Peter Kyle has been sacked as business secretary on Andy Burnham’s first day in Downing Street, leaving the government’s flagship late payment crackdown without the minister who built it while the bill is still midway through parliament.

Kyle became the third cabinet minister dismissed on Monday afternoon as the new Prime Minister assembled his own top team, following housing secretary Steve Reed and deputy prime minister David Lammy out of the door. Rachel Reeves was also sacked as chancellor, as Burnham moved swiftly against ministers most closely associated with Sir Keir Starmer.

No successor has been confirmed. The Financial Times has reported that Jonathan Reynolds could return to the brief, the role he handed to Kyle only last September.

For business owners, though, the more pressing question is not who next sits behind the desk at the Department for Business and Trade, but what happens to the agenda Kyle leaves behind.

Chief among it is the Small Business Protections (Late Payments) Bill, laid before parliament in May. The legislation caps payment terms at 60 days for large firms paying smaller suppliers, imposes mandatory interest of 8 per cent above the Bank of England base rate on overdue invoices, and hands the Small Business Commissioner powers to investigate and fine serial offenders. Government figures suggest poor payment practices drain roughly £11 billion a year from the economy and contribute to the closure of an estimated 38 small businesses every day.

Kyle had made the bill personal. He told Business Matters in May that he would not “resile from delivering” what he called a “step change in the relationship between all larger businesses and their supply chains”, adding: “Sixty days is a solid, reasonable outer limit for paying a small business.”

With the CBI and the British Retail Consortium already pressing concerns ahead of committee stage, the departure of the bill’s most vocal defender hands corporate lobbyists an opening at an awkward moment for small firms. Whoever inherits the brief faces an immediate test of nerve: hold Kyle’s line, or let the toughest payment rules in the G7 soften on the way to the statute book.

The churn itself will grate. Kyle’s successor will be the third business secretary since Labour took office two years ago, an unhappy echo of the revolving door at the business department that firms endured under successive Conservative administrations. Kyle used his ten months in post to promise an active, interventionist department, setting a target of nurturing Britain’s first $1trn company and pledging to make the UK the best place to start and scale a business.

His exit also lands amid a wider reorganisation of the Whitehall machinery that matters to growing firms. Officials have been asked to draw up plans to close the science and technology department, with its responsibilities split between the business department and the culture department, a proposal that has already provoked a revolt from tech leaders. The next business secretary could therefore take on a substantially bigger empire, and a year of restructuring to go with it.

Burnham, for his part, has promised to “bring forward the biggest changes in the last 40 years”, with a return to public ownership, a 10-year plan for the country and cost-of-living measures expected as early as Tuesday.

For SMEs, three things now bear watching: who gets the business brief, whether the late payments bill survives committee stage intact, and where the science department’s funding streams end up. On all three, owners will hope the new Prime Minister moves faster than the reshuffle rumour mill.

Jamie Young

Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk

A mid-sized company can spend months perfecting a LinkedIn page that a few hundred people follow, while the audience it actually wants sits quietly in the contact lists of its own staff.

Every employee who logs in brings a network of clients, suppliers, former colleagues and peers. Added together, that reach usually dwarfs anything the corporate account can manage on its own. For smaller businesses without a large media budget, this is one of the few channels where size is not the deciding factor.

The reach already sits inside your business

The instinct of most owners is to push everything through the brand account, then wonder why engagement stays flat. People follow people. A post from a recognisable colleague lands in a feed with a face and a name attached, and it carries a credibility no logo can buy. This is the thinking behind a deliberate employee advocacy strategy: instead of asking the marketing team to shout louder, you give the wider workforce a simple, low-effort way to share what the company is doing in their own words.

The barrier has never really been willingness. Most staff are happy to support the business they work for. The barrier is friction. People do not know what to post, worry about getting the tone wrong, or simply forget. Remove those obstacles and participation climbs quickly.

Turning goodwill into a repeatable habit

The firms that get this right treat sharing as a light routine rather than a campaign: a short prompt, a draft they can edit, a nudge at the right moment. Newer thought leadership software now handles much of that groundwork, suggesting angles based on someone’s role and letting them rewrite a post so it still sounds like them rather than a press release. The technology matters less than the principle: keep it personal, keep it easy, and let consistency do the heavy lifting.

Measurement helps too, though it is easy to overcomplicate. Track how many people are active, which themes earn replies, and whether any of it turns into conversations with prospects. As recent coverage in the magazine’s business news pages has shown, buyers increasingly research suppliers through the individuals behind them long before they ever fill in a contact form.

There is a cultural payoff as well. When employees post about their work, they tend to feel more connected to it. Recruitment gets easier because candidates can see real people enjoying real projects. The company page becomes a supporting act rather than the entire show, which is exactly where it belongs for most growing businesses.

None of this requires a rebrand or a six-figure agency retainer. It asks for a clear reason to take part, a bit of structure, and the patience to let a handful of regular contributors set the tone. The businesses that build that habit now will own a presence on LinkedIn that competitors with deeper pockets find surprisingly hard to copy, because it rests on something they cannot simply buy: the trust their own people have already earned.

By James Picerno

The outlook for the Federal Reserve’s mandate to control inflation isn’t getting any easier.

