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Sends shares Q1 2026 business update and product progress

The government has fired the starting gun on a £30 million funding offensive aimed at Britain’s video games sector, urging developers with ambitions to create the next blockbuster title to come forward for a share of the pot.

At the heart of the package is a £28.5 million UK Games Fund, which effectively doubles previous public investment in the industry. Applications open from 14 April, with grants split across three tiers designed to support studios at every stage of growth, from fledgling outfits with little more than a strong concept through to established developers ready to take a game to market.

The entry track offers up to £20,000 for newly formed companies showing genuine potential. An emergent track provides up to £100,000 for prototyping, while the expansion track, carrying grants of up to £250,000, the largest the fund has ever offered, is aimed at studios looking to complete a title and scale their operations.

The remaining £1.5 million has been earmarked for the London Games Festival over the next three years, with the stated aim of strengthening investor partnerships and doubling the value of private investment deals brokered at the event to £30 million annually.

Creative Industries Minister Ian Murray was characteristically blunt about the rationale. The gaming sector, he argued, has been undervalued for too long despite its considerable economic heft. Britain’s gaming market now generates £8.8 billion in consumer spending each year, and the country is home to more than 2,000 games companies whose output, from Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider to PowerWash Simulator and No Man’s Sky, has defined genres and built global audiences.

For small and medium-sized studios, the funding architecture matters as much as the headline figure. Access to finance has long been the sector’s most persistent constraint, particularly for independents operating outside the orbit of major publishers. Dr Richard Wilson OBE, chief executive of trade body TIGA, noted that the organisation has repeatedly called for greater prototype and content funding to help studios bridge the gap between concept and commercial product.

The geographical spread of the industry adds a further dimension. While London remains a significant hub, gaming has deep roots in Dundee, Leamington Spa and Guildford, among other locations. The Tay Cities Region has already received £20 million in government backing to advance creative technologies including games and virtual reality, a signal that ministers see the sector as a genuine vehicle for regional economic development rather than a metropolitan concern.

The Games Growth Package forms a central plank of the Industrial Strategy’s Creative Industries Sector Plan, a £380 million blueprint published earlier this year. It sits alongside enhanced support from the British Business Bank, UK Research and Innovation, and the existing games tax relief regime, which has been one of the more effective fiscal interventions in the creative industries since its introduction.

The package has drawn a broadly positive response from across the industry. Nick Poole OBE, chief executive of Ukie, described it as a strong vote of confidence in British gaming, while Nick Button-Brown, chair of the UK Video Games Council, called it an “amazing statement of intent” regarding long-term government commitment.

Beyond funding, the government is also turning its attention to the consumer side of the market. The Chartered Trading Standards Institute has been commissioned to develop guidance clarifying the rights of gamers purchasing digital content, with a consultation expected in the coming months. Ministers will also engage with the newly established UK Esports Advisory Panel, a Ukie-led forum intended to keep Britain competitive in the rapidly expanding competitive gaming space.

For the thousands of small studios and independent developers that form the backbone of the British games industry, the practical question now is whether the money can flow quickly enough and flexibly enough to make a material difference. The three-tier structure suggests the government has at least listened to the sector’s concerns about accessibility. Whether it proves sufficient to keep British talent from being lured abroad by better-funded competitors remains to be seen.

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Government doubles down on gaming with £30m funding package as sector eyes global growth

Rising energy costs triggered by the escalating Middle East conflict are on course to strip nearly £500 from the finances of a typical UK household this year, according to new analysis from the Resolution Foundation.

The thinktank warned on Monday that surging gas, electricity and petrol prices had fundamentally altered the outlook for living standards in 2026. Before the Iran war erupted in late February, working-age households were tracking towards modest income growth of 0.9 per cent. That figure has now swung to a projected decline of 0.6 per cent, a turnaround worth £480 per household.

Brent crude climbed back above $100 a barrel on Monday, driven by continued uncertainty over the conflict’s trajectory. Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Lebanon, despite a two-week ceasefire brokered between Washington and Tehran last Wednesday, and Donald Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian ports have cast fresh doubt over any prospect of a swift resolution.

For the poorest fifth of UK households, the picture is particularly stark. Average income growth for this group is now expected to reach just 1.2 per cent, barely half the 2.8 per cent forecast before the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on 28 February.

