The government is developing a plan to nationalise Speciality Steel UK (SSUK), the country’s third-largest steelworks, after deciding against backing the preferred bidder for the business, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds has told the House of Commons.

SSUK, previously part of Liberty Steel, employs about 1,300 people at sites in Stocksbridge and Rotherham in South Yorkshire and Wednesbury in the West Midlands. The government took control of the company last year after it was forced into liquidation by the High Court.

Reynolds told MPs that a bidder had come forward earlier this year, but the government had decided against supporting it. He cited “serious concerns” over the proposed financing of the deal and “protections for UK taxpayers”.

Ministers had therefore decided that the government would plan its own formal acquisition of the business, he said.

Production paused

Production at SSUK was paused several months ago, and staff have been placed on furlough on reduced wages.

In a press release published yesterday, the government said the company operates four sites, in Rotherham, Stocksbridge, Brinsworth and Wednesbury, which produce specialist steel for the aerospace, defence and advanced manufacturing sectors. It said the lead bidder’s proposal could not provide “the long-term stability, certainty and value for money that workers, communities and taxpayers deserve”.

According to the government, SSUK entered liquidation in August 2025, following financial difficulties linked to the collapse of lender Greensill Capital in 2021. The government did not name the bidder. Business Matters reported in April that Norwegian green-steel start-up Blastr had entered exclusive negotiations to acquire the South Yorkshire works.

Reynolds told the Commons: “Having concluded that we cannot support the preferred bidder’s proposal, we are faced with a choice.

“We can allow events to take their course through the liquidation process and risk being left with no say in the future of these sites, or we can act.

“We will therefore engage with the official receiver sale process and develop a proposal for the public acquisition of SSUK.

“This will preserve strategic control and ensure that all credible future opportunities can be properly considered before irreversible decisions are taken.”

Funding and next steps

Reynolds said future decisions and spending commitments relating to the business would be “subject to detailed due diligence and funded from existing government budgets”.

He added: “Working towards public acquisition will create the necessary time and space to undertake a full assessment of the opportunities available.

“It will let us consider future industrial use, regeneration opportunities and the role that specialist manufacturing capabilities could play in supporting growth and our national resilience.”

The government said it would work with the Official Receiver and the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority on the next steps. In the release, Reynolds said the approach would “keep options open while we work with local leaders, workers, industry and investors”.

In a message to workers, Reynolds said: “I will do all I can to secure a bright future for you, your communities and your families.”

The move follows a long period of uncertainty at the business. When Liberty Speciality Steel collapsed into government receivership in August 2025, UK Steel’s Gareth Stace said: “We hope a new owner is found quickly who can inject the investment and working capital required to return production volumes to previous levels.”

The government has said a Serious Fraud Office investigation is under way into suspected fraud linked to Greensill Capital financing.

Responding to the announcement, Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “This is a critical move.

“The government is listening to Unite and is acting to protect jobs. Now we need to get on and nationalise the company.”

About the author

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

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Search “WordPress development agency” and you’ll get thousands of results, all promising more or less the same thing: fast, responsive, SEO-friendly websites at a competitive price. The pitches blur together. The real differences show up later, usually after you’ve signed with the wrong one.

So it’s worth knowing what actually matters before you hand over your project.

Anyone Can Install a Theme. That’s Not Development

The first thing to understand is that a lot of “WordPress agencies” aren’t really doing development at all. They’re buying a premium theme, dropping in your logo and content, and handing it back. That works fine for a simple brochure site, and if that’s genuinely all you need, you shouldn’t overpay for more.

But the moment your requirements get specific, a custom booking flow, a membership area, a product configurator, an integration with your CRM, the limits of the theme-and-plugin approach show up fast. You end up with a site held together by fifteen plugins that fight each other, slow the whole thing down, and break every time WordPress updates. A genuine development agency writes custom code where custom code is needed, and knows when a plugin is the smarter choice. Knowing the difference is most of the job.

