Business

Rachel Reeves has pledged to slash electricity bills by up to a quarter for more than 10,000 British manufacturers, in a move Whitehall hopes will shore up the country’s battered industrial base and blunt criticism that ministers have been slow to tackle the highest energy costs in the developed world.

Speaking from Washington, where she is attending the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the Chancellor confirmed on Thursday that the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme (BICS) will be widened by 40 per cent, bringing an additional 3,000 firms under its umbrella. The scheme, first trailed in last year’s Modern Industrial Strategy, will exempt qualifying businesses from the indirect costs of three legacy green levies: the Renewables Obligation, Feed-in Tariffs and the Capacity Market.

Treasury officials put the value of the relief at roughly £35 to £40 per megawatt hour, or up to £600 million a year once the scheme takes effect in April 2027. Crucially, ministers insist that neither households nor businesses outside the scheme will see their bills rise as a consequence, with the cost being met through a mixture of changes within the energy system and Exchequer funding. Full details are to be set out in next year’s Budget.

In a concession to firms that have been lobbying hard for immediate relief, the Chancellor has also agreed to a one-off backdated payment in 2027, replicating the support manufacturers would have received had BICS been operational from April 2026. Exemptions on the Renewables Obligation and Feed-in Tariff levies will kick in from April 2027, with Capacity Market exemptions following that October.

Eligibility will run the length of the industrial spectrum, from sprawling steelworks and automotive plants to smaller recyclers, plastics producers, metal fabricators and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Aerospace companies, nuclear fuel processors and makers of cooling and ventilation equipment are also expected to qualify. Relief will be calculated site by site, based on the proportion of electricity used to manufacture eligible goods. Sites where less than 25 per cent of power is used for qualifying production will receive nothing; those between 25 and 50 per cent will get a half exemption, and any site above 50 per cent will benefit in full. Notably, the scheme draws no distinction between large corporates and SMEs, a point likely to be welcomed by smaller firms in the supply chain who have often found themselves shut out of previous industrial aid programmes.

Ms Reeves said the measure was part of the Government’s broader push to deliver “stability, keeping costs down, and boosting competitiveness” at a time when the Middle East crisis is once again rattling global energy markets. “This Government has the right plan for the economy: backing British industry, cutting electricity costs, and building a stronger, more resilient future,” she said, adding that the announcement would help manufacturers “compete, win and create good jobs across the country”.

The Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, framed the move as a response to the number one complaint he hears on factory visits. “When global instability puts businesses under pressure we’ll always do what’s needed to support them,” he said. “By extending the reach of BICS by 40 per cent, we’re acting decisively to tackle the number one issue that businesses face head-on.”

Business lobbies offered a qualified welcome. Rain Newton-Smith, chief executive of the CBI, said the Chancellor had shown she was “listening to firms grappling with volatility in global energy markets”, though she stressed that BICS should be viewed as “an important step” rather than “job done”. Lasting reform, she argued, would require stripping policy costs from electricity bills altogether, scaling up energy efficiency support and accelerating the rollout of renewables.

Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, described the final design of BICS as “a major win” for the car industry, saying it sent “a clear and immediate signal that we are open for business and a prime destination for investment”. Shevaun Haviland, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, welcomed the backdating in particular, which the BCC had lobbied for.

Not everyone was satisfied, however. Stephen Phipson, chief executive of Make UK, delivered the sharpest riposte, warning that relief coming in 2027 was cold comfort to manufacturers renegotiating their contracts now. “Manufacturers are staring down the barrel of huge increases in their energy bills this month,” he said. “Many simply can’t wait until 2027 for relief.” The UK still labours under the highest industrial electricity costs in the developed world, he noted, and failing to act immediately risked “substantial job losses and further deindustrialisation of a sector vital for our national security and resilience”, a sector that supports 2.6 million skilled jobs.

