Business

Tesco has suffered a significant setback in the long-running equal pay battle being waged by tens of thousands of its shop floor staff, after the Court of Appeal threw out the supermarket’s challenge to the way an Employment Tribunal had been assessing the value of jobs carried out by its customer assistants.

In a judgment handed down on 12 May 2026, the Court of Appeal dismissed Britain’s biggest grocer’s appeal against the Tribunal’s approach to determining the job facts of customer assistants and warehouse operatives, a critical step in the so-called “equal value” process that underpins the entire dispute.

The ruling comes mid-way through a separate Employment Tribunal hearing in which Tesco is attempting to justify paying its predominantly female store workforce less than its largely male distribution centre staff. The supermarket has leant heavily on the argument that the differential reflects “market rates”, a defence lawyers at Leigh Day, who act for more than 16,000 claimants, insist cannot lawfully stand.

At the heart of the appeal was Tesco’s attempt to stop the Tribunal from relying on the company’s own training manuals and operational documents to establish what customer assistants and warehouse operatives are required to do day-to-day. For Britain’s SME employers and retail bosses watching closely, the Court of Appeal’s response will make uncomfortable reading.

The judges upheld the Tribunal’s approach, accepting that Tesco operates in a highly regulated environment, deploys sophisticated digital stock systems and maintains exhaustive training materials precisely to ensure work is carried out consistently across every one of its stores. The Court found Tesco had a “strong business need” for these roles to be performed in the same way throughout its operations, and that, absent clear evidence to the contrary, its own training documents could properly be treated as determinative of what staff were required to do.

The implications stretch well beyond Welwyn Garden City. The judgment effectively rejects attempts to force thousands of workers in mass equal pay claims to individually prove every nut and bolt of their roles when the employer has itself standardised the work. For any business with a structured operating model, supermarkets, hospitality chains, logistics operators and the wider SME retail community, the precedent is plain: your own training materials and operating manuals may be used as evidence against you.

The Court of Appeal also repeated earlier criticisms of Tesco’s evidential approach, raising concerns about both the nature and presentation of witness testimony deployed during the litigation. In a further blow to large employers, the judgment offered fresh guidance that tribunals in mass equal pay claims may, where appropriate, assess jobs more generically rather than insisting every single claim be picked apart on an overly individualised basis, a clarification that could substantially reduce the runway of delay and procedural complexity that often accompanies these disputes.

Kiran Daurka, employment partner at Leigh Day, said the ruling was a significant moment for access to justice. “The Court of Appeal has recognised the importance of removing unnecessary hurdles that prevent everyday people from accessing justice in complex equal pay litigation,” she said. “This judgment is a welcome clarification that, in large-scale cases involving sophisticated respondents like Tesco and other large retailers, tribunals can take a practical and proportionate approach to assessing jobs, which then mitigates against unnecessary complexity to delay or obstruct claims.

“Our clients have always maintained that these cases should focus on the reality of the work being done, not on creating artificial barriers that make equal pay claims impossible to pursue. This ruling will help future claims progress in a more streamlined and accessible way.”

For Tesco, and for every employer with a workforce split between front-of-house and back-of-house operations, the message from the Court of Appeal is unambiguous. The defence of “that’s just what the market pays” is wearing thin, and the documents sitting on a company’s own intranet may yet prove to be the most powerful evidence claimants ever need.

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Tesco loses court of appeal fight over equal pay job assessment in landmark ruling for SME and retail employers

Sir Jim Ratcliffe has thrown his Ineos Grenadier into one of the most coveted defence procurement contests of the decade, gunning for a Ministry of Defence contract worth an initial £900 million to replace the British Army’s ageing fleet of Land Rovers.

The billionaire industrialist, tax exile and part-owner of Manchester United has been in active discussions with the MoD, lining his utilitarian 4×4 up for a tender that opens shortly and could ultimately deliver up to 7,000 vehicles to the armed forces. A formal announcement from Ineos Grenadier is understood to be imminent, with initial bids due on Monday.

It sets the stage for a four-way scrap that pits Ratcliffe directly against his long-standing rival, Jaguar Land Rover, the British marque he once tried, unsuccessfully, to acquire. JLR is fielding a military variant of its commercially successful new Defender, the modernised reincarnation of the very vehicle the Grenadier was inspired by. The two firms previously clashed in court when JLR accused Ratcliffe of copying the original Land Rover silhouette; the judge ruled there had been no breach of copyright, though Ratcliffe has never disguised the lineage of his design.

Also in the running are BAE Systems, which has paired with the American giant General Motors under the working title Team LionStrike, offering GM’s Infantry Squad Vehicle already in service with US forces, with engineering support based in Leamington Spa and Silverstone. Devon’s Supacat, working alongside defence contractor Babcock, is pitching an armoured derivative of the Toyota Hilux fitted with a bespoke chassis and combat cell.

Mike Whittington, chief commercial officer at Ineos, made it clear the Grenadier’s ambitions stretch well beyond Whitehall. “The Grenadier is the ideal choice for defence services as it’s the most capable 4×4,” he said. “Its local supply lines make it ideal for deployment in European countries, for sovereign defence and operations in the UK and on the continent.” Whittington pointed to existing demand from elite counter-terrorism and special operations units in Germany and France, alongside border forces in Germany, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Hungary and Spain.

