Business

There was a moment, somewhere around 1990, when I sincerely believed that the most important thing my mother did each evening was sit down at 9.00pm sharp to watch the news.

Not 9.01pm. Not 8.59pm. Nine, on the dot, because that was when the news began, because Sir Alastair Burnet had decided it was so, and because the rest of the United Kingdom, including, by the look of it, the entire cabinet, appeared to be doing exactly the same thing. The country ran on a single national rhythm, like a great wheezing grandfather clock, and the people who set the time wore tailored suits and lived in a place called Wood Lane.

That rhythm is now thoroughly, demonstrably, embarrassingly dead. And the people doing the burying are not bedroom-bound teenagers in TikTok-stained pyjamas. They are the very figures who built the broadcast schedule in the first place.

Take Stephen Colbert. Forty-eight hours after CBS finally smothered The Late Show with a corporate pillow, the network insists this had nothing to do with the lawsuit, the Skydance merger or the present occupant of the Oval Office, and we are of course expected to accept that assertion at the value of a Liz Truss lettuce, Colbert popped up on a public-access channel called Monroe Community Media. Then he popped up, rather more pointedly, on his shiny new YouTube channel, with Eminem and Jeff Daniels in tow, gathering 120,000 subscribers in a single weekend. No 11.35pm slot. No commercial break. No procession of Affiliate Sales stations of the cross. Just Stephen, a camera, and the most generous tip jar in the history of broadcasting.

A few months earlier, Piers Morgan walked off the Murdoch reservation entirely, to which I would normally raise a single languid eyebrow, but the man left a reported £50 million on the table to do it. He has called the TalkTV slot a “straitjacket”. He has 3.6 million YouTube subscribers and a four-year arrangement that hands him ownership of his own brand. Trump, Zelensky, Peterson, Ronaldo: all interviewed not for the dignified British 10 o’clock viewer but for a global congregation that watches him in Brisbane, Boston and bed.

And while the talent is bolting for the exits, the institutions are quietly digging tunnels under the perimeter fence. The BBC, that great, lumbering, well-meaning monument to the licence fee, is putting the finishing touches on a landmark deal to produce original shows for YouTube. Why? Because, mortifyingly, YouTube has overtaken BBC One on monthly reach in this country. The corporation that gave us Reith, Attenborough and Bake Off is now obliged to commission content for the same platform that hosts cats falling off skirting boards. The licence fee, it turns out, doesn’t beat free.

The numbers, for those of us who still pretend to be grown-ups, are devastating. Per Ofcom’s Media Nations 2025 report, Britons aged 16 to 24 now watch a startling 33 minutes of broadcast television a day, of which barely 20 minutes is live; they spend an hour and a half on YouTube and TikTok. For someone over 75, broadcast still hoovers up 90 per cent of in-home viewing. For a 16-year-old, it is 19 per cent. We are not, as is so often claimed, watching the gradual decline of an industry. We are watching its will being read.

Across the Atlantic, Nielsen’s Gauge confirms YouTube has now spent six consecutive months as the single largest distributor of television in America, larger than Disney, larger than NBCUniversal, larger than the entire stricken cable bundle put together. YouTube earned $36 billion in ad revenue in 2024, more than all four American broadcast networks combined. The schedule, to put it baldly, has been replaced by the search bar. The time slot has been replaced by the thumbnail.

The business lesson here is not “everyone should start a YouTube channel”. Please don’t. You’ll fail, embarrass your spouse and spend Saturdays editing in your shed. The lesson, for those of us building businesses outside the M25 commentary bubble, is rather more important than that. Ownership, distribution and audience relationship are now the three things that actually count, and the platform that delivers all three at once is winning. Witness Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger Ventures putting capital into creator-led media businesses precisely because the old playbook, make show, hand to broadcaster, hope, is demonstrably worse than the new one. The talent keeps the IP. The talent keeps the audience. The talent, increasingly, is the broadcaster.

The slot, that great totem of the 20th-century media baron, was never about the viewer. It was about logistics, advert breaks, satellite uplinks, union breaks, Carol Vorderman’s hairdresser. The viewer wanted the show. They never wanted nine o’clock. And now, at last, they don’t have to take both.

Sir Alastair Burnet, sleep well.

Read more:
Goodbye 11.35pm: Why linear tv’s biggest names are all fleeing to YouTube

Many directors have built wealth inside their companies rather than in formal retirement plans. In 2026, that familiar SME model is looking more exposed.

The plan behind the business is being tested

Ask most UK employees about retirement, and they can usually point to a workplace pension. Ask an SME owner, and the answer is often less tidy.

Many directors have paid themselves through salary and dividends, reinvested cash into the company and treated the business itself as the pension. The assumption was simple: build, sell and fund the next chapter. In 2026, more owners are realising that the plan may need a harder look.

The savings gap is moving into view

Research on self-employed workers and owner-directors has repeatedly shown weaker pension saving than among comparable employees. The latest Retirement Living Standards put a comfortable retirement at £43,900 a year for a single person and £60,600 for a couple.

The full new State Pension is £241.30 a week, or around £12,548 a year, depending on NI record. Private pension access is changing too, with the access age rising from 55 to 57 from 6 April 2028.