Thursday’s announcement follows the £420 million boost delivered on 1 April through the British Industry Supercharger, which lifted the discount on electricity network charges for around 500 of the most energy-intensive firms from 60 to 90 per cent. Together with BICS, ministers argue the two schemes represent the most significant intervention in industrial energy pricing in a generation.

A second consultation on the regulatory changes needed to bring the scheme to life closes on 14 May, with legislation expected on the statute book by the autumn. A full review of BICS is pencilled in for 2030. The full list of eligible SIC and HS codes is due to be published on gov.uk later today.

Whether the package is enough to arrest the slow erosion of Britain’s industrial base, or whether, as Make UK fears, it simply arrives too late for firms already on the brink, will now become the defining question of the Chancellor’s industrial policy in the run-up to the Budget.

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Reeves unveils 25% electricity bill cut for 10,000 manufacturers as energy costs bite

British SMEs with transatlantic trade links have been warned they face a prolonged and uncertain wait before recovering tariffs wrongly collected by the United States, after Washington confirmed that its long-awaited online refund portal will handle only a fraction of outstanding claims when it goes live next week.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is due to switch on its Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries system, known as CAPE, on 20 April. The first phase of the portal is expected to cope with roughly 63 per cent of refund requests. The remaining 37 per cent, however, have been left without so much as a provisional timetable, raising fresh concerns for cash-strapped importers that have been out of pocket for the best part of two years.

John Havard, a consultant at audit, tax and business advisory firm Blick Rothenberg, said the scale of the backlog was “extraordinary” and that the uncertainty surrounding the more complex tranche of claims would do little to reassure small and mid-sized businesses that had counted on a swift resolution once the US Supreme Court struck down the tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

“Many of these remaining cases are classed as final tariffs because the goods concerned will have entered the US more than a year before the refund claim is filed,” Havard said. “In such instances the claims procedure is going to be considerably more involved. We are unlikely to hear anything further until government officials next appear before the Court of International Trade to deliver their next mandated progress report.”

The numbers involved are eye-watering. Blick Rothenberg estimates that around 53 million unlawful tariff collection transactions were processed during the period in question, with the total refund bill potentially reaching $166 billion (£132 billion). More than 26,000 importers, collectively responsible for some $120 billion of IEEPA tariffs, have already registered with CBP to receive their money back electronically, following a White House directive requiring all federal payments to be made by electronic transfer.

The rules governing who can actually lodge a claim are tightly drawn. Only the official importer-of-record, or that party’s nominated US customs broker, will be entitled to submit a refund request. Businesses must also hold an active account with CBP’s Automated Commercial Environment before they can receive any money. Havard said there had been “considerable activity” in new account registrations since the Supreme Court’s ruling, suggesting that many firms had been caught flat-footed by the decision.

For those still waiting, there is at least one sliver of good news. In a previous statement to the US trade court, a government official confirmed that interest would be paid on all refunded amounts, offering modest compensation for what is shaping up to be a lengthy delay before cheques actually land.

For British exporters and importers with exposure to the US market, the practical advice is straightforward: ensure ACE registration is in order, confirm which party holds importer-of-record status on historic shipments, and brace for a drawn-out administrative process. The fundamentals of the refund entitlement are no longer in doubt; the mechanics of getting the money back, it seems, very much are.

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US tariff refund backlog leaves UK exporters in limbo as Washington scrambles to process billions in claims

Walt Disney is preparing to shed roughly 1,000 jobs in the first significant cost-cutting exercise under its new chief executive Josh D’Amaro, as the entertainment giant grapples with the shifting economics of Hollywood.

In an email to staff on Tuesday, seen by Reuters, D’Amaro told employees the company would be eliminating roles across several divisions, citing the need for a more nimble operation. “Given the fast-moving pace of our industries, this requires us to constantly assess how to foster a more agile and technologically-enabled workforce to meet tomorrow’s needs,” he wrote.

According to a person familiar with the matter, the redundancies will land across the recently reorganised marketing group, the studio and television businesses, sports network ESPN, products and technology, and a handful of corporate functions. Affected staff began receiving notifications earlier this week.