Mark Cameron, managing director of the Defender programme at JLR, was equally bullish. “Defender will again begin supplying UK-designed and engineered light logistics vehicles for people and equipment transportation for the defence and blue light sectors, which Defender has a long history of supporting.”

For all the patriotic flag-waving, neither of the two frontrunners is actually built in Britain. The Grenadier rolls off a production line on the French–German border, in the former Smart car plant at Hambach, while the Defender is assembled at JLR’s Slovakian facility in Nitra. The MoD’s tender notably stops short of demanding domestic manufacture, a concession that will raise eyebrows in Westminster given Ratcliffe’s increasingly vocal criticism of the Labour government’s industrial policy.

The MoD confirmed in March that it was retiring the Land Rover from frontline duties after more than seven decades of service, describing the moment as “the end of an era for the vehicle that has been a cornerstone of military operations”. Officials want the first replacement vehicles in soldiers’ hands by 2030, with the initial tranche of 3,000 vehicles, plus engineering support, valued at £900 million.

For Ratcliffe, the contract represents more than a commercial prize. Having built Ineos into one of Britain’s largest privately-held chemicals empires, the Grenadier was always a passion project, conceived over a pint in a Belgravia pub and named after it. Winning the MoD’s blessing would validate his bet on a market that the original Land Rover effectively abandoned and hand him a powerful reference customer to chase further European defence deals.

For JLR, the stakes are arguably even greater. Losing the Land Rover’s spiritual home contract to an upstart designed by a critic of its design heritage would be a public relations setback of considerable magnitude, particularly as the Tata-owned business pushes its premium Defender into ever-higher price brackets and away from the workhorse roots that earned it military favour in the first place.

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Ratcliffe’s Grenadier rolls into battle for MoD’s £900m Land Rover replacement

Jamie Dimon has fired the bluntest warning shot yet at Westminster, signalling that JPMorgan Chase will walk away from its planned multibillion-pound Canary Wharf skyscraper if the political weather in Britain turns colder for the banking industry.

Speaking to Bloomberg TV on Tuesday, the chairman and chief executive of America’s largest bank said the lender would “reconsider” the project should its UK tax bill climb “too much”, a pointed intervention as speculation grows in the City that Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership is vulnerable and that a successor government could lurch leftwards.

“Not political instability, but if they become hostile to banks again, yes,” Dimon told the broadcaster when asked whether the febrile mood in Westminster was giving him pause. “I’ve always objected to the fact, we didn’t damage the UK in any way, we paid probably $10 billion in extra taxes by now. I don’t think that’s right or fair. If that happens too much we will reconsider.”

The proposed tower, which would span roughly three million square feet and accommodate up to 12,000 staff, was unveiled the day after Rachel Reeves delivered her latest Budget. The chancellor opted against raising taxes on banks after intensive lobbying by the industry, a decision that JPMorgan rewarded with one of the most consequential corporate property announcements London has seen in a generation.

Were it built, the skyscraper would rank among the largest office buildings in Europe. JPMorgan has put the construction-phase boost to the local economy at £9.9 billion, while the Treasury has dangled a business rates discount of “up to 100 per cent” to secure the investment. The bank, however, was careful to caveat its commitment at the time, stressing that the project remained “subject to a continuing positive business environment in the UK”.

Dimon’s latest remarks make plain what that small print really means.

Britain’s lenders are enjoying a profitable run. First-quarter results from the high street banks confirmed earnings continue to be flattered by higher-for-longer interest rates, themselves a consequence of the inflationary shock from the war in Iran. That combination, fat banking profits, squeezed household budgets and battered public finances, has long been a recipe for political appetite to raid the sector.

UK Finance, the industry’s lobbying arm, calculates that banks operating in Britain now shoulder the heaviest tax burden of any major financial centre, with an effective rate of 46.4 per cent last year against 27.9 per cent in New York and 38.9 per cent in Frankfurt. The numbers reflect a bank levy on balance sheets introduced in the 2010 emergency Budget after the financial crisis, layered with a corporation tax surcharge on profits brought in five years later.

CS Venkatakrishnan, the Barclays chief executive, captured the mood last month when he observed that “banks in the UK are more highly taxed than they are in other major jurisdictions.” Analysts at Jefferies told clients last week that they considered an increase in the bank surcharge to be “more likely than not”.

A retreat by JPMorgan from Canary Wharf would not simply leave a hole in the Docklands skyline. It would dent the supply chain of construction firms, fit-out specialists, security contractors, cleaners, caterers and software vendors that depend on big anchor tenants. It would also chill the broader signal sent to overseas investors weighing whether London remains, post-Brexit, a credible base for European headquarters, investors whose downstream spending touches thousands of British SMEs.

There is, equally, a financing dimension. Punitive levies on banks rarely stay confined to the banks themselves. They tend to manifest in tighter lending criteria, higher arrangement fees and a more cautious approach to small business credit, precisely the segment of the market that already complains loudest about access to capital.