There is one notable exception. Families in the lower half of the income distribution with three or more children stand to benefit from the abolition of the two-child benefit limit, which the Foundation estimates will deliver income growth of 7.7 per cent, even after the inflation shock. By contrast, poorer families with fewer than three children face zero growth.

Jonathan Marshall, the Foundation’s principal economist, said household energy bills were set to climb again this summer, effectively cancelling out the £117 average saving delivered by Ofgem’s reduction of the energy price cap from April.

Market expectations offer limited comfort. JPMorgan Chase is forecasting crude oil prices above $100 a barrel through the current quarter to June, with some easing anticipated in the second half. Goldman Sachs last week trimmed its forecast for Brent crude to an average of $90 a barrel in the second quarter, down from $99.

James Smith, chief economist at the Resolution Foundation, said damage to household finances was already largely baked in regardless of how the conflict developed, and called on the government to press ahead with a social tariff ahead of winter to support the most vulnerable households.

The Foundation’s intervention adds fresh urgency to a debate that has been simmering in Westminster for months. With energy costs set to bite hardest when temperatures fall later this year, ministers face growing pressure to move beyond broad-brush price caps and deliver targeted relief to those most exposed to the cost squeeze.

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Rising energy costs from Middle East conflict set to leave UK households £480 worse off this year

British businesses are in danger of being left stranded in the middle of the pack on artificial intelligence, with a new PwC study revealing a significant gap between UK firms and the world’s top AI adopters in both spending and returns.

The consultancy’s global survey found that while leading companies worldwide are investing an average of five per cent of revenue in AI and reaping returns of 15 per cent, their British counterparts are committing just two per cent and generating returns of ten per cent. It is a gap that should alarm boardrooms across the country, particularly among small and medium-sized enterprises already grappling with tight margins and limited budgets for technology transformation.

Perhaps more troubling is the innovation shortfall the figures suggest. UK businesses derived only 27 per cent of their revenue from products that did not exist three years ago, compared with 43 per cent among global leaders. For SMEs, which have historically relied on agility and fresh thinking to compete against larger rivals, that disparity ought to prompt some uncomfortable questions about whether enough is being done to turn AI capability into genuinely new commercial offerings.

The research points to familiar obstacles. Outdated IT systems and rigid internal processes continue to hold companies back, with only 27 per cent of UK businesses having redesigned their workflows to properly integrate AI rather than simply grafting it on to what already exists. The same proportion had modernised legacy technology to better accommodate the tools.

There is also a question of ambition. Nearly half of the UK businesses surveyed said efficiency and productivity were their primary motivation for experimenting with AI, while just 26 per cent cited revenue generation. It is a mindset that Leigh Bates, PwC UK’s global risk AI leader, believes is limiting the country’s potential.

Bates described the findings as a wake-up call, arguing that too many firms remain trapped between piloting AI projects and scaling them effectively. The businesses seeing the greatest returns globally, he said, are not merely doing more of the same but fundamentally reinventing how they operate.

Overall, the UK ranked 11th out of 19 countries in PwC’s assessment, behind China at the top of the table, as well as France, Germany and Saudi Arabia. The United States, notably, fared little better at 13th. PwC defined global leaders as companies in the top 20 per cent of AI-driven performance.

For Britain’s SME community, the message is clear enough. The window to move from cautious experimentation to meaningful adoption is narrowing, and those that continue to treat AI as little more than a cost-cutting exercise risk discovering that their competitors, at home and abroad, have already moved on.

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UK firms risk being left behind as AI adoption gap widens, warns PwC

Virgin StartUp has launched applications for the second round of Momentum, its free eight-week accelerator programme built specifically to help dyslexic entrepreneurs grow their businesses.

Momentum 2.0, which runs from 26 May to 14 July 2026, returns after what Virgin StartUp described as the most applied-for programme in its history. The inaugural cohort supported 30 founders last year, with nine in ten participants saying they came to view their dyslexic thinking as a strength by the time they finished. The programme is backed by Virgin Unite and run in collaboration with Made By Dyslexia, the global charity founded by Kate Griggs.

The accelerator is aimed at early-stage founders and offers a combination of tailored workshops, one-to-one mentoring and practical resources designed around the way dyslexic thinkers naturally operate. Virgin StartUp has also introduced a dedicated “Dyslexic Thinking” space within its online community for business founders, extending the programme’s reach beyond the cohort itself.

