sanitaryware and refractory products have seen net company worth rise since 2018, with supply chain turnover up 35 per cent between 2018 and 2024 — a reminder that, properly supported, this is far from a sunset industry.

The campaign to secure the support extended well beyond Westminster. The GMB had previously pushed ministers to showcase UK pottery in British embassies worldwide, a piece of soft-power advocacy that helped keep the sector’s plight on the political agenda.

What happens next

Attention now turns to the detail. Flello and Ceramics UK will spend the coming weeks working with officials on the application process, the eligibility thresholds, and how the £60 million capital pot will be apportioned between firms still investing for the long term and those simply trying to keep the lights on.

The mood among manufacturers remains cautious. Few in Stoke-on-Trent believe £120 million alone solves a problem that has been a generation in the making, and structural questions about UK industrial gas pricing remain unresolved. But for the first time in several years, the country’s ceramics industry has reason to believe it has been heard.

“I’m really delighted for the industry,” said Flello. “I can’t wait to get sleeves rolled up and work out how we’re going to spend it.”

Read more:
Potters win £120m rescue as government finally backs Britain’s ceramics heartland

The founder of 4Networking lost a £2 million business in an afternoon, then spent four years being smeared online by a woman he had met for 30 seconds.

In an unflinching conversation with Richard Alvin, he describes the four seconds that nearly ended it all, and the platform failures he now wants the next Secretary of State to put right.

There is a moment, about twenty minutes into our conversation, when Brad Burton goes very still. We are talking about the period in 2022 when his business had collapsed, his stalker was posting fifteen lies a day across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and X, and the platforms were responding to his complaints with cut-and-paste boilerplate. He is sitting at his desk in Somerset, the same desk he sat at then.

“Four seconds,” he says. “For four seconds, I thought I can’t do this anymore.” He pauses. “Luckily those four seconds happened when I was sat at my desk, as in another setting the outcome might have been different, either way it motivated me to go to the doctors and get some antidepressants. Hadn’t done them for 25 years. That just shows you how severe this was.”

It is a remark, delivered in the matter-of-fact Salford cadence familiar to anyone who has ever booked Burton for a keynote, that reframes the whole interview. Britain’s self-styled “number one motivational speaker”, the man who built 4Networking from a £25,000 debt and a pile of pizza delivery sheets in 2006 into the country’s largest face-to-face business network — was, on his own admission, four seconds from a very different ending.

We had sat down for the latest edition of the ‘In Conversation Podcast’ to talk about three things, all of them, in his view, urgent for anyone running a small business in 2026: how you rebuild when turnover goes to zero with no playbook; what happens when the professional platform you have anchored your reputation to stops protecting you; and what resilience, mental, financial, reputational, actually looks like on the other side. They proved to be the same story.

From £2.3 million to nought in a single afternoon

The first collapse was televised. On 20 March 2020, with 4Networking turning over £2.3 million a year at its peak and running 5,000 face-to-face breakfast meetings in Premier Inns and Brewers Fayre up and down the country, Boris Johnson told the country to stay at home.

“When you’re running 5,000 networking meetings in Brewers Fayres and Holiday Inn Expresses up and down the land, that’s a problem,” Burton says, with characteristic understatement. The original assumption that “this will be a short pause, we’ll be back”, turned into a “dance of the seven veils”, a fortnightly extension that he believes did more damage than honesty would have.

Burton’s response was to invoke what he calls his 24/24/24 framework. “If I can’t make a decision in 24 seconds, revisit in 24 minutes. If after 24 minutes I can’t make a decision, I revisit in 24 hours. If after 24 hours I can’t make a decision, I’ve just made a decision, it’s not important. Next.” Within days, 4Networking had become the first network in the country to move wholesale onto Zoom, under the banner 4N Online. He calls it “drawing a picture of a sandwich when you’re hungry”, a holding measure rather than a substitute. He exited the company in 2022.

That should have been the story: a textbook British SME pivot, a clean founder exit, a man in his early fifties moving on to keynotes and books. It was not.

Thirty seconds at Aston Villa

In January 2019, at one of Burton’s personal development events at Aston Villa Football Club, a woman in an audience of around 200 was introduced to him by a mutual contact and asked for a selfie. The exchange lasted less than a minute. Her name was Sam Wall.

A year later, with Britain locked down and Burton’s identity as the country’s networking-in-chief evaporating in real time, Wall began posting on social media. The first post was vague; the second referenced “a high-profile speaker”; the third named him. Within days she had 30,000 LinkedIn followers, more than Burton’s own, and was alleging he had given her death threats, poisoned her cat, slashed her tyres and put a tracker on her car. Burton was 200 miles away in Somerset throughout lockdown.