Whether the warning lands depends on who occupies Number 10 by the autumn. Should Sir Keir survive, Treasury officials are likely to continue the delicate dance of squeezing revenue from elsewhere while keeping the City onside. Should he fall, his successor will inherit a fiscal hole, a restless backbench and an industry that, despite record profits, has become extraordinarily adept at signalling its mobility.

Dimon, who has spent the better part of two decades reminding politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that capital travels, has chosen his moment. JPMorgan’s tower is not merely a building. It is a bargaining chip, and the chancellor, whoever she or he turns out to be, has just been put on notice.

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JPMorgan threatens to scrap Canary Wharf skyscraper if Labour swings left on bank taxes

Suzanne Ashman, one of London’s most prolific early-stage venture capitalists and the daughter-in-law of Sir Tony Blair, has been appointed managing partner of the government’s £500 million Sovereign AI fund, a vehicle designed to channel patient capital into Britain’s homegrown artificial intelligence champions and loosen the country’s dependence on Silicon Valley.

The appointment, confirmed on Tuesday, places Ashman at the helm of one of the most closely watched pots of taxpayer-backed money in the UK technology ecosystem. Launched in April, the Sovereign AI fund is chaired by James Wise, a partner at Balderton Capital, and is tasked with co-investing alongside private backers in companies the Treasury views as strategically important to Britain’s long-term competitiveness.

Ashman, who married Euan Blair in 2013, has cut her teeth at two of the capital’s most respected seed and growth investors, LocalGlobe and Latitude, where she sat as a general partner. In its statement, Sovereign AI described her as “one of the most respected venture investors in the UK”, crediting her with “a decade backing the founders who have come to define a generation of British technology”.

Her track record at LocalGlobe and Latitude offers a window into the kind of bets the new fund is likely to favour. She led the firms’ investments into Motorway, the used-car marketplace now valued at more than $1 billion, and into Open Cosmos, a fast-growing satellite manufacturer and operator working on Earth-observation missions. Both are textbook examples of the scale-up stage British venture capital has historically struggled to finance without bringing in American or Asian lead investors.

The family dimension to the appointment is hard to ignore. Euan Blair has himself become a fixture of the British technology scene since founding Multiverse, now the country’s largest apprenticeship provider, in 2016. The combination of a high-profile political surname and one of the most active venture investors in London moving into a government-funded role will inevitably attract scrutiny, even though Ashman’s investment record stands comfortably on its own.

Ashman arrives just as the fund discloses its third investment. Sovereign AI has joined the latest funding round for Isomorphic Labs, the London-headquartered drug discovery business spun out of Google DeepMind in 2021 by Sir Demis Hassabis. Isomorphic announced it had raised $2.1 billion from a syndicate that includes Thrive Capital and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, alongside existing backers Alphabet and Google Ventures.

Isomorphic said the proceeds would underpin an aggressive hiring drive and help it commercialise its “drug design engine”, which uses AI to predict how candidate medicines will behave in the human body, a process the company believes can compress years out of the conventional drug development timeline. The Sovereign AI fund declined to disclose the size of its cheque, though the vehicle typically writes tickets of between £1 million and £20 million.

Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer at Alphabet and Google, said: “Isomorphic Labs has already made extraordinary progress in harnessing AI to accelerate drug discovery and we are excited by this momentum and the early promise of the technology platform.”

For SME-watchers, the Isomorphic deal is a useful indicator of how the fund intends to deploy its money. Joséphine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI, said: “Isomorphic is one of the most consequential companies being built anywhere in the world today and it’s being built in Britain. Sovereign AI exists to invest in the companies that will shape what this country becomes next.”

The political stakes are equally clear. Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, called Isomorphic’s work “AI at its very best”, arguing that it could “reshape completely how medicines are discovered, cutting years off development and giving real hope to people living with devastating diseases”.

Whether the Sovereign AI fund can move the needle for Britain’s wider population of AI-first SMEs, those without a DeepMind pedigree or a billion-dollar valuation, will be the real test of Ashman’s tenure. With £500 million to deploy and a remit to back companies the private market alone is unlikely to scale, the new managing partner has both the firepower and the political weight behind her. The question now is whether the fund can identify the next generation of British technology leaders before American capital does it first.

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Blair family link as Suzanne Ashman takes the reins at £500m Sovereign AI fund

British food marketers have been handed a stark warning after the advertising watchdog banned two high-profile campaigns promoting domestic beef and milk, ruling that the carbon footprint claims at their heart could not be substantiated.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint brought by Chris Packham, the broadcaster and environmental campaigner, against the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) over its taxpayer-funded Let’s Eat Balanced campaign. The decision is likely to send a chill through the marketing departments of food producers, processors and trade bodies that have increasingly leaned on green credentials to drive sales.

At issue were two adverts trumpeting British beef as having a “carbon footprint that’s half the global average” and British milk as producing emissions “a third lower than the global average”. Both campaigns referenced the “full lifecycle” of the produce, a phrase that has now proved their undoing.

The AHDB, which is funded by a statutory levy on farmers and growers, argued that consumers would reasonably have understood the figures to relate only to the journey from farm to retail. The board pointed to independent consumer research, commissioned after the investigation began, suggesting the majority of respondents interpreted the adverts in precisely that way.