The Middle East conflict is escalating again, creating new shipping bottlenecks for energy exports from the region, which could delay – and possibly reverse – the

The businessman brought in to fix Britain’s cost of living crisis has quit, declaring it “damn hard to get anything done” in Whitehall, the day before Andy Burnham sets out measures to give families more “breathing space” on rising bills.

Lord Walker of Broxton, the executive chairman of Iceland Foods, was appointed by Sir Keir Starmer in February to “work across government” as cost of living champion. Announcing on LinkedIn that his role had “expired” with Starmer’s departure, he warned the new prime minister that he “doesn’t have time for rests and delays”.

His parting verdict on government will ring true for any business owner who has waited months for a policy decision. “Plans are all very good but daily political machinations consume everything,” he wrote, adding that restricted communication flows mean “anyone from the outside with fresh ideas” can be frozen out.

Walker saved his sharpest criticism for the building itself, saying No 10 “as a building is not fit for purpose”. “The 17th Century rabbit-warren design makes collaborative co-working impossible,” he wrote.

His advice to Burnham was to make plans for a No 10 North “more than just a PR exercise”. “I would move the cost of living remit into there and away from the Westminster bubble to make policy work better for every part of the country.”

Walker is not the only business figure heading for the exit. Lord Timpson, former chief executive of the shoe repair and key-cutting chain, is also leaving his role as prisons minister, pointing to “green shoots” in the system and saying he looked forward to returning to lead the family business. For SMEs hoping commercial experience would carry weight inside government, the departure of two of its most prominent business voices within days of a new premiership is not an encouraging signal.

The resignations landed as business groups gave a cautious welcome to Burnham’s first speech as prime minister, in which he spoke of the need to “regain our stability” and a “new economic model”, including a “ten-year plan”, devolution, “stronger public control” of “life’s essentials”, more council homes and “re-industrialising Britain, using public procurement to back British industry”. It follows weeks of business leaders demanding an end to drift and delay during the handover of power.

Their message now is that firms must not be an afterthought. Shevaun Haviland, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: “The cost of living and the cost of doing business are two sides of the same coin. Our surveys show energy and taxation are squeezing businesses, hitting confidence and investment. Easing the cost of doing business will deliver the growth we all want to see.”

Burnham has already pledged a 20 per cent business rates cut for pubs and high street firms, but recruiters want him to go further. Neil Carberry, chief executive of the REC, said “firms across the country need to see action. Over the past few years, businesses have seen a swathe of well-intentioned policies raise costs and dampen hiring, contributing to the rising cost of living people face.”

He urged Burnham to insert “pragmatism into the unworkable elements of the government’s employment law changes, reducing the tax wedge on hiring people, and re-invigorating the industrial strategy with the kind of skills, planning and infrastructure reforms that will get private capital working”. Small firms have long warned the employment law overhaul would hit hiring.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies offered a colder dose of realism. Helen Miller, its director, said: “Seeking to rewire the British state, against a backdrop of constrained public finances and with an in-tray full of domestic and international challenges, will require much more than ambition.”

She added that the government “will need to quickly flesh out the vision of what it wants to achieve and be ruthless in its prioritisation”, warning that generous NHS settlements would mean cuts elsewhere, and that on council housing “the subsidies required won’t come cheap”.

With consumer price inflation still running at 2.8 per cent, Burnham’s breathing space cannot come soon enough, for households or the firms that serve them. Walker’s parting message suggests delivering it from inside the rabbit warren will be the hard part.

Jamie Young

Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has prevented nearly $99 million in federal payments from being disbursed to deceased individuals using a new verification system deployed under President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting government fraud, waste and abuse.

Following Executive Order 14249, “Protecting America’s Bank Account Against Fraud, Waste, and Abuse,” the Department of the Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service implemented a verification process that reviewed more than 885 million payments totaling approximately $2.77 trillion.

That screening flagged more than 4,900 payments totaling nearly $99 million that were associated with deceased individuals, returning the payments to the originating federal agencies for review before any funds were disbursed.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attends a meeting with President Donald Trump and other Cabinet members. (Getty Images)

BESSENT CREDITS TRUMP IMMIGRATION POLICIES WITH HELPING RETURN JOBS TO AMERICANS AS WAGE GAINS RESUME

“So far, we’ve saved about $100 million, payments that didn’t go to deceased people… We think that there’s up to $350 million that we can stop before the end of this year,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on “Mornings with Maria” Tuesday. “The [Government Accountability Office] estimates that… this number might be up to $500 billion, which is about 1.66% of GDP. So that could go a long way towards paying down the debt, providing more services, and this is just the start.”

“In the Biden administration, HHS got rid of about 50 or 60 of the people who were charged with monitoring fraud. And, Maria, what’s important here is that we are stopping the money from going out. So once the money gets out, trying to retrieve it, it’s very, very difficult. So stopping it at the source here is our goal,” he continued.

The initiative relies on permanent access to the Social Security Administration’s Full Death Master File, access that was initially granted on a temporary three-year basis in 2021 through the Consolidated Appropriations Act, according to a Treasury press release.

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Following initial projections estimating $330 million in net benefits between 2024 and 2026, Congress made the verification authority permanent through the “Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act,” which President Trump signed into law in February.

“This new safeguard addresses a longstanding vulnerability and helps ensure every dollar the federal government spends reaches its intended recipient,” Bessent also said in the press release. “Treasury will continue efforts to modernize the federal payment system, strengthen safeguards against fraud and improper payments, and protect taxpayer dollars.”

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