“I was 200 miles away in lockdown and being accused of poisoning her cat — and Linkedin did nothing”

“People don’t do checks and measures on social media,” he says. “It was a modern-day witch hunt. I was guilty until proven innocent.” A cease-and-desist letter, served at a cost of £3,000, was promptly photographed and posted to her feed beneath the caption: “I’m not allowing this guy to bully me into submission.” Supporters cheered her on. Speaking engagements began to be quietly cancelled. Family members were drawn in.

The legal road, when he finally took it, was as slow as it was bruising. A statement given at Taunton police station vanished from the system. Wall was arrested, bailed for 30 days, “30 days of peace”, and resumed her campaign, in Burton’s recollection, “30 days and 10 minutes later”. She forged what purported to be a stalker protection order against him and posted it online. She wrote a 22,000-word article about him on LinkedIn. By his own count, she made roughly 500 posts about him across the major platforms over four years.

In March 2025, the case finally reached a national audience. BBC Panorama broadcast My Online Stalker, presented by Darragh MacIntyre, with Burton and the Manchester tech entrepreneur Naomi Timperley as its central voices. Channel 4’s Social Media Monsters followed with a second-episode treatment of the same case. ITV covered the sentencing. In October 2025, at Minshull Street Crown Court, Sam Wall was jailed for 28 months for what Judge Neil Usher described as a “prolonged, deliberate and calculated” campaign and an “unrelenting barrage” that was “breathtaking” in its scope.

Burton’s case is one of the fewer than two per cent of stalking complaints in this country that result in a conviction.

“There is no leadership at LinkedIn”

It is the response of the platforms, and one platform in particular, that animates him now. Wall’s LinkedIn account, as of publication, remains live, and so does much of the content she posted about him. Business Matters has previously reported on the mounting pressure on LinkedIn to act.

“We contacted LinkedIn legals. We contacted support. We tagged in everybody,” Burton says. “Not a single piece of content came down. We had people from America come on Zoom calls, they wouldn’t even turn the cameras on, saying, ‘She’s not doing anything illegal.’ I said, ‘What happens if she gets convicted?’ They said, ‘If she gets convicted, do let us know and we’ll see what we can do.’ So guess what? We let them know. They did nothing about it.”

Top-tier legal advice, he says, surfaced a structural problem: LinkedIn hides behind European law jurisdictionally rooted in Ireland and corporate decision-making rooted in California. “They’ve got this double moat. Nobody wanted to champion it.” Reporting Wall’s account, by design, blocked the reporter from her output rather than removing it. “That’s not a solution.”

If he had ten minutes with the Secretary of State and LinkedIn’s UK MD, what would he ask for? “Imagine if on your platform, I called you this, and I said this about your family. Would you ignore it and block me? Or would you make some changes and get me off the platform? That is exactly what should have happened here. Your business is people, and that’s the bit that’s been lost.” He goes further: there is, he says, “no leadership” at the UK level. “Nobody stepped forward and said, ‘I’m the UK managing director. I’m going to sort this crap.’”

It is a critique that lands at a moment when the regulatory tide is turning. The Online Safety Act is reshaping platform obligations in the UK, and stalking prosecutions, although still woefully low against a high base of reported offences, are at a record high. Burton’s case is the gap between the law and its enforcement made flesh.

Building the antidote

What Burton always does, and is doing again, is build. His new venture, Motivational Business Network, has opened for paid membership at £75 a month, vetted, deliberately slow, and capped at the kind of room size where, as he puts it, “you go and put yourself in a room with 50 people who are on side and positive, and tell me that’s a waste of time.”

The product cue is something called Shine: every member receives 100 daily “Shine points” they can award to others for genuine help, the awards visible on a member’s profile as social proof. “When everyone’s shouting, no one’s listening,” he says. “We’ve got to start getting quieter. We’ve got to start talking again. Less AI, more human.”

He pauses, the Salford grin back in place. “When I built 4Networking, it was a wobbly Jenga tower. This time we’re building it slow, methodical. No rush. Let’s get it right, not right now, which goes 100 per cent against everything I’ve ever done.”

For a man who came within four seconds of a different outcome, “right, not right now” sounds less like a strapline and more like a hard-won operating principle. British business, and the platforms that profess to serve it, would do well to take the note.

Read more:
Brad Burton interview: how the UK’s no.1 motivational speaker rebuilt after lockdown wiped out 4Networking, and survived a four-year online stalking campaign

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

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

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

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

A backbone, not a footnote

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

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

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

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

Squeezed at every turn

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

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

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

A test of credibility

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Reeves has rolled out a package of consumer-facing tax cuts in a bid to put more cash in family pockets and breathe life back into Britain’s battered high streets, with the centrepiece a temporary VAT reduction on summer attractions designed to keep tills ringing through the holidays.