The ASA disagreed. The regulator concluded that the adverts implied a cradle-to-grave assessment encompassing farming, retail, consumption and disposal, and that the evidence supplied fell short of supporting claims on that basis. The watchdog acknowledged the practical difficulty of producing post-retail emissions data but said that, where environmental claims are made, the burden of proof rests squarely on the advertiser unless caveats are made plain.

“We acknowledged the potential difficulties in producing post-retail emissions data,” the ASA said in its ruling. “The claims in the ads suggested those emissions were included, and we therefore expected the evidence provided to also include them. We therefore concluded that the evidence presented was insufficient to support the full life cycle claims in the ads, which was how the average consumer was likely to interpret them.”

Mr Packham, the long-standing presenter of BBC’s Springwatch, had also alleged that the adverts misrepresented British beef as typically outdoor-grazed and made claims that could not be substantiated. The watchdog rejected five of his six points, ruling that images of cows in green pastures amounted to a “generic reflection” of British farming rather than a blanket assertion that all cattle live outdoors.

Will Jackson, the AHDB’s director of communications, struck a defiant note in response to the ruling. “Let’s Eat Balanced is doing what it was designed to do, providing clear, factual, evidence-led information about British food, nutrition and farming standards,” he said. He added that the board’s own consumer research “supports our belief that consumers were not misled by the information we shared in these two specific adverts”.

For the wider SME landscape, however, the ruling carries lessons that extend well beyond the farm gate. Small and mid-sized food businesses, from artisan cheesemakers to regional butchers, have increasingly built marketing around lower-carbon, locally produced credentials. The ASA’s intervention signals that broad-brush green claims, particularly comparative ones, will face robust scrutiny regardless of whether the advertiser is a multinational, a government-backed body or a family-run producer.

The decision also lands at a sensitive moment for British agriculture, which is grappling with the phasing out of EU-era subsidies, mounting input costs and growing consumer pressure on the environmental footprint of meat and dairy. Sector bodies will now need to weigh up whether the marketing benefits of headline carbon comparisons justify the regulatory risk, or whether more conservative, narrowly framed claims offer a safer path.

For marketers across the SME economy, the practical takeaway is straightforward enough. Lifecycle language must be backed by lifecycle evidence; comparative claims must be supported by robust, like-for-like data; and where caveats are required, they must be clear enough that the ordinary consumer cannot reasonably misread them. As the ASA has made plain, the test is not what the advertiser intended to say, but what the average reader took away.

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ASA bans British beef and milk adverts after Packham complaint over carbon claims

Waitrose is to put bottles of champagne behind locked glass before the end of the year, as the upmarket grocer escalates its fight against an unrelenting wave of shoplifting that has swept through Britain’s high streets.

The John Lewis Partnership-owned chain has told its 50,000-strong workforce of partners that it will pilot so-called “smart cabinets” to protect premium spirits and champagne, marking one of the most striking acknowledgements yet that organised retail crime has begun to reach into the aisles of Britain’s most genteel supermarkets.

The cabinets, already trialled at rivals including Sainsbury’s, typically require shoppers to navigate a multi-step process on a touchpad before the doors will release. Some retailers have gone further, demanding customers scan a loyalty card or enter a mobile telephone number to gain access, creating a digital paper trail that can later be cross-referenced if stock goes missing. The technology can also log how long a cabinet door has been open, flagging suspicious behaviour such as bulk emptying to staff in real time.

Waitrose has declined to disclose the precise mechanics of its own system, but the move comes alongside a broader package of measures: protective “meat nets” wrapped around premium joints, reinforced screens at tobacco counters to deter the increasingly common practice of vaulting kiosks to grab cigarettes, and an expanded rollout of body-worn cameras for staff on the shop floor.

In an internal communication to partners, Lucy Brown, the John Lewis Partnership’s director of central operations, framed the investment as proof that the business was not “standing still” in the face of what she conceded had been characterised as “a tide of retail crime and epidemic of shoplifting”. She acknowledged the frustration felt by staff who watch thieves walk out unchallenged, but warned that intervention was rarely the safer option.

“It may feel like standing back is us not acting, but this isn’t the case,” Ms Brown wrote, urging partners to resist their “first instinct” to detain suspects or wrestle back stock. Detaining “potentially volatile” individuals in front of other customers, she said, risked escalating an already fraught situation.

The guidance follows a bruising month for Waitrose’s public image. The retailer faced sharp criticism in April after dismissing Walker Smith, a 17-year veteran of the chain, who said he had been sacked for confronting a shoplifter attempting to make off with Easter eggs. The Partnership declined to comment on the specifics, citing employment confidentiality, but said it had followed “the correct process” and pointed to the “serious danger to life in tackling shoplifters”.

Jason Tarry, the John Lewis chairman who joined from Tesco last year, has since written in The Telegraph that the answer to the crime wave was emphatically not to “encourage” workers to take on thieves themselves. Trained security personnel would “intervene to challenge shoplifters”, he said, “but only if they’ve been trained and it’s safe to do so”.