The cull marks D’Amaro’s first major structural intervention since succeeding Bob Iger in the corner office, and signals that the new chief is wasting little time in putting his own stamp on the House of Mouse. It also places Disney firmly alongside its peers: Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount Skydance have both taken the axe to headcount in recent months as the legacy Hollywood majors confront the same unforgiving combination of a softening linear television market, sluggish box office receipts and intensifying competition for viewers’ attention and wallets.

For Disney, it is the largest round of cuts since 2023, when the group announced some 7,000 redundancies as part of a sweeping $5.5bn (£4.2bn) cost-saving drive. That earlier exercise was launched under pressure from activist investor Nelson Peltz, who had been agitating for sharper financial discipline and a credible route to profitability for the group’s loss-making streaming arm.

With a global workforce of around 231,000 at the close of its last fiscal year in September, the latest reduction is proportionately modest, affecting well under half of one per cent of total headcount. But the symbolism is hard to miss. By targeting marketing, studio, television and ESPN in a single sweep, D’Amaro is effectively telling Wall Street that no corner of the empire is beyond scrutiny as management hunts for leaner operating structures and faster decision-making.

The job losses were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

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Disney to axe 1,000 jobs as new chief D’Amaro moves to streamline empire

A Norwegian green-steel start-up has emerged as the preferred bidder for the former Liberty Steel operations in South Yorkshire, raising hopes of a long-awaited rescue for two plants that have become emblematic of Britain’s troubled heavy industry.

Blastr, a business backed by the Oslo-based renewables investor Vanir Green Industries, has entered a five-week period of exclusive negotiations with the Government’s official receiver to acquire Speciality Steel UK (SSUK), the company that owns Britain’s largest operating electric arc furnace in Rotherham and the downstream works at Stocksbridge.

The deal, if completed, would draw a line under one of the most drawn-out corporate collapses in recent British manufacturing history. SSUK has been in the hands of the official receiver since last August, when London’s High Court stripped ownership from the embattled metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta and declared the business “hopelessly insolvent”.

A successful sale would also hand ministers a rare piece of good news on the steel file. The Department for Business and Trade is already wrestling with the future of British Steel in Scunthorpe, the Chinese-owned blast furnace operation taken into state control roughly a year ago and now widely tipped for full nationalisation. Whitehall officials had privately floated the idea of bolting SSUK on to British Steel to create a single, state-shepherded speciality and long products champion, but sources suggest that option has fallen away under Blastr’s plans.

Confirmation of the exclusivity window came on Wednesday. “The official receiver will look to complete the sale at the earliest opportunity,” the Government said in a terse statement, with officials pointing to the tight five-week runway as a sign that negotiations are already well advanced.

For Blastr, the prize is considerable, but so is the challenge. The company does not yet own or operate a single working steel plant. Its flagship project is a greenfield site in Finland, where it plans to use green hydrogen to produce low-carbon iron and steel — a technology that remains commercially unproven at scale. The business is led by Mark Bula, a steel industry veteran who has held senior roles at large producers in India and the United States, and who is understood to be the driving force behind the push into the UK.

Industry watchers expect Blastr to require substantial external financing to take the Rotherham and Stocksbridge sites across the line. Even so, insiders argue that SSUK itself is a fundamentally viable business, long throttled by the chronic shortage of working capital that plagued the wider Liberty Steel group under Mr Gupta and left the plants unable to buy raw materials consistently. Gupta, whose globe-spanning GFG Alliance has contracted sharply in recent years as cash pressures mounted, fought to retain SSUK to the last, but was eventually overruled in court.

The Rotherham electric arc furnace is a particularly strategic asset. As Britain’s largest operational EAF, it is central to any credible vision of a lower-carbon domestic steel sector and produces the kind of speciality and engineering steels used by the aerospace, defence and oil and gas industries — customers the Government is keen to keep sourcing at home.