Against that backdrop, McCarthy Wealth Management, a trading style of Clarity Wealth Management LLP and an FCA-regulated UK firm, has published guidance on retirement affordability planning for owner-directors weighing pensions, State Pension entitlement and business assets.

The owner-manager model creates blind spots

The issue is structural, not careless. Directors are not swept into pension saving in quite the same way as employees. Contributions are often an active decision rather than a default.

Dividend-led pay can be efficient during working life, but it may leave some owners with fewer National Insurance qualifying years than expected. Owners also tend to prioritise staff, premises, growth and cash reserves ahead of personal planning.

The familiar “business is my pension” model is not automatically wrong. For some founders, a sale may support retirement. The risk is assuming it will happen at the right time, at the right valuation and without the founder still being central to the company’s value.

Sales outcomes depend on timing, buyer demand, margins, management depth and whether the business can operate without the owner. A profitable firm is not always saleable at the preferred price, particularly where customer relationships and day-to-day control sit with one person.

The State Pension is only part of the picture

The State Pension remains an important foundation, but it rarely matches the lifestyle expectations of successful SME owners on its own.

MoneyHelper notes that 10 qualifying years are needed to receive any new State Pension, while 35 qualifying years are usually needed for the full amount. For directors who rely on dividends, the forecast can be more revealing than the assumption.

What better-prepared owners are reviewing

The planning areas now being reviewed are broad. Director pension contributions may be relevant where company-funded contributions interact with corporation tax, remuneration and cashflow. State Pension forecasts may help identify gaps. Business sale realism may support more cautious exit planning.

Succession planning is central too. A company that can operate without the founder is usually easier to step back from and potentially easier to sell. Cashflow modelling can test early exit, gradual exit, full sale, partial sale, continued dividends or no sale. Estate planning has moved up the agenda, with most unused pension funds and death benefits due to fall within a person’s estate from April 2027.

McCarthy Wealth’s view

Adam McCarthy, Financial Planner at McCarthy Wealth Management, said: “Owner-director retirement planning is one of the most under-served areas of UK personal finance. Standard retirement guidance is often written for salaried employees, yet business owners have different income patterns, asset structures and risks.

“The issue is not that using a business to support retirement is wrong. It is that relying on one best-case sale outcome can be fragile. Director pension contributions, succession planning and cashflow modelling increasingly need to sit alongside the business plan.”

The questions worth asking advisers

For SME owners, the questions are practical. What is the actual State Pension forecast? How many qualifying years are recorded? Have director pension contributions been reviewed across recent financial years? What might the business sell for under cautious assumptions?

What happens if the sale price disappoints? How does salary versus dividend income affect National Insurance and retirement income? What is the cashflow position after exit? Do pension and inheritance tax changes affect estate planning?

The exit plan needs more than hope

The SME owner retirement gap is not really about pension product choice. It is about the fundamental difference between how employees and business owners build long-term financial security.

For UK SME owners, the most useful retirement decisions are made early, modelled realistically and reviewed regularly, not left until the final 12 months before an exit. A business may still form an important part of the retirement picture, but it works better when tested alongside pensions, State Pension entitlement, cashflow, succession planning and estate considerations.

Retirement planning works best when it sits beside the business plan, with personalised advice that reflects individual circumstances. The most expensive retirement mistake an SME owner can make in 2026 is not a bad investment decision. It is assuming the business will quietly handle everything when the time comes.

This article is for general information only and does not constitute financial, tax, legal or accounting advice. The value of investments can go down as well as up, and past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and may change in future. Some retirement, pension, tax and estate planning matters may fall outside FCA regulation. McCarthy Wealth Management is a trading style of Clarity Wealth Management LLP, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, FCA Firm Reference Number 575252.

Read more:
Why Britain’s SME Owners are Facing a Retirement Reality Check

Growth usually brings more onboarding, more counterparties, and more pressure to get checks right without slowing everything down. That is why KYC and KYB matter beyond specialist compliance roles. Founders, operations teams, finance teams, and managers all benefit from understanding how these processes work in practice.

KYC supports smoother customer onboarding

A good KYC process affects how a business collects customer data, verifies identities, reduces avoidable friction, and spots risk earlier.

When the process is weak, the effects are practical:

onboarding takes longer
teams ask for the wrong information
reviews become inconsistent
customer experience suffers

A stronger understanding of KYC onboarding, data collection, and risk-based checks helps teams build a process that is more efficient and more reliable.

KYB helps businesses assess who they are working with

For companies onboarding merchants, corporate clients, suppliers, or partners, KYB plays a similar role. Business verification often involves checking company information, ownership structures, directors, beneficial owners, and supporting documents. That can become difficult quickly if teams lack a shared understanding of what good verification looks like.

For growing businesses, stronger KYB knowledge supports:

faster onboarding of legitimate business clients
more consistent internal reviews
stronger partner and counterparty due diligence
less operational uncertainty

A practical way to build those skills

This is where Sumsub Academy can help. The Academy offers free, self-paced courses (including KYC certification course) focused on practical compliance and verification workflows. For teams working with KYC and KYB, the most relevant options include:

How to Collect Data for Successful KYC
Business Verification Fundamentals
Business Verification Advanced

These courses are built around practical application, with short lessons, quizzes, and a certificate on completion.