The retreat into hardened technology reflects the scale of the problem confronting British retailers. Industry body the British Retail Consortium has repeatedly warned that shop theft has reached levels not seen in a generation, with the cost to retailers running into the billions and assaults on shop workers rising sharply. For a chain such as Waitrose, whose brand has long traded on a relaxed, customer-trusted shopping experience, the optics of placing Bollinger behind a touchscreen-controlled glass door represent a notable cultural shift.

A spokesman for John Lewis confirmed the direction of travel: “We are currently investing in a range of advanced technology, including smart technology to deter theft. As part of this we are planning to pilot lockable smart cabinets for areas such as spirits and champagne soon. We already use smart shelf technology in our health, beauty and spirits aisles, which are able to sense unusual customer behaviour, so this would provide an additional layer of security.”

For Britain’s SME retailers, who lack the capital to deploy comparable systems, the message from Waitrose is sobering. If a chain of its size and security spend has concluded that its most prized stock now needs locking up, the implication for the independent off-licence or village convenience store is uncomfortable indeed.

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Waitrose places champagne under lock and key as retail crime wave bites

Britain’s bond market delivered its sharpest rebuke yet to Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership on Tuesday, with 30-year gilt yields climbing to their highest level this century as the prime minister stared down a growing chorus of Labour MPs demanding he step aside.

The sell-off, which dragged sterling and equities lower in lockstep, wiped out the relief rally that followed Starmer’s defiant intervention last week. Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, at which the prime minister once again refused to countenance resignation, did little to settle nerves. Investors are now openly pricing in the prospect of a leftward lurch in Labour policy, with the attendant risks of looser fiscal rules, higher gilt issuance and a further squeeze on the cost of capital for British business.

For the country’s 5.5 million small and medium-sized enterprises, the implications are far from academic. Higher long-dated gilt yields feed directly into the swap rates that underpin commercial lending, business mortgages and asset finance, raising the prospect of yet another leg up in the borrowing costs faced by Britain’s corporate backbone at a time when many are still nursing the legacy of post-pandemic debt.

The 30-year gilt yield rose 13 basis points to 5.81 per cent, the highest since May 1998. The benchmark 10-year yield gained 10 basis points to 5.1 per cent, within a whisker of breaching the post-2008 peak it set earlier this month. Bond prices move inversely to yields.

“A new Labour leader may face pressure to ease the fiscal rules and raise gilt issuance,” warned Jim Reid, analyst at Deutsche Bank, capturing the City’s central concern that any successor would lean towards higher spending and heavier taxation of the very businesses the Treasury is counting on to drive growth.

Sterling’s slide alongside government bonds will draw uncomfortable parallels with the dark days of Liz Truss’s mini-budget. When a currency weakens in concert with rising borrowing costs, it is the trading pattern of an emerging market that has lost the confidence of foreign capital, not that of a G7 economy. The pound fell 0.64 per cent against the dollar to a two-week low of $1.352, and shed 0.21 per cent against the euro to €1.152, its weakest since mid-April.

Some of the pressure is undeniably imported. Bunds, OATs and BTPs all sold off as President Trump declared the Iran ceasefire was “on life support”, sending Brent crude up 2.8 per cent to $107.17 a barrel and reigniting inflation fears across advanced economies. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil and gas once flowed, remains largely shut. Germany’s Dax bore the brunt of the European sell-off, falling more than 1 per cent. But gilts underperformed by a substantial margin, marking out Westminster’s political turmoil as a uniquely British risk premium.

Mohit Kumar, chief European economist at Jefferies, urged clients to short sterling, arguing any change in the composition of government “would likely be left-leaning”. Anthony Willis, senior economist at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, cautioned that the bond market was unlikely to settle “until greater clarity emerges”.

Equities followed suit. The FTSE 100 surrendered 0.3 per cent having opened the week with a 0.4 per cent gain, while the more domestically focused FTSE 250 dropped 211 points, or 0.9 per cent, extending its losing streak to a second day. Mid-cap stocks, dominated by UK-facing businesses, are the clearest read on how the City judges Britain’s economic prospects.

The grim verdict from Andrew Goodwin, chief UK economist at Oxford Economics, is that there is little prospect of meaningful relief. He expects 10-year borrowing costs to remain stuck above 5 per cent for the remainder of the year, regardless of who occupies Number 10. “Markets clearly perceive the UK has a bigger inflation problem and that tighter monetary policy will be needed to limit second-round effects from the energy shock, while political uncertainty has added to pressures at the long end,” he said.

Even were Starmer to dig in, Goodwin argued, the bond market would have little to celebrate, with the prime minister’s “attempts to regain popularity, or, more likely, from a successor implementing more costly left-wing economic policies” weighing on sentiment. “If Starmer sets out a timetable to stand down, the uncertainty premium will persist.”

For owner-managers already navigating a punishing cost base, a softening consumer and the fallout from this spring’s National Insurance changes, the message from the bond vigilantes is unambiguous: brace for borrowing to stay dear, and for political risk to remain firmly on the balance sheet.

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Gilts plunge to 28-year low as Starmer clings on, leaving SMEs braced for borrowing squeeze

Few retailers wear their politics quite so visibly as Alan Roper. Stand the managing director of Blue Diamond, the UK’s leading garden centre group, with 54 destination sites across Britain and the Channel Islands, in front of a microphone and the easy West Country charm gives way to something rather more pointed.