The response from the shop floor was cautiously welcoming. Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, a national secretary of the GMB union and a former steelworker herself, said Liberty Steel employees “have been at the sharp end of years of uncertainty at this point — this needs to be a deal that secures the long-term future of steelmaking in South Yorkshire”. She added that “any sale of SSUK must include due diligence which guarantees ongoing operations and stability of the sites”, a pointed reminder that unions will scrutinise Blastr’s funding package and operational plan closely before offering unqualified support.

For a region that has watched its steelmaking heritage erode over decades, and for a Government anxious to demonstrate that its industrial strategy can deliver more than just holding operations, the coming five weeks will be among the most consequential yet for the future of British speciality steel.

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Norwegian green-steel start-up closes in on rescue deal for former Liberty works in South Yorkshire

Rachel Reeves touched down in Washington on Tuesday carrying an unwelcome piece of luggage: the International Monetary Fund’s verdict that Britain is the biggest economic casualty of the Iran war among the world’s wealthiest nations.

The Fund’s spring forecast, delivered as the Chancellor arrived for the IMF and World Bank meetings, trimmed 0.5 percentage points from the UK’s 2026 growth projection, the steepest cut handed to any G7 economy since its January outlook. Inflation is now expected to push towards 4 per cent, while unemployment is heading for its highest rate in more than a decade.

For the small and medium-sized businesses that power two-thirds of the UK’s private sector workforce, the numbers translate into a grim set of pressures: softer consumer demand, stubborn cost inflation and a Treasury with precious little headroom to soften the blow.

The UK entered the conflict already on the back foot. Growth was sluggish well before the first missiles flew, with firms and households hunkering down ahead of last autumn’s Budget amid a fog of tax speculation that dampened activity across the high street and the boardroom alike.

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s economic counsellor, pointed to what he called a “shadow effect” lingering from that weaker momentum, a drag the Fund believes will bleed into next year’s performance. It is a diagnosis the Chancellor firmly rejects, arguing that Labour inherited a damaged economy from the Conservatives and has since set firmer foundations. Yet the data is unsympathetic: British households were already wrestling with the G7’s highest inflation rate before a single Iranian oil facility was struck.

The deeper problem is energy. The Iran conflict has delivered the sharpest shock to global supplies since the oil crises of the 1970s, and Britain’s gas-heavy power mix leaves it unusually exposed. Although much of the country’s gas is produced domestically, imported cargoes are being bought at sharply elevated wholesale prices, and because gas sets the marginal price for UK electricity, the pain travels quickly from the terminal to the meter.

“There is more of a pass through, if you want, of gas prices into wholesale prices of energy,” Gourinchas observed, noting that household bills were being cushioned only temporarily by existing government measures.

Reeves has used her Washington platform to push for de-escalation while sharpening her criticism of Donald Trump’s decision to prosecute the war on Iran. The political calculus is plain enough. With the public finances squeezed by elevated debt and stubbornly high borrowing costs, her fiscal room for manoeuvre is wafer-thin, and Labour is trailing in the polls as it approaches a testing set of May local elections.

Treasury insiders expect short-term, narrowly targeted relief measures rather than a broad spending splurge, precisely the prescription the IMF itself has endorsed. Anything more expansive risks spooking the gilt market and undoing the hard-won credibility Reeves has spent the past year trying to bank.

For Britain’s business community, the more consequential question is what happens once the immediate crisis fades. Insulating the country against the next energy shock will demand a far more aggressive push into domestic renewable generation, grid reinforcement and the kind of supply-side reforms that unlock private investment at scale.

SME owners hoping for relief will be watching two pressure points closely: whether the promised targeted support reaches smaller firms exposed to soaring input costs, and whether the long-promised industrial strategy finally delivers the cheaper, home-grown power that British manufacturers have been demanding for the best part of a decade.

Reeves returns from Washington with the IMF’s blessing for her fiscal restraint, but also with its unvarnished warning that, on current trajectory, Britain will spend 2026 at the bottom of the G7 league table. For a Chancellor already short on political capital, that is a verdict she can ill afford to let stand.