Speed and Security Are Where Cheap Builds Fall Apart

A WordPress site that looks great on launch day can still be a liability underneath. Bloated page weight, unoptimised images, and a pile of unnecessary plugins will tank your load times, and slow sites lose both visitors and search rankings. Google has been clear for years that page experience affects where you rank, and it’s only gotten stricter.

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Look for a Partner, Not a Vendor

The best agencies treat a build as the start of a relationship, not the end of a transaction. Your site will need updates, new features, and maintenance as your business grows, and an agency that understands your goals will make far better decisions on your behalf than one that just ticks off a spec sheet and disappears.

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The Bottom Line

Choosing a WordPress development agency isn’t really about who has the slickest portfolio or the lowest quote. It’s about who understands the difference between assembling a website and building one. Ask how they handle custom functionality, how they approach speed and security, and what happens after the site goes live. The answers will tell you far more than any sales page.

Get that decision right, and your website becomes an asset that works for you for years. Get it wrong, and you’ll be paying someone else to rebuild it sooner than you’d like.

The Durham University spin-out has secured funding from a number of sources

A North East tech company supporting new medicine discoveries has secured £1.3m to accelerate its work.

Magnitude Biosciences, a spinout from Durham University, has secured the funding to accelerate the commercialisation of VivoScan, which provides pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies with faster and more cost-effective ways to identify promising new treatments for ageing, longevity and neurodegenerative diseases.

VivoScan uses hundreds of nematode worms as a biological model to evaluate potential therapies. By combining the worms with advanced imaging, machine learning, agentic AI, automation and robotics, Magnitude Biosciences can generate whole-organism data in weeks rather than years.

The company’s work aims to offer faster alternatives to traditional drug testing models while supporting the growing industry shift towards research that is not performed on mammals.

Northstar Ventures has led the new round of investment into the company, committing capital from the North East Spinout Inspire Fund backed by the region’s five universities, as well as from the North East Innovation Fund and the Northstar EIS Growth Fund.

The funding will also mean that Magnitude Biosciences can access a £217,000 Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant.

Dr Fozia Saleem, CEO at Magnitude Biosciences, says: “Our ambition is to become the first company to provide a platform to screen millions of compounds in a whole organism. This investment in VivoScan gives us the opportunity to turn that ambition into reality and fundamentally change the scale and speed at which drug discovery can be done.

“We are building a platform that can move beyond simply screening more compounds. VivoScan generates rich, whole organism biological data that can help researchers understand how potential therapies affect health, ageing and disease. By making data generation faster and more cost effective, we will be able to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies identify better drug candidates earlier and ultimately accelerate the development of new treatments.”

The funding will be used to scale Magnitude Bioscience’s VivoScanTM platform, expand commercial activity with global pharmaceutical companies, invest in additional equipment and automation, as well as recruit new staff as the business enters the next stage of its evolution.

Dr Will Cousins, investment manager at Northstar Ventures, said: “The North East continues to generate world-class innovations with the potential to compete on the global stage. Supporting ambitious companies with the capital they need to grow is essential if we are to unlock that potential. Having worked closely with Magnitude Biosciences throughout its journey, we have seen first-hand the strength of the team, the technology and the opportunity ahead. We are proud to continue backing a business that is helping to shape the future of drug discovery.”

Sarah Newbould, Senior Investment Manager at the British Business Bank, said: “We’re continuing to back the businesses that are driving innovation across the UK economy, with this new funding round helping to bring Magnitude Biosciences’ new technology to market. With NPIF II providing initial investment in May last year, we’re able to support businesses throughout their journey, fuelling the Government’s Industrial Strategy and ensuring the North East’s life sciences sector continues to thrive.”

LOS ANGELES — A California surrogate says she only learned the true identity of the man whose child she was carrying after CBS News journalists connected her pregnancy to Xu Bo, a reclusive Chinese gaming billionaire whose former partner has alleged he has fathered as many as 300 children through surrogacy arrangements in the United States.

The surrogate, identified only as Judy to protect her privacy, told CBS News she was roughly 12 weeks pregnant when reporters informed her that leaked documents identified Xu, founder of Guangzhou-based gaming company Duoyi Network, as the intended father. “Do I even have a right to know?” Judy said, describing her reaction after learning more about the scale of the family arrangement she had unknowingly become part of.