In recent weeks Roper has gone on the record claiming that successive minimum wage rises, layered on top of higher employers’ national insurance, have stripped £12.6m from Blue Diamond’s bottom line, money, he says, that would otherwise have been reinvested in stores, suppliers and people.

“I’m not against the minimum wage,” he insists, in the office above one of his flagship centres. “But you have to recognise that prior to Labour, it was the Conservatives who increased it by ten per cent for two years in succession. Then Labour came in with another 6.7 per cent, plus the 3.5 per cent employers’ NI rise. That is a major hit. I don’t know anyone who has not seen a pub go under recently because of these costs. Sometimes I wonder if politicians realise the level of impact this has.”

The £12.6m figure, he is at pains to stress, is not back-of-an-envelope. Blue Diamond benchmarks profit per employee across the group and Roper can trace the number precisely. It also reflects his own choices as an employer. “It is not just the people on the minimum wage. The colleagues who were earning a pound or one-fifty above it, as a good employer, I chose to maintain that gap. When their pay moved up, the department managers’ salaries moved up. That is where the 12.6 million comes from. I wish it had happened over eight years; instead, it happened in three.”

The consequence has been a quietly ruthless review of full-time equivalent hours, first across the garden retail estate and now in the restaurants. “We benchmarked the most efficient centres against the rest and got everybody working on the same page in terms of hours recruited per day,” he says. “Restaurants are naturally trickier because we won’t compromise service. But we have reduced man-hours, and we’re not the only retailer doing it.”

He is sceptical of those who claim artificial intelligence will fill the gap. “In this format I don’t think AI is going to have a big impact on man-hour reduction. Although I am trialling a full-size salesman avatar in one of our centres this year, I saw one at the Retail Tech Show in London and thought, well, that’s novel, give it a go.”

Such pragmatism has guided 27 years of growth at Blue Diamond, which has now completed its fifty-fourth deal. Yet for every acquisition there is a much larger pile of opportunities Roper has walked away from, something he attributes, only half-jokingly, to the cautionary tale of Wyevale, the once-mighty chain whose collapse he watched at uncomfortably close quarters.

“Wyevale at one point was close to £300m of turnover from about 130 sites,” he says. “That is barely £2m per centre, and at that size you are going to struggle to make money. They got into this mindset of: we want to be national, we’ll just buy centres. Small, large, the demographics didn’t matter. There was no filter on their judgement. It had a garden centre on the tin, so they bought it. The problem was in their DNA from very early doors. Private equity may have finished it off, but the issue was already there.”

Blue Diamond’s filter has remained narrow: demographics, footprint, location, and what Roper calls the “shape” of the opportunity. “I have never said, where’s my fifty-fifth centre,” he says. “That megalomaniac approach is a disaster. It is about the quality of the opportunity, growing sustainably, with low debt on the balance sheet.” Asked where Blue Diamond will be in five years, however, he answers without theatre: “If the right opportunities come, we could easily double in size.”

The most striking strategic shift in the wider sector is one Roper saw coming long before his rivals. In February last year, catering sales overtook live plant sales across the UK garden centre industry for the first time in four years. Blue Diamond’s restaurant arm grew faster than its retail business in 2025. Walk into a busy Blue Diamond at lunch on a Saturday and the queue for breakfast, cake and afternoon tea can resemble that of a casual dining group.

Roper bridles, mildly, at the suggestion that his stores have drifted into hospitality. “Catering goes back 30 years here. I had a large restaurant in a garden centre 30 years ago. What is happening is that other operators have belatedly caught up. Garden centres are a destination, a day out. Customers expect a nice restaurant where they can have breakfast or afternoon tea. It is a prerequisite. Without a restaurant, I think you would lose half your customers.”

The catering footprint, he points out, is far smaller than the planteria and almost always sits at the end of the customer’s natural route through the store. “It is part of the heartbeat. The pressure on us is always to find more space to grow the restaurants. Increasingly, customers demonstrate an insatiable desire for them.”

The same instinct for the local sits behind one of the more counter-intuitive parts of Blue Diamond’s playbook: a refusal to slap a single masterbrand on every site. Acquisitions at Wilton House, the Chatsworth Estate, the Grosvenor Estate and others have all retained their original names, with Blue Diamond co-branded.

“Wilton was my first big move, back in 2001,” he says. “People came there because it was the Wilton House Estate. You couldn’t simply call it Blue Diamond. So we kept the name and put Blue Diamond on it. The same is true at Chatsworth, at Grosvenor, and at the new centre we are building on Lord Iveagh’s Elveden Estate, which will be Elveden Garden Centre.” He bats away the standard corporate playbook. “Customers see their garden centre as part of their local community. Over the years the Blue Diamond brand has caught up alongside the local brand. We’re now in a sweet spot where they see it as both. When we rebadged three of the former Dobbies sites as Huntingdon Garden Centre last year, we were getting emails saying ‘glad you’re coming’ before we had even opened.”

