News

Scottish craft beer group BrewDog has closed all of its bars for a day as it seeks to finalise the sale of the business, marking a pivotal moment for one of Britain’s most high-profile independent brewers. The Aberdeenshire-founded company confirmed that none of its sites would open on Monday to allow staff to attend company-wide meetings and to comply with licensing requirements linked to an anticipated change of ownership. Chief executive James Taylor told employees...

Complaints made by taxpayers about HM Revenue & Customs have climbed to their highest level in five years, with the proportion of cases resulting in compensation also reaching a recent peak. New figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Contentious Tax Group show that HMRC received 93,589 complaints in the 2024/25 tax year, up from 78,542 in 2020/21, a rise of 19.2 per cent over five years. The data suggests mounting frustration...

Gold has surged back above $5,400 an ounce in early trading following US missile strikes on Iran, prompting fresh speculation over whether the precious metal could break through $6,000 in the coming weeks. The renewed rally comes after a volatile start to the year for bullion. Gold hit a record high of more than $5,550 in late January, before tumbling sharply to around $4,700 by early February. Silver followed a similar path, sliding from above...

HM Revenue & Customs figures indicate that thousands of small firms may be deliberately limiting expansion to avoid crossing the UK’s £90,000 VAT registration threshold, fuelling renewed calls for reform of what critics describe as a “cliff-edge” tax system. The data shows that 683,700 businesses reported turnover below the VAT threshold in the year to December 2025, up from 671,000 the previous year. Over the same period, the number of firms reporting turnover between £90,000...

Scottish Power has warned that “shovel-ready” offshore wind farms capable of contributing to the government’s 2030 clean power target have missed out on subsidy contracts to earlier-stage schemes that may not be built in time, or at all. The row centres on the latest Contracts for Difference (CfD) subsidy auction, Allocation Round 7 (AR7), the results of which were published in January. CfDs guarantee developers a fixed price for the electricity they generate, underpinning the...

The UK government has secured what it describes as a “seat at the table” in the fast-moving global race to commercialise driverless cars, after the British Business Bank backed a landmark $1.5 billion fundraising round for British autonomous driving firm Wayve. The investment round, completed last week, valued the Cambridge-founded artificial intelligence company at $8.6 billion, the highest valuation yet achieved by a UK AI start-up. The round was led by SoftBank and supported by...