According to Judy’s account, she responded to an Instagram advertisement offering £88,839, or roughly $120,000, for a surrogacy arrangement. As a single mother raising a seven-year-old daughter, she said the payment appeared to offer a path toward greater financial stability and eventually a home of her own. After being matched through the agency Patriot Conceptions, which CBS reported lists Haotian Bai as its founder, Judy said she was told the intended parent was a single father hoping to expand his family. She said she grew curious about whether other women were carrying children for the same man and was told the number was close to two dozen.

CBS News’ investigation, which the outlet said involved interviews with 32 surrogates along with a review of contracts and court documents, ultimately connected Judy’s pregnancy to Xu through leaked paperwork. Judy said she felt blindsided by the revelation and had repeatedly tried, without success, to arrange a meeting with the man for whom she was carrying the child.

The scale of Xu’s family has become the subject of disputed and evolving public claims. His former partner, Tang Jing, who is currently engaged in a custody and financial dispute with Xu in China, has publicly alleged he may have as many as 300 children. Duoyi Network has pushed back on that figure. Following a December 2025 Wall Street Journal investigation into Xu’s surrogacy arrangements, the company acknowledged that years of effort through U.S. surrogacy had produced what it described as “only a little over 100” children. In a separate statement cited by CBS, Xu disputed the larger estimates and said he has custody of 12 children born through surrogacy in the United States specifically.

Tang Jing has said separately that she helped raise 13 of Xu’s children in Japan, including two she described as their shared biological daughters and 11 others born through surrogacy, and that she is currently raising 11 of the children amid the ongoing custody dispute. She has said the broader group of children live across properties in multiple countries. Xu himself is reported to live in China and has been described as a recluse who is not directly involved in day-to-day parenting of the children.

Xu has posted an image on a social media account linked to him showing more than 100 young children seated in rows. A Chinese-language statement attributed to Xu accompanying similar posts said that “more children bring more blessings” and that he hoped his actions would contribute to what he described as China’s long-term development.

The Wall Street Journal’s earlier investigation additionally reported on court proceedings tied to Xu’s surrogacy arrangements, including petitions filed over parental rights involving unborn children, and found that a California judge had encountered multiple such applications while Xu was in the process of fathering additional children through separate surrogacy arrangements around the same time. The Journal reported separately that Xu had discussed wanting children born in the United States who could eventually take over his business, though that reported ambition remains attributed specifically to the Journal’s own sourcing rather than an independently confirmed statement from Xu himself, particularly given the range of competing accounts surrounding his family circumstances.

Judy told CBS she continued with the pregnancy after signing her surrogacy agreement because she needed the income, saying friends and relatives encouraged her to proceed despite her growing concerns. Those concerns, as described in CBS’s reporting, centered less on the pregnancy itself than on what she viewed as a lack of transparency from the agency about the intended father’s identity and broader family circumstances before she committed to the arrangement. “I feel blindsided. I feel misled,” Judy said of learning the full picture only after becoming pregnant.

The revelations have prompted a wide range of reactions online, though such reactions reflect individual opinions rather than independently verified findings about Xu or the legality of his surrogacy arrangements. Some social media commentary has focused on the reported scale of the arrangements, while other commentary has called more broadly for greater transparency and stronger regulatory safeguards within the commercial surrogacy industry. None of that reaction establishes that Xu violated U.S. law or that he deliberately exploited legal loopholes; the underlying reporting instead centers on Judy’s firsthand account, documents linking Xu to her pregnancy, and the broader, still-disputed questions about exactly how many children have been born through his surrogacy arrangements and how those arrangements have been disclosed, or not disclosed, to the women carrying them.

Every child born in the United States is automatically granted U.S. citizenship at birth under current law, a legal framework that has drawn its own scrutiny in the context of large-scale international surrogacy arrangements like those reported in Xu’s case, even as questions specific to his family circumstances, and the surrogates involved in carrying his children, remain the subject of ongoing reporting and disputed public claims from those closest to the situation.