Equally distinctive is Blue Diamond’s commitment to British growers. Unusually for a retailer of its scale, the group will exhibit at the National Horticulture Trade Association plant show at Stoneleigh in June with the explicit aim of meeting smaller suppliers it does not yet stock. “A lot of growers don’t approach groups because they assume we won’t be interested,” Roper says. “We will be. The challenge is volume. Where we can’t take a grower nationally, we’ll regionalise them, the south-west or the north-west. Knowing the family that grows the fuchsias is a strong USP. It’s a win for the grower, a win for us, and it’s something the customer really wants.”

Underpinning everything is data. Two decades ago Roper built what he calls his Best Practice Indicator, or BPI, an internal benchmarking engine that ranks every centre, department, category and individual line on its conversion of footfall into profit. A weekly league table places the 54 centres in order, one to 54. Where a centre underperforms, a BPI calculator now being rebuilt with artificial intelligence will tell the team exactly which lines were missed and why.

“It is the eighty-twenty rule,” he says. “Twenty per cent of your product does most of the work – hydrangeas, salvias, the genuses you cannot get wrong. The right plant, the right product, in the right place at the right time, at the right price. If you get all of that right, conversion goes up. If you don’t, customers feel it is hard work and they switch off.” It is, he argues, what makes growth safe. “I wrote my own retail ethos. I tell my team to define their church and then write their religion. Once everyone is on the same page, you can give people ownership. But you can only give them ownership if you can measure their decisions. BPI does that.”

On consumer demand, Roper concedes the macro picture is hard to read while weather still dominates. “We are up against a very hot, very dry March and April last year. So it is hard to tell what is real.” At the high-ticket end, suites of garden furniture at £2,000 and pergolas at £4,000, he says he is not yet seeing softness, “but I am not stupid enough to think it isn’t coming. I’m introducing an easy-payment system because I think recalibration is coming.” Last year’s business rates reform was, he says, a marginal win: smaller stores benefited, larger sites took six-figure increases, “but if it helps small businesses, I’m all for it.”

What would he do with a day in Number 11? He pauses, then offers something close to a manifesto. “I understand the need to get debt down. But instead of punitive solutions that suppress growth, this government needs to consult the business community on creating a more Thatcherite environment – or, to use a horticultural analogy, a growing environment where businesses can prosper, employ more people and pay more tax. At the moment, reactions feel knee-jerk and we end up on the back foot, repairing profitability.” He sighs, briefly. “Some days I look at it all and think it would be easier to retire.” Then a grin. “I won’t be doing that.”

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Alan Roper: ‘wage and tax policy has stripped £12.6m out of our profits’

Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed that British Steel will be taken into full public ownership, ending months of speculation about the future of the loss-making Scunthorpe plant and drawing a line under fraught negotiations with its Chinese owner, Jingye.

In a speech designed in part to head off a brewing leadership challenge after Labour’s bruising local election results, the prime minister told supporters that emergency legislation would be laid before Parliament this week to grant ministers the powers needed to take “full ownership” of the business, subject to a public interest test.

“Public ownership is in the public interest,” Sir Keir said, adding that he intended to prove his “doubters” wrong and that, for the British public, “change cannot come quickly enough.”

The decision marks a significant shift in approach. Whitehall had previously stopped short of full nationalisation, preferring instead to court private investors while keeping the blast furnaces alight through an emergency supervision regime. That regime was imposed last April after the government seized operational control of the Scunthorpe site amid mounting concerns that Jingye was preparing to switch the furnaces off, a step that would almost certainly have ended the United Kingdom’s ability to produce so-called virgin steel.

Virgin steel, smelted from iron ore rather than recycled scrap, is the grade used in heavy infrastructure projects, from new rail lines to large-scale construction. Restarting a blast furnace once it has gone cold is both technically forbidding and extraordinarily expensive, and the loss of that domestic capability has been viewed in Westminster as a strategic red line.

Talks with Jingye, the prime minister confirmed, had failed to produce a workable deal. “A commercial sale has not been possible, and now a public test could be met,” he said.

The response from the steel sector was swift and broadly supportive. Gareth Stace, director-general of trade body UK Steel, said the announcement offered “vital certainty” to the 2,700-strong Scunthorpe workforce, as well as the customers who rely on British Steel for rail, structural sections and specialist products.

“Maintaining domestic production capability for British Steel’s products is essential not only for economic growth but also for our national security and resilience,” Stace said.

However, he was clear that nationalisation alone would not be sufficient. “It is not an end goal,” he cautioned, urging ministers to use the moment as the “beginning of a clear and credible long-term plan for British Steel,” underpinned by a proper investment strategy.

The unions echoed that sentiment. In a joint statement, Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community union, and Unite’s Sharon Graham said they “fully support” nationalisation, arguing that British Steel had a “bright future, with a world class highly skilled workforce making strategically important steels for the UK’s rail and infrastructure.” The pair also pressed the Treasury to mandate that government-funded projects source British-made steel — a long-standing demand of the domestic industry.

Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, national secretary of the GMB Union, said it was “right the government does everything in its power to secure its long term future.”

The Exchequer’s bill for propping up the company has already proved eye-watering. The National Audit Office reported in March that £377 million had been spent in just nine months to fund operations, wages and raw materials at Scunthorpe. Should the present rate of spending persist, the NAO warned, the total could exceed £1.5 billion by 2028, “depending on policy choices that may be taken in the future.”