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Reeves flies into Washington as IMF brands Britain the G7’s biggest loser

The AA has become the first company to feel the sting of the Competition and Markets Authority’s new consumer enforcement powers, landing a £4.2 million fine and being ordered to return £760,000 to more than 80,000 learner drivers who were stung by so-called drip pricing.

The watchdog ruled that the motoring group’s two tuition arms, AA Driving School and BSM Driving School, failed to display the full cost of lessons upfront when customers booked online, a legal requirement under the regime that came into force last year. Instead, a compulsory £3 booking fee was quietly bolted on further down the purchase journey, leaving learners to discover the true price only once they were deep into the checkout process.

Sarah Cardell, the CMA’s chief executive, was unambiguous in her verdict. “If a fee is mandatory, the law is clear: it must be included in the price from the very start, not added at checkout, so consumers always know what they need to pay,” she said.

The enforcement action is the first of its kind and sends an unmistakable signal to British business that the regulator is prepared to wield its sharpened teeth. Since April 2025, the CMA has been able to investigate and penalise breaches of consumer protection law directly, without recourse to the courts, a shift that had been widely flagged as a potential game-changer for how SMEs and large corporates alike present pricing online.

Affected customers will not need to lift a finger. The two driving schools will write to those who qualify and refund them automatically, either to the card originally used or, failing that, by cheque. Individual payouts will depend on how many lesson packages each learner purchased, with the average repayment coming in at roughly £9.

A spokesperson for AA Driving School sought to draw a line under the episode. “Although the £3 booking fee was made clear to customers prior to their purchase, we acknowledge it should have also been displayed at the start of the online booking journey,” they said. “Having listened to the regulator, we made immediate changes to our website to make the £3 booking fee more prominent. We are now refunding all relevant customers. Whilst we are disappointed with the outcome of the investigation, we have fully co-operated with the CMA throughout and would emphasise that protecting consumer rights has been central to our business for more than 120 years.”

Drip pricing, the practice of advertising a headline figure and then layering on mandatory extras at the point of sale, has long been a bugbear of consumer champions. A 2023 study by the Department for Business and Trade found that nearly half of online traders were using the tactic, stripping an estimated £3.5 billion a year out of consumers’ pockets. For small and medium-sized businesses watching the AA case unfold, the lesson is straightforward: what might once have passed as a marketing nicety is now a regulatory tripwire.

The ruling also arrives at a delicate moment for the AA itself. Advisers were reportedly appointed late last year to examine either a sale or a stock market flotation of the group, five years on from its £219 million take-private deal struck by Warburg Pincus and TowerBrook Capital Partners. A public rebuke from the CMA is hardly the shop-window polish its owners will have been hoping for as they court potential buyers.

The timing is equally awkward for Britain’s hard-pressed learner drivers. Department for Transport figures show that the share of 17 to 20-year-olds in England holding a full driving licence has tumbled from 37 per cent in 2018 to 29 per cent in 2024, with the cost of tuition cited as the single biggest deterrent to getting behind the wheel. Learners who do press ahead now face an average waiting time of 22 weeks to sit their practical test, compared with roughly five weeks in February 2020, before the pandemic upended the system.

For an industry already struggling with affordability and access, being publicly pulled up for opaque pricing is an unwelcome spotlight. For the wider business community, the message from Canary Wharf is rather blunter: the CMA has found its cheque book, and it is no longer afraid to use it.

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AA ordered to refund 80,000 learner drivers in landmark ‘drip pricing’ ruling

A London-based fintech determined to drag Britain’s notoriously opaque utilities market into the twenty-first century has closed a £500,000 pre-seed round led by Fuel Ventures, one of the UK’s most active early-stage investors.

Arrival, founded by Harry Hanlon, pitches itself as a one-stop shop for the grimly familiar ritual of moving house. Rather than forcing tenants to juggle separate contracts for electricity, gas, water, broadband, council tax, the TV licence and rent, the platform bundles the lot into a single onboarding flow that, the company claims, takes under three minutes to complete. Independent research cited by the business suggests the average renter currently burns close to half a working day wrestling with the same task.