The commercial case for backing dyslexic entrepreneurs is well documented. Analysis from Made By Dyslexia suggests that dyslexic business owners contribute at least £4.6 billion to UK GDP annually and support more than 60,000 jobs. The charity estimates that one in three entrepreneurs is dyslexic, a statistic that underlines how closely entrepreneurial instinct tracks with the pattern recognition, creative problem-solving and big-picture thinking commonly associated with dyslexia.

Elle Upshall, scale up lead at Virgin StartUp, said the response to the first cohort had exceeded expectations and that the programme had demonstrated what happens when business support is designed around different ways of thinking rather than in spite of them.

Among the alumni of the first Momentum cohort is Alex Molokwu, founder of Loujo, an initiative that uses educational songs to help dyslexic children with reading and writing. Molokwu credited his mentor with helping him turn instinctive thinking into structured strategy. Aylin Abdullah, founder of Fractionals Match, an AI-powered marketplace for scaling businesses, said the programme gave her the space to articulate and lean into how she thinks, rather than treating it as something to work around.

Griggs, herself a dyslexic social entrepreneur, framed the initiative in broader economic terms, arguing that the UK has never needed dyslexic thinking more if it wants to unlock growth and innovation.

Momentum sits within a wider push across the Virgin Group to champion neurodivergent talent, inspired in large part by Richard Branson’s own experience with dyslexia. The ambition extends beyond the cohort: by helping dyslexic founders scale, the programme aims to drive job creation and inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Applications for Momentum 2.0 close on 8 May 2026. Full details are available at virginstartup.org/momentum.

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Virgin StartUp opens second round of free accelerator for dyslexic entrepreneurs

Britain’s finance chiefs have retreated into full defensive mode as the fallout from the war in Iran sends confidence tumbling to levels not recorded since the country was plunged into its first coronavirus lockdown more than six years ago.

Two of the most closely watched barometers of corporate sentiment, Deloitte’s monthly CFO survey and BDO’s output index, paint a picture of a business community bracing for prolonged turbulence rather than plotting for growth. The message from boardrooms is unambiguous: conserve cash, cut costs and wait for the storm to pass.

Deloitte’s survey places CFO confidence at a six-year low, with geopolitics once again cited as the single greatest external threat. The firm’s chief economist, Ian Stewart, said the Middle East conflict had delivered a genuine shock, dragging optimism back to the darkest days of the pandemic. For finance leaders accustomed to navigating uncertainty, the comparison is a sobering one.

BDO’s figures tell a similarly bleak story. Business output contracted last month for the first time since February 2021, with services and manufacturing bearing the brunt. Scott Knight, the firm’s head of growth, pointed to soaring energy and commodity prices as the principal culprits, noting that a fragile truce between Washington and Tehran had offered only fleeting respite.

The knock-on effects are already filtering through the economy. Higher commodity costs are eroding manufacturers’ margins, while both businesses and consumers have begun tightening their belts in anticipation of rising inflation. Deloitte found that business leaders are most anxious about the war’s impact on energy prices, inflation and interest rates, all of which economists now expect to climb this year. The spectre of increased cyber-attacks, potentially orchestrated by state-sponsored actors, is adding a further layer of unease.

The labour market is feeling the chill. BDO’s employment index has slumped to a 15-year low as firms signal that inflationary pressures will curtail their ability to take on new staff. Hiring demand, the accountancy firm warned, is likely to remain subdued for the remainder of 2026. A separate report from KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation found that permanent placements and worker demand continued to fall in March, albeit at a gentler pace than in preceding months. Wage growth, meanwhile, was described as marginal.

There is a slender thread of hope. Jon Holt, chief executive of KPMG, suggested that the prolonged decline in hiring activity may be starting to level off. Yet he was quick to caution that any meaningful recovery hinges on greater clarity over the trajectory of the conflict and its wider economic consequences. Without that, he warned, hiring decisions and capital investment risk being deferred once more, stalling any sustained improvement in the jobs market.

For now, the overwhelming priority among Britain’s finance chiefs, many drawn from the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250, is balance sheet resilience. The vast majority told Deloitte they intend to pare back both spending and recruitment in the months ahead. As Stewart put it, rarely in the past 16 years have UK CFOs been so single-mindedly focused on controlling costs.