For growing businesses

Not every growing business has a large in-house compliance team. In many cases, onboarding decisions sit across operations, customer teams, finance, and risk.

That makes practical training useful. A clearer understanding of KYC and KYB helps businesses improve onboarding quality, reduce avoidable delays, create more consistent processes, and support growth without losing control of risk.

Explore Sumsub Academy and start learning today.

Read more:
Why growing businesses need a better understanding of KYC and KYB

Good packaging is often overlooked in business, but it plays a much bigger role than most people think. It is not just about wrapping a product and sending it out the door.

It affects cost, customer satisfaction, branding, and even how often people buy from you again. For many small and growing businesses, improving packaging can bring real and measurable benefits without needing huge changes elsewhere in the company.

When a product is sent out in poor packaging, it often arrives damaged or looking unprofessional. That can quickly lead to refunds, complaints, and bad reviews. On the other hand, well-designed packaging builds trust from the moment the parcel lands on a customer’s doorstep. It sends a clear message that the business cares about quality, right through the whole buying experience. Even simple improvements like stronger materials or better fitting boxes can make a noticeable difference.

Why packaging choice matters for everyday shipping

One of the most practical upgrades a business can make is improving its choice of postal boxes. These are not all the same, even if they look similar at first glance. The right size, strength, and design can reduce movement inside the box, which helps protect the product during transport. This means fewer damaged items and fewer replacement costs, which can save money over time. It also helps businesses look more professional, especially when customers receive clean, well-packed deliveries that feel organised and reliable.

Good postal boxes also help with storage and packing speed. If a business uses standardised sizes that fit its products well, staff can pack orders faster and with less waste. This is especially useful during busy periods when every minute counts. It also reduces the need for extra filler, which cuts down on cost and improves efficiency in the packing process. Small changes like this often have a bigger impact than expected.

How packaging materials affect cost and customer experience

The type of packaging materials used is just as important as the box itself. Businesses often focus only on the outer packaging, but what goes inside matters too. Bubble wrap, paper fill, air cushions, and protective wraps all play a role in keeping products safe. Choosing the right combination can help prevent damage while keeping costs under control.

However, it is not just about protection. Packaging materials also affect how customers feel when they open their order. A neat, well-packed parcel creates a better first impression. It can even make the product feel more valuable. On the other hand, messy or excessive packaging can feel wasteful and cheap. Many customers today are also more aware of environmental impact, so using recyclable or reduced packaging materials can improve a brand’s reputation.

Businesses that take time to balance protection, appearance, and sustainability often see better customer feedback. It is a simple shift, but it can improve repeat purchases and word-of-mouth recommendations. In a competitive market, those small details matter more than many realise.

Improving brand value through smarter packaging

Packaging is also a powerful branding tool. It is often the only physical interaction a customer has with a business, especially in online retail. That moment when a parcel is opened can shape how the brand is remembered. Clean design, consistent colours, and thoughtful presentation all help build a stronger identity.

Investing in better packaging can also reduce long-term operational problems. Fewer returns, fewer complaints, and fewer damaged goods all help improve efficiency. Over time, this creates a smoother system where staff spend less time fixing issues and more time focusing on growth.

Even small businesses can benefit from making these changes early. It is easier to build good habits from the start than to fix problems later when order volumes increase. Packaging is often seen as a cost, but in reality, it is an investment that supports every part of the customer journey.

Final thoughts on smarter packaging choices

At the end of the day, packaging is more than just a box and some filler. It is part of how a business presents itself to the world. Better choices lead to fewer problems, happier customers, and a stronger brand image. From postal boxes that protect products properly, to carefully chosen packaging materials that balance safety and presentation, every detail plays a part.

Businesses that take packaging seriously tend to stand out for the right reasons. They look more professional, run more smoothly, and build stronger relationships with customers. Suppliers such as Bestbuyenvelopes make it easier for companies to access reliable packaging options that support growth without overcomplicating the process. In a competitive market, those small improvements can make a big difference over time.

Read more:
The business benefits of investing in better packaging

The boss of Oxford University’s flagship spin-out fund has delivered a stinging verdict on the City’s biggest savers, accusing UK pension funds of being “way off the pace” when it comes to writing cheques for the country’s most promising technology businesses, despite successive governments promising to fix the problem.

Ed Bussey, chief executive of Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE), said reform efforts such as the Mansion House accord, under which seventeen of Britain’s largest workplace providers voluntarily pledged to put more of their members’ savings into private and high-growth companies, are simply not moving quickly enough to keep up with the pace at which Oxford-rooted businesses are scaling.

“Everyone’s diagnosed the problem, but the movement towards the solution is just way off the pace in terms of the speed at which we and others are building companies,” Bussey told Business Matters. “We’ve got companies with technology that should be thinking about $100 billion in terms of the scale of opportunity, and that’s reflected in the international capital — and particularly US capital — that is being attracted into these sorts of companies.”

A british problem with American fingerprints

The numbers tell their own story. Bussey said the vast majority of the £300 million in external capital raised by OSE’s portfolio companies last year came from American investors rather than domestic backers. Across the wider market, UK scale-ups now source as much as 80 per cent of their funding from overseas, according to figures from UK Private Capital, the trade body for the British private equity and venture industry.