That works, but it also means missing out on half the fun. Understanding how odds are built, and what they are really saying, turns betting from a blind guess into something genuinely engaging. Platforms like bizbet display all three major odds formats at once, which is actually a handy way to start seeing how they connect to each other.

What the Different Odds Formats Mean

There are three formats used globally, and they all say the same thing — the difference is just in how they say it. Decimal odds show the full return per unit staked, stake included. So 2.50 on a €10 bet returns €25 total, meaning €15 profit. Browsing through something like bizbet bonus offers a real-world look at how these formats sit side by side on an actual platform, which makes the comparison much easier to grasp than reading about it in theory. Below 2.00 means favourite, above 2.00 means underdog — that one rule alone covers most situations.

Fractional odds, still widely used in racing, show profit against stake. At 5/1, a €1 bet returns €5 profit. At 1/2, the stake is larger than the return — that is what odds look like when the bookmaker considers something close to a certainty.

American odds work differently. A minus sign means favourite — -200 requires a €200 stake to win €100. A plus sign means underdog — +180 returns €180 profit on a €100 stake. It feels strange at first but follows a consistent logic once seen a few times.

Here is a simple side-by-side comparison of all three:

All three rows say the same thing — just in three different languages.

The Margin Hidden Inside Every Bet

Every set of odds has a margin built into it, and most bettors never know it is there. It is called the overround or vig, and it does not appear as a separate line anywhere — it is folded directly into the numbers.

In a truly fair market, the implied chances of all outcomes would add up to exactly 100%. Bookmakers push that total above 100% — usually to around 105–110% at mainstream sportsbooks, and closer to 102–103% at more competitive ones. That extra percentage is their margin, and it means every bet placed costs a little more than the raw odds suggest.

Knowing this does not make betting less fun — if anything it makes the numbers more interesting to look at. Here are four practical ideas that follow naturally from understanding how odds work:

• Implied probability: every set of odds is really a percentage in disguise. Converting them reveals what the bookmaker genuinely thinks will happen.
• Line shopping: the same event priced across different platforms often shows meaningful differences — sometimes 5 to 10% better return for the identical bet.
• Value: when an outcome seems more likely than the odds suggest, that difference is called value. Finding it is what separates informed betting from random picking.
• Margin check: adding the implied probabilities of all outcomes in a market together shows the total bookmaker margin in seconds.

Betting stays enjoyable when there is a clear budget set before a session starts. Most platforms have deposit limit tools in the account settings — straightforward to set up and genuinely useful for keeping things in check.

Some experts share the view that, in the short-term at least, it is up to the AI companies to regulate themselves responsibly.

“You might want an act of Congress, and I would love a congressionally mandated regime that requires safety and testing and bias testing,” said Asad Ramzanali, the director of AI & Technology Policy at Vanderbilt University.

“But absent that action, the companies have autonomy.”

Others have expressed scepticism at the recent flurry of warnings by AI staffers.

Trevor Traina, a tech executive who was a diplomat during Trump’s first term, said: “I don’t think the typical citizen has encountered anything scary or really problematic with AI.”

“We’re relying on the tweets of a half-dozen people who are all vying for perceived supremacy,” he said. “The cynic in me thinks, ‘Are they are really concerned, or are they trying to prove which model is the most awesome?’”

Alexandra Reeve Givens, who previously worked in government and now leads the US non-profit the Center for Democracy and Technology, said she did not think meaningful federal AI regulation would pass in the foreseeable future.

While the Trump administration has set up an entirely voluntary framework for AI companies to submit their models and tools for government assessment, Givens noted that the framework itself remains a secret.

“There’s no clear standard to make sure that the approach is even grounded in the rule of law,” she said.

Appeals from various groups to release the framework have so far gone ignored.

The White House approach, combined with a lack of political will and consensus, makes passing laws around AI difficult.

“There is no question that federal legislation is challenging in this climate, but Congress also has to grapple with which of the many types of AI risk need to be addressed,” Givens said.

“It’s not that AI is ungovernable, it’s that each risk needs a tailored approach.”