It is a posture born not of panic but of hard-headed pragmatism. Until the geopolitical fog lifts and energy markets find some semblance of stability, corporate Britain appears content to hunker down and ride it out.

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UK business confidence crashes to Covid-era lows as Iran conflict forces firms into survival mode

The decision by OpenAI to plant its flag in King’s Cross with a permanent London headquarters, just days after walking away from a major data centre project in the northeast, tells you something important about where the real value lies in Britain’s artificial intelligence ambitions: it is in people, not power grids.

The ChatGPT developer has secured an 88,500 sq ft space in the Regent Quarter capable of housing 544 staff, a clear signal that it intends to more than double the roughly 200 employees it currently has working across research, engineering, policy, marketing and sales in the capital. Around 30 of those are researchers, and the company has committed to making London its largest research hub outside the United States.

The move comes at a politically awkward moment. Last week OpenAI shelved its Stargate data centre plans for Cobalt Park in North Tyneside, citing high energy costs and uncertainty around the future of UK copyright law. That project would have seen some 8,000 Nvidia chips deployed in a designated AI growth zone and was widely regarded as a cornerstone of Sir Keir Starmer’s ambitions to bolster Britain’s sovereign computing capacity.

Benedict Macon-Cooney, chief AI and innovation officer at the Tony Blair Institute, captured the tension neatly, noting that whilst Britain excels as a hub for talent, it continues to struggle to secure the large-scale AI infrastructure needed to compete globally.

But not everyone views the data centre retreat as the more telling indicator. Saul Klein, founder of venture capital firm Phoenix Court, argued that signing a commercial property lease is a far stronger commitment than headline-grabbing announcements about hyperscale compute. Leasing office space and filling it with people, he suggested, is not something a company can easily walk away from.

Klein’s firm has dubbed the King’s Cross corridor the world’s third most productive technology cluster after San Francisco’s Bay Area and Beijing, home to thousands of venture-backed companies and more than 200 unicorns. The neighbourhood already counts Google DeepMind, Meta, University College London, the Francis Crick Institute and the Alan Turing Institute among its residents, alongside homegrown AI success stories such as Synthesia and Wayve. Its proximity to King’s Cross, St Pancras and Euston also gives it unrivalled connectivity across Britain and into mainland Europe.

OpenAI is not alone in eyeing London for expansion. Anthropic, its closest rival, is understood to be in discussions with both the London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan and the government about growing its own UK presence, where it also employs around 200 people.

The government, meanwhile, has sought to reinforce Britain’s credentials in fundamental AI research, announcing £40 million in funding over six years for a new blue-sky research laboratory.

Phoebe Thacker, OpenAI’s global head of data research programmes and London site lead, pointed to the depth of British talent and the growing adoption of AI tools across UK businesses and institutions as key drivers of the investment.

For the UK’s technology sector, the message is encouragingly clear: even when infrastructure plans falter, the gravitational pull of world-class talent remains irresistible.

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OpenAI doubles down on London with first permanent office despite Stargate U-turn

Some of Britain’s most prominent entrepreneurial voices are pressing the Treasury to introduce a targeted tax incentive designed to keep the proceeds of successful exits circulating within the domestic start-up ecosystem, rather than drifting into passive wealth management or overseas opportunities.

The proposal, which has been dubbed “repeat entrepreneur relief”, would allow founders who sell shares in their companies and reinvest the gains into a new venture within twelve months to defer capital gains tax indefinitely. The liability would only crystallise when the new shares were eventually sold without further reinvestment.

The idea has been put forward in various forms by the Founders Forum Group, Schroders and UK Private Capital as part of a recent Treasury consultation on the tax treatment of entrepreneurs. Each submission makes broadly the same case: that the UK’s tax framework does a reasonable job of supporting businesses as they grow, but does far too little to encourage founders to recycle their capital and experience once they have cashed out.

UK Private Capital, the trade body representing venture capital and private equity firms, argued there is a compelling rationale for aligning tax incentives with the post-exit phase, when founders hold significant capital, possess hard-won operational expertise and face decisions about where to base themselves and where to deploy their money next.