In a statement that drew rare applause from the hospitality lobby, the Chancellor confirmed that VAT on a swathe of family activities will fall from 20 per cent to 5 per cent under a new “Great British Summer Saving Scheme”. The reduced rate will apply to fairs, zoos, museums, cinemas and children’s meals in restaurants, running from the start of the Scottish school holidays on 25 July through to early September.

Reeves also ruled out the long-trailed rise in fuel duty, suspended tariffs on more than 100 supermarket food lines and lifted the tax-free mileage allowance by 10p per mile, backdated to April 2026. Free local bus travel for children aged five to 15 will operate throughout August in England, in what the Treasury framed as a co-ordinated push to ease pressure on households during the school break. Full eligibility criteria for the scheme have been published by the Treasury.

The measures land at a critical moment for the country’s small-business community, particularly the hospitality and leisure operators who have spent the past three years absorbing rising wage bills, energy costs and business rates. As Business Matters has reported, trade bodies have warned of a “tidal wave” of closures unless ministers act, with three pubs and restaurants shutting their doors every day so far this year.

A lifeline for the high street

Michelle Ovens CBE, chief executive and founder of Small Business Britain, welcomed the move as a timely intervention before the all-important summer trading quarter. “It’s encouraging to see the Chancellor’s commitment to a summer of savings with the VAT cut on children’s meals,” she said. “Providing an important boost for small businesses during the summer period, helping to drive footfall and ease pressure on margins at a crucial time of year. As many businesses prepare to enter the most important trading quarter of the year, measures that support both families and local high streets are incredibly welcome.”

Ovens added that the package was “essential in combating the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, particularly during the summer holidays when financial pressures and childcare commitments can intensify without the support schools often provide”.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) echoed the sentiment but with sharper edges. Tina McKenzie, the FSB’s policy chair, said the timing could not be more urgent for an industry running on fumes. “Anything that helps get families out spending this summer is good news for the restaurants, pubs, soft plays and attractions that have spent years fighting rising costs and shrinking margins,” she said. “With 44 per cent of small hospitality firms based on or near the high street, a VAT cut should help put bums on seats and bring life into our town centres this summer.”

McKenzie pointed to a domestic tourism uplift as cash-strapped families switch out of foreign holidays. “Families will make extra purchases, such as drinks and merchandise, which is likely to be the biggest help to small businesses’ bottom lines,” she added.

Confidence in critical condition

The numbers behind the announcement make uncomfortable reading. According to the FSB, 94 per cent of small hospitality firms saw their costs rise in the last three months, with tax cited as one of the biggest drivers by 61 per cent of operators. A further 35 per cent expect to contract over the coming year, a figure that helps explain why this temporary VAT cut, while welcome, is unlikely to satisfy a sector that has long campaigned for a permanent reduction.

Kate Nicholls, chair of UKHospitality, which has lobbied for years for a lower headline rate, said it was “good to see the Government recognise the importance of a lower VAT rate for hospitality as the quickest and simplest way to lower prices and boost consumer confidence”. The trade body has consistently argued that aligning the UK’s rate with European competitors would stimulate jobs and investment well beyond the summer window.

For now, however, ministers have stopped short of that wider reset. The Treasury has costed the scheme at roughly £300 million, a modest sum against the backdrop of the wider Budget arithmetic, but enough, the Chancellor hopes, to keep the lights on in pubs, cafés and family attractions through what one operator described to Business Matters as “make-or-break months”.

The fuel duty freeze and 10p mileage uplift, meanwhile, address a separate but related pressure point. Rising pump prices have been squeezing tradespeople, hauliers and rural firms with no realistic alternative to the van or the car, an issue previously highlighted as a slow-burning crisis for the SME economy.

A summer test

Whether the package delivers will depend on whether smaller operators can pass the VAT saving through to customers quickly and visibly, and whether families respond. “A strong summer could be the difference between staying afloat and shutting up shop for some businesses,” McKenzie warned.

For the Chancellor, the political calculation is straightforward: a summer of cheaper days out, full coach parks and busy seaside arcades is a far easier sell on the doorstep than another quarter of grim closure headlines. For Britain’s small businesses, it is a chance, perhaps the last one this year, to turn footfall into cash flow.

As McKenzie put it, in a line that doubles as a plea: “As people plan summer days out, we’d urge them to back the small local pubs, cafés, attractions and hospitality venues that make our communities special.”

Read more:
Reeves serves up summer of savings with VAT cut on family days out

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

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

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

The numbers behind the obituary

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

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

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

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

What it means for SME fleets and company car schemes

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

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

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

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

Learners are already voting with their feet

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

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

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

The models still flying the flag

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

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

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

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