“There’s nothing wrong with US money per se,” Bussey said. “But the share of UK money, particularly UK pension money, just needs to be dialled up about ten times. I think there’s a lack of understanding [within pension funds] of this space, of the opportunity, of the potential returns.”

His frustration was sharpened by a recent conversation with a Gulf-based backer. “One of my Gulf investors said: ‘You are sitting on our equivalent of Gulf oil.’ But UK pension funds are largely missing in action from this opportunity. The rest of the world scratches its heads when they look at this.”

It is a complaint that will sound familiar to anyone who has tracked the growing chorus calling on Britain’s pension giants to back homegrown scale-ups before the upside is shipped offshore. For all the political enthusiasm around turning the UK into the “next Silicon Valley”, the capital that ultimately reaps the rewards of British science still tends to be raised in Boston, San Francisco or Abu Dhabi — not in Edinburgh or the Square Mile.

The Mansion House promise, and its critics

Both the previous Conservative administration and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government have made unlocking domestic pension capital a flagship policy. The 2023 Mansion House compact set a target of 5 per cent of default fund assets in private markets. Last summer, that ambition was doubled when seventeen workplace pension providers signed up to the Mansion House accord, formally announced by the Treasury, agreeing to allocate at least 10 per cent of their default funds to private assets by 2030, with at least half of that ringfenced for the UK, releasing an estimated £25 billion into the domestic economy.

Lord Vallance of Balham, the science minister, conceded the pace had been a source of impatience but insisted momentum was building. “Is it as fast as everyone wants? No. But it’s starting and I really believe that’s going to change quite rapidly,” he said.

Critics, however, argue that without firmer incentives — or, more controversially, mandates, Britain’s defined contribution savers will continue to underwrite foreign infrastructure and foreign pensioners’ retirements rather than the domestic innovation economy. As Business Matters publisher Richard Alvin has previously argued, the UK’s real scale-up crisis is one of conviction as much as capital: a structural inability to back our own.

From lab bench to billion-pound business

Bussey’s broadside arrived alongside OSE’s latest annual report, which painted a far brighter picture of operational performance. Net asset value rose 17 per cent year-on-year to £1.26 billion, lifted by two landmark exits.

In September, IonQ’s $1.08 billion acquisition of quantum computing pioneer Oxford Ionics handed OSE its first unicorn exit. Before the year was out, the fund also completed the sale of cancer-drug discovery business Dark Blue Therapeutics to US biotech giant Amgen in a deal worth up to $840 million. Between them, the two transactions returned more than £283 million to OSE.

Bussey said further realisations were now firmly in view. “Within the next two to four years we’re going to hit a phase of regular realisations. We’ve proven that we can take science out of a lab and create a billion-pound company. What’s more exciting is now we’ve got line of sight to that happening on a consistent basis.”

For Britain’s SME ecosystem, and the universities, investors and founders trying to turn world-class research into world-class companies, the question is whether the country’s own pension savers will own a meaningful slice of that upside, or whether, once again, the wealth created in British labs will end up funding retirements on the other side of the Atlantic.

Read more:
UK pension funds still “way off the pace” on backing Britain’s tech stars, warns Oxford science chief

More than half of Britain’s graduates would walk away from a student loan if they had the chance to decide again, according to one of the largest public responses ever received by a parliamentary inquiry, a finding that should rattle ministers, universities and employers in equal measure.

The Treasury select committee, which scrutinises financial policy, launched its probe into student loans earlier this year amid mounting evidence that high interest rates and ballooning balances are weighing heavily on a generation of workers. Its call for evidence drew more than 52,000 responses inside a month, among the biggest hauls the committee has ever logged, and the verdict from the field is uncomfortable reading.

Of the 49,000-plus respondents who hold a loan, 57 per cent said they did not understand the terms and conditions of their repayments at the point of signing, and 51 per cent said they would not take one out again. Yet 91 per cent admitted, with equal candour, that they could not have gone to university without one, a tension that lies at the heart of the policy headache now facing the Treasury.

The milestones being put on hold

For a magazine that speaks to small business owners every day, the most striking finding is not the headline figure but the behavioural fallout. Respondent after respondent told the committee that the monthly drag of repayments was forcing them to defer the very life decisions that drive consumer demand and entrepreneurial risk-taking: buying a first home, starting a family, even accepting a promotion that nudges them into a higher repayment band.

That dovetails with a separate review by Sir Alan Milburn, the government’s jobs tsar, which found that one in ten so-called NEETs, young people not in education, employment or training, now holds a degree. Sir Alan told the Financial Times that “employers are demanding skilled labour, but the education system is not providing it,” a complaint that will resonate with SME owners who have watched the NEET total edge towards one million while vacancies in skilled trades remain stubbornly unfilled.

£53,000 of debt and an interest rate that bites

The numbers are stark. The average graduate now leaves university with roughly £53,000 of debt. From the April after graduation, they hand over 9 per cent of any earnings above a threshold ranging from £25,000 to £33,795, depending on which loan plan and which nation of the UK applies. Add a postgraduate loan to the mix and a further 6 per cent is sliced off income above £21,000.