The Founders Forum Group, co-founded by Brent Hoberman and Jonnie Goodwin, drew a comparison with the American Qualified Small Business Stock scheme, under which founders pay no capital gains tax on gains of up to $10 million or ten times their original investment. The group described that exemption as a primary driver of the reinvestment culture that has long defined Silicon Valley, where exit proceeds are routinely funnelled straight back into the next generation of companies.

A survey conducted by the Founders Forum Group found that nearly nine in ten founders said such a measure would make them more likely to reinvest in the UK, with more than seven in ten describing the effect as significant.

The lobbying comes at a sensitive moment for the government’s relationship with the entrepreneurial community. Since taking office, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has progressively increased the rate of business asset disposal relief, the levy formerly known as entrepreneurs’ relief, from its longstanding rate of ten per cent to fourteen per cent last year, then to eighteen per cent from this month. The standard capital gains tax rate remains at twenty-four per cent.

Many founders have argued that the increases make Britain a less attractive place to build and exit a business, though a number of tax analysts have countered that the previous relief was poorly targeted and did relatively little to encourage genuinely productive reinvestment.

The government has sought to balance these changes with fresh incentives at the earlier stages of the company lifecycle. In November, Reeves extended a package of measures making it easier for founders to offer equity to employees and raise capital, provisions that came into force last week.

A Treasury spokesperson pointed to these steps as evidence that the government has the right economic plan in place, highlighting changes to the enterprise management incentive scheme and venture capital tax schemes that are expected to support around £100 million of additional investment annually.

Whether the Treasury is willing to go further and address the post-exit gap that the lobbying groups have identified remains to be seen, but the volume of submissions suggests the argument for repeat entrepreneur relief is gathering serious momentum.

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Founders push for ‘repeat entrepreneur relief’ to keep exit capital flowing back into UK start-ups

Britain’s high streets enjoyed a welcome lift last month as an early Easter drew shoppers back through the doors, but retailers are warning that the bounce may prove fleeting as a fresh wave of tax rises and wage costs bears down on the sector this month.

Total UK footfall climbed 2.4 per cent year-on-year in March, according to figures from the British Retail Consortium (BRC), reversing a grim start to the year that saw shopper numbers fall by 0.6 per cent in January and a chastening 4.5 per cent in February as persistent wet weather kept high streets quiet.

Yet behind the headline figure lies a more anxious story. The BRC cautioned that the Easter uplift, which arrived earlier than usual this year, fell short of what retailers had been banking on, leaving many in no mood to celebrate as April’s cost pressures begin to bite.

Shopping centres led the recovery with a 2.6 per cent rise, followed closely by retail parks at 2.5 per cent, while high streets themselves managed a more modest two per cent gain. Regionally, Manchester staged the strongest comeback, with total footfall surging by more than nine per cent, while London edged ahead of the national average at 3.3 per cent.

Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the BRC, struck a cautious note. With Easter and the school holidays falling earlier this year, she said, retailers had been expecting a stronger boost than March actually delivered. Warmer weather might help sustain momentum in the coming weeks, Dickinson added, but without a repeat lift in April the recovery was far from assured.

Andy Sumpter, retail consultant at Sensormatic, which compiles the BRC’s footfall data, was blunter still, suggesting that March would have recorded a decline altogether were it not for the Easter effect. He pointed to a worrying cocktail of falling consumer confidence, geopolitical uncertainty and rising living costs, not least at the petrol pump, as reasons shoppers are cutting back on discretionary trips. The real test, he argued, will be whether footfall can hold up once the Easter boost fades and tougher year-on-year comparisons return.

The mood among retail chiefs has been lifted, if only tentatively, by President Trump’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire, although that deal has since been cast into doubt. The BRC noted that a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, should it materialise, could bring global energy prices back towards more manageable levels before the bulk of companies come to renew their supply contracts.

Even so, the warning lights on the retail dashboard remain firmly on. Trade bodies representing both retail and hospitality are sounding the alarm over mounting employment costs and April’s hike to business rates, which together threaten to swallow any windfall the Easter trade may have produced.

Dickinson urged ministers to do their bit by easing the burden of domestic policy costs, arguing that lower overheads would free operators to invest in value, experience and their in-store offer, the very things, she said, that help drive footfall and breathe life into local economies.

