A fresh procurement push in England will not put a public-sector contract on anyone’s desk overnight. But for small growers, wholesalers, caterers and local food producers, it is one of the clearer signals in a…
Welsh Labour says it would freeze Welsh income tax rates in the next Senedd term if it wins May’s election. For many small business owners, that may sound like background politics. It is not a…
Weekend jobs used to be a fairly normal way into work for teenagers. For many small firms, they were also a useful way to cover busy shifts, build a future staff pipeline and bring in…
UK shoppers are getting more cautious again, and that matters for the smaller firms that rely on everyday discretionary spending. GfK’s Consumer Confidence Barometer fell two points to -21 in March, while expectations for the…
HMRC has updated two key Making Tax Digital for Income Tax publications just over a week before the new regime starts for the first group of taxpayers. On the surface, the 27 March changes look…
New HMRC trade figures suggest the very smallest UK goods-trading businesses had a much tougher 2024 than larger firms. For businesses with no employees, export trade value fell 26% year on year and import trade…
The Competition and Markets Authority has opened five new investigations into fake and misleading online reviews, including cases involving Just Eat, Autotrader, Feefo, Dignity and Pasta Evangelists. On the surface that looks like a story…
The government has agreed to invest up to £100 million to reopen the mothballed Ensus plant on Teesside as part of a contingency plan against possible carbon dioxide shortages linked to the Iran war. That…
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax has felt like a problem for bigger sole traders first. That is still true in the short term, but HMRC has now made clear that a much larger group…
UK inflation did not get worse in February, but this is not the kind of update most small firms can relax over. The headline Consumer Prices Index stayed at 3.0%, unchanged from January, according to…