The proposition lands at a pointed moment for Britain’s private rented sector. There are roughly 4.6 million privately rented households in England alone, and churn is high, meaning the administrative headache repeats itself on an industrial scale every year. Hanlon argues that the incumbent energy and telecoms giants have quietly profited from the chaos, parking movers on default tariffs that can cost them thousands of pounds more than necessary over the course of a tenancy.

Arrival’s consumer-facing product promises to guarantee the cheapest tariff available on each utility and charges a flat £12.99 management fee, a deliberately transparent pricing model designed to contrast with the byzantine billing structures renters have come to expect. On the business-to-business side, the company says it saves letting agents and build-to-rent operators an average of 90 minutes of administrative time per property and offers a managed rent collection service it claims is up to four times cheaper than rival platforms such as OpenRent.

The wider prize is considerable. Rent arrears are estimated to cost UK landlords more than £470 million a year, a figure that has steadily crept upwards as cost-of-living pressures have squeezed household budgets. By consolidating payments and sitting closer to the tenant’s financial plumbing, Arrival is betting it can materially reduce the risk of missed rent for landlords while taking some of the sting out of moving day for renters.

The fresh capital will be used to accelerate growth in the fast-expanding build-to-rent sector, where institutional landlords are increasingly hungry for technology partners that can streamline operations at scale. The hire of Clare Johnson, previously a director at property management group Centrick, is intended to spearhead that push. The founders have set themselves the bullish target of reaching one million units under management by the end of the year.

Hanlon said the current system for managing household utilities was “fundamentally broken and exploitative”, adding that tenants were wasting critical time each month and frequently paying well over the odds simply because default tariffs went unchallenged. He described the funding as crucial to scaling the platform and cementing partnerships in the build-to-rent space.

Mark Pearson, founder of Fuel Ventures, said Arrival was tackling “a clear and costly inefficiency” within the private rental sector and praised the team’s early traction and understanding of both tenant and operator pain points.

For a market long accused of punishing inertia, Arrival’s pitch is disarmingly simple: make switching and setting up the default, not the exception. Whether the platform can convert that promise into the sort of scale its backers are banking on will depend on how quickly it can wire itself into Britain’s rapidly professionalising rental stock, and whether the big six energy suppliers prove willing, or able, to adapt.

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Arrival secures £500,000 to untangle Britain’s broken utilities market for renters

Britain’s largest housebuilder is tightening its grip on the chequebook, slashing land acquisition spend by as much as £200 million in response to what its board has branded a “less certain backdrop” triggered by the ongoing conflict in Iran, even as sales on the ground continue to hold up.

Barratt Redrow, formed from the £2.5 billion takeover of Redrow by Barratt Developments in 2024, told the market on Wednesday that trading between January and March had proved “resilient”, keeping it on course to deliver full-year pre-tax profits of roughly £568 million in line with City forecasts. Its financial year runs until the end of June.

Yet beneath the reassuring headline numbers, management made little secret of its caution about the coming twelve months. While the group does not expect the Middle East crisis and the subsequent spike in mortgage rates to derail its current financial year, directors warned that “visibility beyond the current financial year remains more uncertain”.

For property investors, the implications are twofold. Higher-for-longer borrowing costs threaten to cool buyer demand just as energy-driven inflation starts to feed into building material prices, a classic squeeze on developer margins.

In response, the FTSE 100 group is adopting what its chief executive David Thomas described as a “disciplined approach to capital allocation, selective land investment and rigorous cost control”. Since the start of July, Barratt Redrow has secured land capable of supporting just over 4,000 new homes, a dramatic reduction from the more than 15,300 plots it had snapped up at the same point last year.

Across the full financial year, the developer now expects to add between 7,000 and 9,000 plots to its land bank, well below the previous guidance range of 10,000 to 12,000. Total land spend is being pared back to between £700 million and £800 million, compared with the £900 million previously earmarked.

