It’s good to write about a UK business success story, the UK film industry, which has become an important economic sector having grown faster than much of the UK economy.

According to the DCMS (Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport) in November 2018 the value of the creative industries as a whole to the UK was up from £94.8 billion in 2016 and had broken through the £100 billion barrier. It said the sectors had grown at nearly twice the rate of the economy since 2010 and together are now worth £268 billion.

For the film world specifically not only does the UK have a widespread and skilled support base of experienced film production crews and technicians, it also has both the locations and the studios to attract the biggest film companies from around the world. It is an industry that employs an estimated 60,000 people.

Then there is the knock-on effect into the wider local economy, not only by boosting the...

Clearly businesses are operating in very uncertain economic times with no-deal Brexit having become a game of political football and with such an unpredictable outcome.

While a degree of uncertainty is a fact of life in business, which is why I strongly recommend regular and at least monthly scrutiny of management accounts, the current situation is arguably unprecedented.

We are in the midst of a global economic slowdown, with UK manufacturing activity at its lowest level for six years and the economy stagnating according to the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC) latest quarterly report published last Monday, much of this being self-inflicted following the Brexit referendum.

And worse, the UK is now beset by a contest to elect a new leader for the “governing”, Conservative party in which only a small group of party members have a say, and seemingly with both candidates adopting increasingly intractable positions on leaving the EU by the end-October deadline and even worse...

For almost 40 years the defining measure of a country’s national economic health has been GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

As such, my monthly Key Indicators have focused on various specific aspects, such as oil prices, factory output or investment decisions and the like. This time, however, given that the summer is generally a time to pause and reflect, the Key Indicator considers this notion of how we measure national economic health.

There are signs of a growing resistance to using such a simplistic measure as GDP to compare the relative success of national economies.

For example, Evan Davies, the BBC’s former economics editor argues: “It is barely an exaggeration to say it has been fetishised in economics, despite obvious weaknesses in its capacity to encapsulate a whole economy in a single number” in an article analysing where economists have been going wrong.

National economies are, he argues, both too complex and too theoretically...

We hear a lot about UK regional economic inequality, so as part of our series of macroeconomic snapshots we’re taking a look at some of the data.

These are just a few examples of recent announcements of businesses facing closure or insolvency in the immediate or near term: British Steel, Scunthorpe (c.3,000 jobs), Honda UK, Swindon (3,500 jobs), Kerry Foods in Burton-upon-Trent (900 jobs). What they all have in common is that they are situated in the regions outside London.

Then, of course, there is the ongoing carnage in the High Street retail sector which according to the British Retail Consortium’s calculations has cost 75,000 jobs since the first quarter of 2018.

The long decline in UK manufacturing, initiated in the 1980s Thatcher era, has hit the regions of the north and Midlands, and S. Wales, particularly hard.

In January this year NIESR (National Institute for Economic and Social Research) calculated that since the mid-1990s regions that now have...

There is plenty of evidence that owning and running a SME leaves little spare time to pay attention to their mental and physical health.

Research by Opus Energy earlier this year revealed that SME owners in the UK work an average of 2,366 hours per year in order to make their business a success, working an average of 45.5 hours per week (compared to the average full time working week of 37 hours). More than half (56%) of owners reported working either six or seven days per week.

It also found that 14% percent of all entrepreneurs say that they don’t take any time off while a quarter (23%) claim that they have to work even when on holiday.

A survey by Yorkshire Bank in April found that a quarter of small business owners across the UK sacrifice time with friends and family and around 30% of UK business owners have sacrificed their work-life balance. This results in detrimental effects on their mental and physical health.

In May the FSB announced a partnership with...

The Government’s new Apprenticeship Levy scheme introduced two years ago set an ambitious target of creating 3 million new apprenticeships by 2020.

Under the scheme any business with annual payrolls exceeding £3million have had to pay a 0.5 per cent levy on their payroll to the Government which can be redeemed against the cost of staff employed under an approved apprenticeship programme.

But there is now very little confidence that the 3 million number will be achieved. Indeed, the numbers of new apprenticeships have been reducing and in January this year was revealed to be 15% lower than before the system was introduced two years ago.

In May the Public Accounts Committee said that the DfE’s “poor execution” has created “serious longer-term problems” for apprenticeship programmes.

Yet UK businesses have been for some time facing serious problems in finding appropriately skilled candidates for jobs, particularly in engineering,...

In May this year Julian Richer gave his employees shares in the company through an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) whereby they will own 60% of the business.

Announcing the decision, Richer said that he felt it was better to do it now he had reached the age of 60, than to wait until his death, as originally intended. This way, he said, he could ensure the transition would go smoothly.

Richer Sounds, the hi-fi and TV retail chain, since it was set up in 1978 has survived the last five recessions and is regarded as one of the best companies to work for.

Julian Richer’s success as founder and owner can very much be attributed to his commitment to his employees which includes initiatives such as an extra day of holiday on their birthday, heavily discounted access to holiday homes for all employees with over six month’s service, a month’s use of the company Bentley to the store that has scored highest on customer service each month and chiropody treatment and massages...

There has been a growing body of evidence and research over the last couple of years that millennials prefer working for and shopping with SMEs.

Too often we hear about the difficulties and obstacles SMEs face, such as excessive red tape and disproportionate taxation, but it should be remembered that they account for more than 99% of all businesses in the UK, and recently, Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox called UK SMEs “the future of the UK economy”.

As such, it would be foolish for millennials starting out on their careers to ignore the potential opportunities SMEs could offer, and indeed, according to research carried out by Sodexo, it seems that 47% of this young cohort see them as the ideal business size to work for compared to 19% who put their faith in larger companies.

Among the benefits they saw in working for SMEs millennials in the survey they cited flexible working hours, the ability to work remotely, career progression and a...

In principle, company audits must be carried out on any public body, FCA regulated business and most companies unless they are exempt. The exemption threshold means a company must have at least 2 of the following: an annual turnover of no more than £10.2 million, assets worth no more than £5.1 million, 50 or fewer employees on average.

The audit industry has been under review for some time and this scrutiny has intensified since the collapse of Carillion the construction and outsourcing firm in early 2018.

The industry is dominated by the “Big Four”, Deloitte, EY, PwC and KPMG, who audit almost all of the FTSE 100 largest companies. Despite their dominance other accountants have also come under the spotlight such as Grant Thornton who were auditors of Patisserie Valerie that went bust recently, apparently due to a £40 million fraud.

Mr Dunckley, CEO of Grant Thornton told MPs on the business, energy and industrial strategy committee “we are not...

A mature business cycle is one where the prevailing conditions are such that any economic slack is largely used up and assets are richly priced after a period of expansion.

Arguably this is the position in which the economies of the developed countries, such as the USA, UK, EU and Japan now find themselves, where there is a stable population and slowing economic growth. In this context a growth rate of 2% is seen as acceptable.

Arguably, too, mature economies are at a pivotal moment, in that a market economy is never static and there have been signs for some time that the situation is somewhat volatile, as a selection of headlines in any period illustrates.

For example, on April 28 a new report on global trends published by KPMG Enterprise suggested that increased activity from venture capital investors had been pushing up deal prices in the North of England, and the billionaire investor Warren Buffett told the Financial Times that he is “ready to buy something in...