The fiercest criticism is reserved for Plan 2 loans, taken out by those who studied between 2012 and 2023. Interest is pegged to the Retail Prices Index plus up to three percentage points, depending on earnings — a formula that, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies has repeatedly argued, means most Plan 2 graduates watch their balances grow despite making monthly repayments. Respondents to the committee described the regime as “excessive, outdated and incoherent”, with 93 per cent saying the level of interest and the repayment terms were unreasonable.

A marginal tax rate that drives talent abroad

For higher earners, the arithmetic looks even more brutal. A UK worker holding both an undergraduate and a master’s loan, earning above £50,270, faces a marginal tax rate of 57 per cent, 40 per cent income tax, 2 per cent national insurance, 9 per cent in undergraduate repayments and 6 per cent on the postgraduate slice.

Little wonder, then, that the survey picked up a steady drumbeat of graduates either planning, or actively considering, a move overseas. Loan repayments follow them across borders, but the appeal of more benign tax regimes is doing its quiet work, a brain drain risk that employers, particularly in technology, finance and life sciences, can ill afford.

Class inequality, social mobility and the SME workforce

The committee did not pull its punches on the wider social impact. It concluded that student loans were “entrenching class inequality and undermining social mobility”, because wealthier families can simply pay tuition upfront and sidestep the interest-bearing debt altogether. The repayment burden, it added, was making it harder for graduates to build emergency savings, contribute to a pension or open an ISA — exactly the kind of long-horizon thrift that an ageing population requires.

Dame Meg Hillier, the committee’s chair, was uncharacteristically blunt: “It’s imperative for the prosperity of our country that people in their twenties and thirties feel incentivised to work hard and build successful careers. Unfortunately, what these findings tell us is that far too many young people feel overburdened and demoralised by their student debt.”

That sentiment will land squarely with SME employers, who have long argued, as Business Matters set out in its own analysis, carried out by Trends Research, of why universities should be forced to tell the truth about graduate jobs and debt, that the value proposition of a UK degree has slipped badly out of kilter with the realities of the modern labour market.

What should ministers do next?

The inquiry, kicked into life partly by The Sunday Times’s End the Graduate Rip-Off campaign, will report later this year. Three reforms are likely to dominate the debate: a meaningful cut to the RPI-plus interest rate; a recalibration of repayment thresholds to reflect post-pandemic wage settlements; and far clearer disclosure at the point of sign-up, so that 18-year-olds know what they are committing to before the ink is dry.

For business owners, the political conclusions matter less than the practical ones. A workforce that is reluctant to relocate, postpones home ownership, delays family formation and eyes the Heathrow departure board is not the workforce the UK needs to power growth in the second half of the decade. The Treasury Committee has handed Westminster a 52,000-strong reminder that student finance is no longer a campus issue, it is a business issue.

Read more:
Half of graduates would refuse a student loan today, treasury inquiry warns

From April 2027, the annual cash ISA allowance will be cut from £20,000 to £12,000 for savers under the age of 65, while the overall ISA allowance stays put at £20,000. Older savers will retain the full £20,000 cash entitlement.

Alongside that headline measure, the Chancellor is reportedly preparing to introduce a 22% charge on interest earned on cash held inside stocks and shares ISAs, effectively aligning the wrapper with the basic rate of tax on savings interest from the 2027/28 tax year.

The stated ambition is sound enough: nudge Britain’s cautious savers off the sidelines and into the equity markets. After more than two decades reporting on SME finance, I find few people in the City who would quarrel with the principle. But the suite of so-called “anti-circumvention” rules being readied to police the new regime threatens to reverse much of the simplification achieved by George Osborne’s 2014 reforms, and to replace it with something distinctly more restrictive and bureaucratic.

For the small business owners, founders and self-employed professionals who account for a sizeable share of ISA subscriptions, that matters. The ISA wrapper has become the default long-term savings vehicle for those who cannot lean on a generous occupational pension, and any erosion of its clarity is felt acutely in the SME community.

Back to a pre-2014 world

The proposed 22% charge in many ways revives the pre-2014 framework, when interest on cash inside a stocks and shares ISA attracted a flat 20% levy. That regime was swept away by Osborne’s July 2014 reforms, which introduced a single, more flexible ISA allowance and rendered all cash returns, whether earned in a cash or a stocks and shares ISA — fully tax-free.

Reintroducing a charge on cash within investment ISAs blurs the lines once again. A product marketed for more than a decade as a straightforward, tax-free wrapper will arrive in 2027 with a sizeable caveat attached. Quite how much damage that does to the clarity and high-street appeal of the ISA “brand” remains to be seen, but the early indications from providers are not encouraging. Hargreaves Lansdown’s own analysis suggests savers may find the regime materially harder to navigate.

It is also worth recalling that the direction of travel has been signalled for some time. Earlier coverage in this magazine flagged the Chancellor’s intent to redirect billions of pounds from cash into UK-listed equities. The detail now emerging suggests a far more interventionist execution than many had assumed.

Prudent ISA strategies are in the firing line

The mooted tax charge is only one strand of a broader package, and the practical consequences for existing ISA holders deserve closer scrutiny than they have so far received.

The Government has indicated it will restrict transfers from stocks and shares ISAs into cash ISAs, creating a one-way valve that ushers savers into investments but denies them a route back. Separately, HMRC has signalled that so-called “cash-like” instruments held within stocks and shares ISAs, most obviously money market funds, could face fresh restrictions. The intent is to stop savers sidestepping the smaller cash allowance by parking money in low-risk assets inside an investment wrapper. The risk, however, is that perfectly legitimate portfolio behaviour gets swept up in the net.

