Category: News

Optimism is growing among Britain’s manufacturers, but conditions in the sector remain challenging, according to the CBI’s latest monthly Industrial Trends Survey.

Business lending fell by the largest amount on record in July after banks wrote off £2.2billion of corporate debt.

Lending contracted by £8.4billion between June and July as banks pulled in their horns amid soaring defaults. The Bank of England figures suggest claims from lenders that they are giving more credit to business customers should be treated with extreme scepticism.

A national study by the UK’s leading online takeaway site has found that Sheffield is home to the hardest working employees in the country, where employees are giving their companies the equivalent of 1 extra day’s work a week in unpaid labour through missed lunches and staying late.

The Business Secretary Lord Mandelson has intervened in what had become a turf war between the regions and Whitehall will lead to the Treasury signing off one £125m fund proposed by OneNorthEast.

A second £140m fund designed by the North West Regional Development Agency is being revised and will be resubmitted for Treasury approval this week.

If your business is based in a rural location and you want broadband access then you might find that you are hit with higher charges than your inner city cousins.

Lord Sugar is threatening to sue the sketch writer and columnist Quentin Letts after Letts described Sugar as being a ‘telly peer who doesn’t seem to have an enormous intellect’.

Skype might have to shut down because of a dispute over the core technology used to make the internet telephone system work.

EBay, which paid $2.6 billion (£1.6 billion) for the voice-over-the-internet system in 2005, is facing a court battle with the original founders of the company who retained the rights to the technology at the heart of the system.

A war of words has erupted between clockwork radio inventor Trevor Baylis and James Caan, one of the multimillionaires who fronts BBC2’s Dragon’s Den.

Mr Baylis claimed that the programme was tantamount to “a virtual freak show” that “mocks, bullies and demeans” people like him and “takes pleasure in turning inventors into a laughing stock”.

Alistair Darling has this afternoon demanded to know from the heads of Britain’s biggest banks why they are reaping vast interest charges from small businesses when the cost of borrowing to them is so low.

The Chancellor summoned to Downing Street the chairmen and chief executives of HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Next year’s series of The Apprentice may have to be rescheduled if a general election is called, after the BBC Trust ruled that presenter Lord Sugar’s new role as government “enterprise champion” posed a “greater than normal risk to the impartiality, integrity and independence of the BBC”.

The star of TV’s The Apprentice, now named Baron Sugar of Clapton, was formerly introduced to his fellow peers on Monday afternoon. Flanked by trade minister Lord Davies and business minister Shriti Vadera, Baron Sugar stood in the House of Lords chamber dressed in a traditional ermine gown.

Over 400 business leaders and guests attended The National Business Awards Regional Programme, sponsored by Orange, in London on Tuesday 14th July, to celebrate the success of South of England’s most innovative, ethical and successful businesses.

Nine organisations were duly rewarded including London-based Clearlybusiness, a Barclays company, triumphed with The Orange Best Use of Technology in Business Award for the operational and financial success of its software services for small UK businesses. Octopus Investments, the leading London investment company, won the prestigious Grant Thornton Business of the Year Award.

Some franchisees of the off-licence chain Threshers are suffering a stock crisis and are furious about how its private equity-owned parent, First Quench Group, is running the operation.

The 62-year-old, who was appointed the Government’s Enterprise Tsar earlier this month, is embroiled in a legal battle with a senior female executive at one of his flagship companies.

The Conservative Party is lodging an official complaint with the BBC Trust about Sir Alan Sugar continuing to work on The Apprentice while a government advisor, after appeals to director-general Mark Thompson were rebuffed.