The sales picture, for now, remains more encouraging. Between January and March, Barratt Redrow’s roughly 400 active sites delivered an average reservation rate of 0.67 homes per week, a 6 per cent improvement on the same three months of 2025, a period flattered by a last-minute rush ahead of stamp duty changes. The forward order book has swollen to £3.54 billion, 13 per cent ahead of a year earlier, and the group has already banked 94 per cent of the sales it expects to complete before the June year-end.

That strong forward cover is precisely why bosses believe the fallout from the Iran war will be “limited” in the current year. Over the twelve months to June 2025, the group built 16,565 houses and flats, more than any other developer in Britain, and is guiding towards completions of between 17,200 and 17,800 homes this year.

Sales incentives, such as upgraded kitchens and deposit contributions, remain stubbornly higher than the wider industry would prefer, although Barratt Redrow stressed it has at least resisted the need to sweeten offers further in recent months.

The bigger worry for the 2027 financial year is build cost inflation, with energy prices having climbed sharply since the start of March. The company said it would provide “better visibility on build cost inflation for next year” at its next trading update in July.

“Barratt Redrow had a solid third quarter, with a resilient reservation rate underpinned by good customer demand,” Mr Thomas said. “Despite heightened macroeconomic uncertainty, we expect the Middle East conflict to have limited impact on 2026 performance, given our strong forward sales position and advanced build programme.”

The group’s roots stretch back to 1953, when Sir Lawrie Barratt, a young Newcastle accountant frustrated at being unable to afford the home he wanted, decided to build one himself. More than seven decades later, his successors are navigating an altogether different set of headwinds.

Shares in Barratt Redrow, which have shed 38 per cent of their value over the past year, rose 2.2 per cent to 264p in Wednesday trading, suggesting investors took modest comfort from the resilient near-term outlook even as the longer-term picture clouds over.

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Barratt Redrow pulls back on land buying as Iran war rattles housing market

Morrisons has placed up to 200 head office jobs at risk as Britain’s fifth-largest supermarket leans harder on artificial intelligence and automation to rein in costs and shore up a balance sheet still groaning under private equity debt.

The Bradford-based grocer confirmed to staff on Monday that a fresh round of restructuring would hit roughly 8 per cent of the workforce at its Hilmore House headquarters, with the cuts spread across every department. It is the latest and arguably most pointed intervention yet in a wider efficiency drive that has been running since last year.

A company spokesman said the proposals were part of a longer-term plan to streamline processes, automate manual tasks and “capitalise on the potential of data and artificial intelligence to improve performance”. In plain English, fewer humans in head office, more algorithms doing the heavy lifting.

The news, first reported by trade title Better Retailing, lands less than a month after Morrisons confirmed it would make its entire convenience buying and operations teams redundant and relocate its general merchandise staff to a new office more than an hour’s drive away, a move that affected around 100 employees.

For Morrisons, an SME-built business that grew out of a Bradford market stall to become a national multiple of roughly 500 supermarkets and a clutch of convenience stores, the squeeze is familiar territory. The chain has struggled since Clayton Dubilier & Rice, the American private equity group, took it private in 2021 in a transaction that piled £6.6 billion of debt onto its balance sheet.

The numbers remain sobering. Morrisons posted a statutory pre-tax loss of £381 million in its latest financial year, a modest improvement on the £414 million loss the previous year. Net debt has been cut by 46 per cent to £3.17 billion since 2022, largely through redundancies and the disposal of selected stores and petrol forecourts.

The cost-cutting programme is also delivering measurable results. The group said last month that it had shaved a further £49 million from its cost base in the most recent quarter, taking total savings since the programme began to £894 million. Trading, too, has ticked up, with like-for-like sales in the three months to the end of January rising 2.8 per cent.

Yet the board is under no illusion about the road ahead. The company warned that the trading environment remained “highly competitive, with grocery market growth lagging previous expectations”, and that the conditions seen in the first quarter had persisted into the second.