Holding cash or near-cash within a stocks and shares ISA is not a wheeze; it is how seasoned private investors manage risk. Customers routinely hold cash temporarily while deciding how to deploy it, or rotate into low-risk assets to de-risk portfolios as they approach retirement. For business owners drawing down accumulated wealth in later life, that flexibility is mission-critical. Restricting it threatens to inhibit prudent behaviour at precisely the moment it is most needed.

For first-time investors, the very audience the Treasury professes to court, the calculus is even less forgiving. Stripping out gateway features such as the freedom to hold cash inside an investment ISA risks deterring cautious savers from taking the plunge at all. As has been argued before, the wrapper’s greatest commercial virtue is that it adapts to changing needs and risk appetites over a saver’s lifetime.

Undermining the investment agenda?

ISAs have become one of Britain’s most successful retail financial products precisely because they were simple and flexible. The 2014 reforms helped a generation of savers navigate a previously opaque system. The proposed regime, by contrast, layers in differential tax treatments, possible asset restrictions and one-way transfer rules — the very features that drove savers away from earlier, clunkier wrappers.

The Treasury Committee has already pressed Ministers on the trade-offs at stake, with the Government acknowledging that any reform must not jeopardise the wrapper’s mass-market appeal. It is a delicate balance, and one that previous administrations have got wrong before, as readers will recall from the short, unhappy history of the “British ISA”.

Encouraging more Britons to invest is a sensible policy objective. But there is a real risk that by adding complexity and stripping out the gateway flexibility that drew people in, the reforms achieve the opposite of what is intended. Rather than coaxing cautious savers into the market, a more restrictive system may simply persuade them to do nothing, or to walk away from ISAs altogether.

Simplification helped broaden the wrapper’s appeal. Reintroducing complexity may yet narrow it again. For the millions of SME owners, founders and professionals who rely on the ISA as their primary tax-efficient savings vehicle, that would be a thoroughly unwelcome result.

Read more:
ISA shake-up risks unwinding a decade of simplification, warns Charles Stanley

Amazon has joined a small club of British corporate taxpayers writing nine-figure cheques to the Exchequer, telling investors and ministers that its direct UK tax bill climbed above £1.3 billion in 2025, a jump of around 20 per cent on the previous year.

The Seattle-based group, which now employs roughly 75,000 people across the country, said the increase was driven largely by Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s higher rate of employers’ national insurance and by another year of revenue growth at its UK marketplace and cloud businesses.

UK turnover edged up to about £30 billion in 2025 from £29 billion in 2024, as British shoppers continued to migrate spending online and corporate customers signed fresh contracts with Amazon Web Services. Total taxes administered on behalf of the Government, including VAT, PAYE and employee national insurance, rose to roughly £5 billion, from £4.7 billion a year earlier.

A £1bn taxpayer, but the detail is still missing

It is only the second year Amazon has cleared the £1 billion direct-tax threshold, putting it alongside the likes of Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest and GSK. The company has declined, however, to break the figure down between corporation tax, business rates, employer national insurance and the digital services tax, the disclosure campaigners say is the only way to settle the long-running argument about whether the e-commerce giant pays its fair share.

Dan Neidle, founder of Tax Policy Associates and one of Westminster’s most-quoted tax commentators, was unimpressed. “If they really want to be open they should publish a proper breakdown of the different taxes,” he said. “This mixes together a bunch of different taxes, so gives us no idea how much corporation tax they pay. Are they paying a fair amount? Or are they playing tricks? They don’t tell us.”

Amazon faced years of criticism for paying minimal or no corporation tax in 2021 and 2022, when it benefited from former chancellor Rishi Sunak’s “super-deduction” capital allowance. The relief expired in 2023, since when its corporation tax payments have been rising again — though the company has previously been criticised for the structure of its main UK division, which routes much of its retail activity through a Luxembourg-based parent.

The employer NI hike does the heavy lifting

The biggest single driver of Amazon’s swollen 2025 bill was not its retail margin or AWS profitability, it was payroll. Employers’ national insurance contributions rose to 15 per cent from 13.8 per cent on 6 April 2025, and the secondary threshold at which employers begin paying was cut from £9,100 to £5,000.

For a workforce the size of Amazon’s, the maths is brutal. The company is now one of the top ten private-sector employers in the UK, alongside Tesco, the NHS supply chain and the big four supermarkets, meaning every percentage point of NI translates into tens of millions of pounds.

That same arithmetic, however, is hammering Britain’s small and medium-sized employers, for whom there is no AWS margin to absorb the cost. As Business Matters has reported, the employer NIC bill has jumped £28 billion above Treasury forecasts, and the OECD warned earlier this year that the UK now has the largest employer tax rise in the developed world. Where Amazon can shrug off the increase, smaller firms have been forced to freeze hiring, lift prices or shed staff.

£40bn investment pitch, and the politics of scale

Alongside the tax disclosure, Amazon restated its commitment to spending £40 billion in the UK by 2027, a figure first put to ministers last summer and welcomed by Downing Street as one of the largest foreign direct investment pledges since the pandemic. The company said £15 billion of that had already been deployed in 2025 alone, including a new film and television studio campus, a London office complex in Shoreditch, and the country’s first commercial drone-delivery hub in Darlington.