For Britain’s SMEs, which make up the bulk of independent high-street operators, the message from the data is unmistakable. Easter has provided a fleeting reprieve, but the structural pressures squeezing margins show little sign of easing. Whether March’s modest rebound proves to be the first swallow of summer or merely a brief interlude before tougher trading conditions return will, retailers fear, come down to decisions taken in Whitehall as much as on the shop floor.

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Easter lifts footfall but retailers brace for April cost squeeze

Rachel Reeves has been told by one of the world’s most influential economic bodies that Britain’s tax system is holding the country back and needs urgent surgery if the Chancellor is serious about reigniting growth.

In a pointed intervention, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has urged the Treasury to launch an “in-depth tax review to make the tax system more efficient and growth-friendly”, arguing that decades of tinkering have left Britain with a patchwork of distortions, loopholes and outdated valuations that penalise enterprise and deter investment.

The Paris-based think tank’s latest assessment will make uncomfortable reading in Downing Street. It concludes that the UK economy is being dragged down not only by the familiar headwinds of elevated borrowing costs and sluggish productivity, but by a tax code that businesses have learned to game and that ordinary taxpayers increasingly struggle to understand.

At the heart of the OECD’s recommendations is a call to broaden the VAT base, stripping out a thicket of reliefs and exemptions that economists describe as “largely inefficient and regressive”. It is the sort of reform that could finally consign to history the long-running absurdity of HMRC having to rule on whether a Jaffa Cake is a biscuit or a cake, the kind of grey area that has generated decades of tribunal cases and column inches. The OECD suggests that any additional receipts raised by closing such loopholes could be recycled to shield low-income households through targeted transfers.

Property tax comes in for similarly sharp criticism. The OECD notes that council tax bands still rest on property valuations taken in 1991, a state of affairs no government has dared to touch for fear of triggering a political backlash among homeowners whose rateable values no longer reflect the modern housing market. Successive chancellors have kicked the revaluation can down the road, leaving a levy that economists regard as one of the most distortive in the developed world.

For small and medium-sized businesses, the case for reform has long been obvious. Entrepreneurs, accountants and owner-managers have complained for years about the sheer complexity of the HMRC code, the punitive £100,000 to £125,000 tax trap that penalises aspiration, the interaction of income tax with student loan repayments, and the cliff edges that plague stamp duty. Each has become a case study in how good intentions, bolted on year after year, can produce a system nobody would design from scratch.

Britain once had a body specifically charged with addressing these frustrations. The Office of Tax Simplification, an arms-length outfit set up to cut administrative burdens, survived for 13 years before being abolished by Kwasi Kwarteng during his short-lived tenure as Chancellor. Its recommendations were frequently ignored even while it existed, and its closure was widely seen at the time as a signal that Whitehall had lost interest in serious structural reform.

The OECD’s warning lands at an awkward moment for Reeves. Several think tanks, including the Institute for Government, urged the Chancellor to pursue wholesale tax reform ahead of last year’s Budget, when she was scrambling to fill a fiscal black hole running into billions. She now faces similar pressures later this year, with the war in Iran weighing on global growth, interest rates stubbornly elevated and borrowing costs showing little sign of easing.

The report also strays into more politically charged territory, criticising the government over conflicts of interest in its dealings with business — a swipe that will inevitably be read in Westminster as a reference to the recent controversies surrounding Lord Mandelson and Labour Together, as well as the steady stream of former MPs moving into private sector roles that have raised eyebrows on both sides of the House. The OECD recommends that legally binding commitments on violations be extended to cover politicians’ post-public careers as well as their periods in office.

Among its other prescriptions, the think tank calls for a rethink of employee training subsidies funded through the apprenticeship levy, suggesting resources be redirected towards young people who are struggling to get a foothold in the labour market.

Responding to the report, a Treasury spokesperson said the government was “already reforming the tax system to make it more efficient, modern and fair”, adding that it was “tackling reliefs that are now costing far more than intended and are disproportionately benefitting the wealthy”.

Whether that amounts to the kind of root-and-branch overhaul the OECD is demanding, or simply more of the piecemeal tinkering that has brought the system to its current state, will become clearer when Reeves stands up at the despatch box later this year. For Britain’s SMEs, who bear a disproportionate share of the compliance burden, the hope will be that she finally grasps the nettle.

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OECD urges reeves to overhaul ‘inefficient’ UK tax system