Chief executive Rami Baitiéh said he was closely watching the impact of the war in Iran on consumer confidence, and has repeatedly flagged the drag from the autumn 2024 Budget and wider government legislation, which he argues have created “significant cost headwinds” for operators across the sector.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, a Morrisons spokesman said the “multi-year programme will ensure our central functions are better placed to serve our stores and strengthen our ability to deliver for customers in the current very challenging market conditions”. He added: “As we evolve and adapt, we are proposing to make some changes to a number of areas within our central structure. This will involve making some tough but necessary decisions, which will impact on colleagues in our head office, where we are proposing to place a number of roles at risk of redundancy.”

The grocer said it would do what it could to redeploy affected staff, helping them “find alternative roles elsewhere in the business wherever we can”.

For the wider SME supplier base that depends on Morrisons’ buying desks, the restructuring raises a more awkward question: as AI takes the strain inside Hilmore House, how long before the same logic is applied to the conversations small suppliers have traditionally had with a human buyer on the other end of the line?

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Morrisons to axe up to 200 head office jobs as AI drive accelerates

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has reasserted its electric credentials with the unveiling of a £3 million zero-emissions hypercar aimed squarely at the world’s wealthiest collectors, signalling that the Goodwood-based marque intends to chase margin rather than volume in the years ahead.

The Nightingale, revealed this week, arrives only weeks after the BMW-owned manufacturer quietly abandoned its pledge to become an all-electric carmaker by 2030, conceding that a significant slice of its clientele remained unconvinced by battery power. For a company whose model names have long drawn on the darker hours, Phantom, Wraith, Ghost and Spectre, the Nightingale represents a deliberate tonal shift, named after Le Rossignol, the Cote d’Azur retreat of co-founder Sir Henry Royce.

Just 100 examples will be built, with first deliveries scheduled for 2028. Rolls-Royce is making no pretence of openness: the customer list is “by invitation only”, targeting the sort of ultra-high-net-worth individuals who already have several Rollers parked at their various residences.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Rolls-Royce has long been uneasy about its 6,000-unit annual production ceiling, fearing that volume erodes exclusivity. Rather than push the dial higher, the company has been quietly fattening its margins through ever more elaborate personalisation, bespoke starlight headliners, £26,000 onboard chessboards and £22,000 luggage sets are now routine add-ons. The Nightingale takes that logic to its natural conclusion by reviving full coach-building, allowing clients a direct hand in shaping the bodywork atop the chassis.

Nearly six metres in length and roughly Phantom-sized, the Nightingale retains the signature Pantheon grille before tapering into a torpedo-shaped rear behind a two-seat drophead cockpit. The design nods to the experimental 16EX and 17EX prototypes that Royce was developing in the 1920s after the death of his partner Charles Rolls, channelling an Art Deco sensibility into a segment , the open-top sports car, in which Rolls-Royce has historically felt somewhat awkward.

Demand for one-off commissions, notably the Boat Tail reportedly acquired by Jay-Z and Beyoncé for around $30 million, has prompted Rolls-Royce to nearly double the footprint of its Sussex plant to 100,000 square metres at a cost of £300 million. Crucially, the expansion is not designed to lift output but to house the specialist componentry and accessory capacity that underpins the bespoke model, a business in which some owners spend almost as much on extras as on the car itself.

Chris Brownridge, chief executive, framed the launch as a response to client appetite rather than a shift in strategy. “Some of the most discerning Rolls-Royce clients in the world asked us for our most ambitious work,” he said, pointing to the combination of coach-building freedom, near-silent electric propulsion and open-top motoring as the project’s defining trio.

For Britain’s flagship luxury carmaker, the Nightingale is less a statement about electrification than a declaration of where the profits now lie: in the pockets of a few hundred collectors, not the showrooms of the merely wealthy.

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Rolls-Royce targets collectors with £3m electric nightingale as coach-building strategy accelerates