A further £8 billion is earmarked for data centres between 2024 and 2028 , a strategic bet on AWS as British corporates and Whitehall departments accelerate the migration of workloads to the cloud and adopt generative AI tools.

“As we continue to invest in our UK operations and workforce, we help fund public services and infrastructure across the country,” the company said in a statement.

What it means for SMEs

For Britain’s owner-managed businesses, Amazon’s announcement is a Rorschach test. To ministers, it is proof that the UK remains an attractive home for global capital even after a punishing run of tax rises. To critics, it is a reminder that a company turning over £30 billion can absorb a 1.2-point NI hike without flinching, while the corner-shop economy cannot.

What is not in dispute is that the headline figure, £1.3 billion, would mean a great deal more if Amazon broke it apart. Until it does, the question Dan Neidle posed will continue to hang over every press release the company issues: a fair share, or a clever sum?

Read more:
Amazon’s UK tax bill tops £1.3bn as employer NI hike and £30bn sales drive the total higher

Gordon Brothers, the Boston-based turnaround investor that snapped up Poundland for a pound last summer, has bagged another high-street name, adding the British handbag and accessories brand Radley to a growing stable of distressed retail assets, in a transaction that will cost 42 staff their jobs.

The deal, completed through a pre-pack administration brokered by restructuring specialists at FTI Consulting, secures Radley’s intellectual property, most notably the brand itself, its design archive and the Scottie dog logo that has been a staple of British gift-giving for more than two decades. Crucially, however, the transaction does not include the company’s 21 UK retail outlets, leaving the future of those shops, and the jobs attached to them, hanging in the balance.

In a statement confirming the appointment, FTI Consulting said: “The administration appointment follows a sustained period of challenging economic conditions for the retail environment, including declining customer demand and increasing operating costs, all of which have had a negative impact on trading.”

A founder-led label that ran out of road

Founded in the 1980s by Australian-born designer Lowell Harder from a market stall in Camden, north London, Radley grew into one of the more recognisable mid-market British accessories brands of the past 25 years, building a footprint across the UK, continental Europe and the United States. It was acquired by mid-market private equity house Freshstream in 2016 and, after a difficult post-pandemic trading period, was put up for sale earlier this year.

The numbers behind the auction tell their own story. For the year to 26 April 2025, Radley posted a pre-tax loss of £5.5 million, a sharp deterioration on the £1.7 million loss recorded the previous year. Turnover slipped to £65.8 million from £72 million, with the group blaming the closure of unprofitable US stores and “softer international wholesale performance” for the top-line decline.

The board had warned in its full-year accounts that consumer headwinds — chiefly elevated energy bills and a wave of households remortgaging onto materially higher interest rates — created “material uncertainty” over the company’s ability to continue as a going concern, even as directors expressed hope of trading through to 31 October 2026. In the event, the cash ran out faster than the forecast.

Gordon Brothers’ British shopping list

For Gordon Brothers, Radley is the latest brick in a fast-growing UK retail portfolio that increasingly resembles a curated index of distressed Great British high-street names. The 122-year-old firm — headquartered in Boston, with more than 30 offices worldwide, first made its name in the UK by acquiring Laura Ashley out of administration in 2020, before flipping the homeware and fashion label on to New York-based Marquee Brands in January 2025.

Last summer it bought Poundland from Warsaw-listed Pepco for a symbolic £1, embarking on a brutal restructuring that has so far seen 149 stores shuttered and roughly 2,200 jobs cut as the discount chain refocuses on lower price points. More recently the firm also scooped up the womenswear label LK Bennett out of administration, adding yet another well-known British label to a portfolio that is starting to look strikingly similar to the kind of brand-licensing platforms favoured by US peers Authentic Brands and Marquee.

According to its own statement on the transaction, Gordon Brothers intends to run Radley as an “asset-light” business, leaning on wholesale partnerships and licensing deals to extend the brand into adjacent categories such as watches, jewellery, eyewear and beauty gifting, while pushing harder into international markets.

A wider warning for the British high street

The Radley pre-pack lands in a market that, while quieter than the carnage of 2024, remains acutely fragile for mid-market specialists caught between value retailers and luxury houses. Data published by the Centre for Retail Research shows that even as headline administration numbers have eased from last year’s peak, the cumulative drag of higher wage costs, increased employer national insurance contributions and stubbornly cautious consumer spending continues to expose brands without scale, pricing power or a defensible online proposition.

For owners and management teams running SMEs in adjacent categories, the lessons from Radley are uncomfortably familiar: a strong heritage brand and loyal customer base are necessary but not sufficient conditions for survival when wholesale channels weaken, US expansion misfires and refinancing windows narrow. Pre-pack administrations, controversial though they remain, are increasingly the mechanism of choice for preserving brand equity while shedding loss-making stores and legacy obligations, a route that has now been travelled, in quick succession, by Laura Ashley, LK Bennett and Poundland under Gordon Brothers’ stewardship.