The BBC understands the government is currently spending in the region of £1 million a day to keep the business afloat. Jingye, for its part, claimed the site was haemorrhaging £700,000 a day and was no longer commercially viable before ministers intervened.

No headline figure has yet been put on the cost of full nationalisation. Officials say an independent valuation of the business will be carried out once legislation is in place, with any compensation due to Jingye to be determined on the basis of that exercise.

It is not the first time the state has stepped in. The Insolvency Service ran British Steel for nine months following its 2019 collapse, at a cost to the taxpayer of around £600 million, before its sale to Jingye.

For the SME supply chain, the fabricators, hauliers and engineering firms clustered around Scunthorpe and across the wider Humber industrial corridor, the announcement removes the immediate threat of a catastrophic shutdown. Many of these businesses operate on tight margins and would have struggled to survive the loss of their principal customer.

The broader question, however, is whether public ownership can deliver the modernisation that successive private owners have failed to fund. Decarbonising primary steelmaking, replacing ageing blast furnaces with electric arc technology, and securing reliable long-term contracts with British infrastructure projects will all require capital commitments measured in billions, not millions.

The public interest test required to complete the takeover will weigh national security, the protection of critical national infrastructure and broader economic considerations. On all three counts, the government appears to have concluded that the case for intervention is now unanswerable.

Read more:
Starmer moves to nationalise British Steel as commercial rescue collapses

Britain’s largest poultry processor has handed supermarkets a £70m bill for the Chancellor’s tax-and-wage squeeze, in one of the clearest signals yet that Labour’s labour-cost reforms are working their way through the nation’s grocery aisles.

2Sisters Food Group, the West Bromwich-based business founded by Midlands entrepreneur Ranjit Boparan (pictured), confirmed it has passed on the entire additional cost to Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and other major retail customers. The increase, the company said, was the direct consequence of Rachel Reeves’s decision last spring to raise employers’ National Insurance contributions and lift the national minimum wage, measures the British Retail Consortium warned at the time would make price rises “inevitable”.

The disclosure lands in the middle of an increasingly heated debate over the cumulative impact of the Chancellor’s Budget on Britain’s productive economy. For a business that supplies roughly one in every three poultry products sold in the UK, slaughtering and processing 10.4 million birds a week from a network of more than 700 farms, even a marginal tweak to employment costs reverberates a long way down the till receipt.

2Sisters employs 13,500 people, making it one of the most heavily exposed companies in the country to changes in payroll taxation. Mr Boparan, long dubbed the “chicken king” of British food, has built a sprawling operation that touches almost every fridge in the land, and the group’s pricing decisions are watched closely by Whitehall and the Competition and Markets Authority alike.

Concern over the wider chilling effect of the National Insurance increase has spread well beyond the food sector. Malcolm Gomersall, chief executive of Grant Thornton’s UK business, said this week that the rise was “not great for businesses who are looking to grow”. He added: “There is a hidden cost of growth and if I could wave a wand, it would be to try and make it easy to employ more people with less related taxes on the employer. UK growth would be supported by lower national insurance contributions.”

It is not the first time 2Sisters has weighed in on government policy. Richard Pennycook, the seasoned retailer who chairs the group on a non-executive basis, warned last year that the curtailment of agricultural property relief would persuade many family farmers to “give up”. His intervention helped galvanise a rural revolt that ultimately pushed Sir Keir Starmer into diluting the inheritance tax measure earlier this year.

Yet for all the political noise, the underlying business is humming. Accounts for the twelve months to July 2025 show pre-tax profits soaring to £108m, up from £35.5m the previous year, helped by a 9 per cent rise in turnover to £2.38bn. The figures were also flattered by the sale of the group’s European poultry interests to the Boparan family’s private office, a transaction that has simplified the corporate structure and concentrated management attention on the home market.

Feed costs, historically the swing factor in poultry margins, fell by 5 per cent over the period. Mr Boparan’s team said those savings had been handed back to customers, partially offsetting the labour-cost increases pushed through elsewhere.

Looking ahead, the company describes itself as “cautiously optimistic”, but the outlook is far from straightforward. The escalating conflict in the Middle East threatens to send food and energy inflation higher, and the Food and Drink Federation has cautioned that grocery inflation could touch 10 per cent before the year is out. Some suppliers are already understood to be levying so-called “Donald Trump surcharges” on imported produce, reflecting the knock-on effect of the White House’s tariff regime on fertiliser and fuel costs.

Working in the group’s favour is a marked consumer pivot back to traditional animal proteins, accelerated by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda across the Atlantic, which has lent fresh momentum to demand for chicken, eggs and unprocessed meats.

“We remain committed to investing in our factories and utilising advanced technologies, helping to grow our core business while supporting our sustainability ambitions,” Mr Boparan said.

For Britain’s SME-rich food supply chain, and for the millions of shoppers who buy 2Sisters’ chicken without ever seeing the brand, the message from West Bromwich is unmistakable. The Treasury may have collected its National Insurance windfall, but the bill has not disappeared. It has simply moved further down the trolley.

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Poultry powerhouse 2Sisters lifts supermarket prices by £70m to absorb Labour’s National Insurance shock