Whether Radley’s Scottie dog can be re-energised under a wholesale-and-licensing model, and whether any of those 21 displaced UK stores can be saved by other operators, will be the next test of both the brand’s resilience and Gordon Brothers’ increasingly assertive playbook for rescuing British retail.

Read more:
Gordon Brothers swoops on Radley as Poundland owner adds British handbag label to its turnaround portfolio

For the last quarter of a century, Samsung’s microchip engineers have ground out their working lives in the cleanrooms of Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek on solid, if unremarkable, salaries. This week, around 78,000 of them learned that the AI gold rush has finally put a slice of the gold into their pockets, to the tune of as much as £300,000 a head.

Under a profit-sharing settlement formally ratified by union members on Wednesday, Samsung Electronics has agreed to channel 10.5 per cent of the operating profits generated by its semiconductor division straight into a bonus pool for unionised technical staff. A further 1.5 per cent will follow in cash. For workers in the most lucrative units, chiefly the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) lines that feed the world’s AI data centres, annual payouts could reach 500-600 million Korean won, equivalent to between £250,000 and £300,000. That is nearly four times the average Samsung salary last year, and it is set to be paid not as a one-off sweetener but every year for a decade, contingent on the division hitting its operating profit targets.

The agreement caps months of brinkmanship. Samsung’s largest labour union had threatened an 18-day walkout that, according to estimates carried by Bloomberg, risked stripping as much as 1 trillion won (£550m) a day from the Korean economy and tipping a global memory market already in deficit into outright crisis. Management blinked. Workers, sensing the leverage that scarcity confers, pressed home their advantage.

The supercycle that changed the maths

It is hard to overstate just how dramatically the economics of memory have shifted in the past 18 months. A business long dismissed by investors as a commoditised, cyclical also-ran has become the single biggest beneficiary of the generative AI infrastructure build-out, with HBM modules now indispensable to every Nvidia Blackwell and Rubin accelerator shipping out of Taiwan.

Spot prices for certain memory grades have risen by as much as 800 per cent in the past year. Samsung’s two main rivals, Micron and SK Hynix, both crossed the $1 trillion (£740bn) valuation threshold this week, with Micron’s shares jumping 19 per cent on Tuesday after UBS tripled its price target. SK Hynix added 9 per cent on Wednesday, having signed its own union profit-share last year. Samsung itself hit the trillion-dollar mark earlier this month, and its shares have climbed more than 10 per cent since the tentative deal was first floated.

Bloomberg analysts now expect Samsung’s 2026 operating profit to multiply sevenfold to around 330 trillion won (£183bn). On that basis, the £300,000 ceiling for memory workers looks not implausible but conservative.

The ripple reaches the high street

For consumers, the bill is already arriving. Sony has raised PlayStation 5 prices on both sides of the Atlantic, citing memory cost pressures, and reports from Tokyo suggest the long-anticipated PlayStation 6 — originally pencilled in for 2027 — may now slip to 2028 or even 2029 as Sony scrambles to secure DRAM allocations. Nintendo is weighing a Switch 2 price rise; PC builders are finding RAM modules harder to source than at any point since the pandemic.

The squeeze on memory has also raised eyebrows in Whitehall, where ministers are courting hyperscale operators to anchor new AI infrastructure across the UK. The same components that determine whether a teenager in Manchester can buy a games console at Christmas now sit at the heart of national industrial strategy.

Not everyone is celebrating

Inside Samsung’s gleaming Seoul headquarters, however, the deal has opened a fissure. Tens of thousands of staff in the consumer electronics, mobile and display divisions — the units that produce Galaxy smartphones, televisions and laptops — have been excluded entirely. Their bonuses, where they exist at all, are reported by Nikkei Asia to be capped at around $4,000 a head. Lower-paid subcontractors have been excluded altogether.

A shareholder group has already threatened legal action, arguing that distributing such a substantial share of group profits to a single division amounts to a transfer of value away from investors and other employees. The complaint speaks to a broader unease: when one corner of a sprawling conglomerate is suddenly mining gold, what obligation does it have to the rest of the operation, or to the long-suffering equity holders who bankrolled its rise?

For Samsung’s executive committee, the calculus was straightforward. Memory engineers possess scarce, perishable expertise; losing even a fraction of them to Micron or SK Hynix mid-supercycle would be commercially catastrophic. Locking them in for a decade, and aligning their pay packets directly with the division’s most ambitious profit targets, is, on the numbers, cheap insurance.

What british business should take from this

For UK SMEs and tech employers watching from afar, the Samsung settlement is a case study in how the AI capital cycle is reshaping labour markets at every tier of the value chain. Technical talent in any field touching AI, from data engineering and MLOps to specialist semiconductor design, now commands pricing power its predecessors could only dream of. Profit-sharing schemes, once the preserve of partnership firms and Silicon Valley start-ups, look likely to creep into far more conventional corners of British industry as employers fight to retain the people who actually understand the new infrastructure.

The wider lesson is sharper still. When demand for a critical input outruns supply on a multi-year horizon, the rewards do not accrue evenly. They flow to whoever controls the choke point, and, eventually, to whoever can credibly threaten to walk away from it.

Samsung’s chip workers have just demonstrated, with some style, that they understood that earlier than anyone else.

Read more:
Samsung chip workers pocket £300,000 windfalls as AI memory boom rewrites the rule book