Laura Doel comes from a long line of family trade unionists

TUC Cymru has confirmed Laura Doel as its new general secretary. Ms Doel is currently the national secretary for Wales of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) and the current TUC Cymru president.

She will replace Shavannah Taj who was elected as a Labour member of the Senedd in May.

A passionate trade unionist and education campaigner, she started her career in journalism working at several newspapers, including the Newport Argus, before moving into politics.

A stint in local government reignited a love of social activism and campaigning which turned into a career in the trade union movement. She began that career as an organiser for Unison, then an organiser for NAHT Cymru before becoming their National Secretary six years ago.

In her role as national secretary she held a number of key roles including NAHT Cymru’s seat on Wales TUC general council, as well as a number of key Welsh Government union positions under social partnership legislation including the National Attendance Task Force, the Pay Partnership Forum, the workload negotiating groups and Schools Social Partnership Forum.

Born and brought up in Aberbeeg, near Abertillery, she now lives in Cardiff with her two daughters. She attended Abertillery Comprehensive School before going to college in Ebbw Vale and Pontypool. She comes from a long line of trade unionists. She is the first female trade union official in her family following in the footsteps of her dad, grandfathers, and wider family who all worked in manufacturing, local collieries, steelworks, and local government.

The incoming general secretary said: “I am honoured to be appointed to the role of TUC Cymru general secretary, and I look forward to representing Wales’s nearly 400,000 trade unionists as we work together to build a Wales that works for everyone.

“I believe that trade unions have never been more important. Wales is experiencing a moment of significant change, with a new government in place, continued pressures on pay-packets, and a world of work that is transformed compared to what has come before.

“The workers of Wales need to know that there is someone on their side and I look forward to taking up that challenge in the coming weeks.”

So that’s that, then. Keir Starmer has read the room, found it on fire, and quietly let himself out of the back door.

Andy Burnham, the man who has spent years doing his best impression of a Prime Minister-in-waiting from a tram stop in Greater Manchester, is now the overwhelming favourite to be holding the keys to No.10. And the question I keep being asked, by founders who have built something real with their own sweat and overdraft, is a simple one: is he on our side or isn’t he?

I should declare an interest. I advised David Cameron’s government on enterprise, and I sat alongside the late, magnificent Lord Young of Graffham, the sharpest business brain to wander the corridors of Whitehall in a generation. Young understood something that most politicians never grasp, which is that you cannot conjure growth from a spreadsheet or a press release. You get it by listening to people who have actually met a payroll on a Friday when the bank has gone quiet. His reports on small business were not poetry, but they were honest, and they moved the needle. We need that voice in the room again.

Now, Burnham is not a fool, and he is not anti-business in the snarling, placard-waving sense. He talks a good game about “business-friendly socialism,” whatever that turns out to mean when the civil servants get hold of it. He wants to cut business rates for the corner café and the struggling pub, which is grand, and I will buy the first round. But the mood music among the people who actually create jobs is not exactly a standing ovation. A recent survey found that eight in ten SME owners are nervous about what a Burnham premiership means for their business, and you do not get a number like that by accident.

Here is the bit Burnham needs to understand, and understand fast. The genius of a healthy economy is not the wealth that gets created. It is what happens to that wealth afterwards. The founder who sells her software company for forty million does not stuff it under the mattress. She becomes an angel investor. She backs three more founders, mentors a dozen, and sets up a fund. That is the flywheel, and it is the single most powerful engine of prosperity we have. The Tony Blair Institute, no nest of swivel-eyed capitalists, has written about exactly this, the way start-up success recycles into the next generation of scale-ups. Nine out of ten angels reinvest their exit money. That is not greed. That is the machine working.

And here is my worry. You cannot, on the one hand, ask entrepreneurs to take insane risks, remortgage the house, miss the kids’ bedtimes for a decade, and then, on the other, signal that the moment they succeed you intend to relieve them of the reward through a wealth tax, a land tax, or whatever the focus group has christened it this week. Burnham has been artfully vague on this, which is its own kind of answer. Vagueness is what frightens founders. They can plan for bad news. They cannot plan for a shrug.

The thing is, the money is sitting there, ready to be put to work. The challenge for whoever is next PM is not creating start-up wealth. We are rather good at that, thank you. The challenge is getting it recycled into the real economy instead of fleeing to Lisbon and Dubai, where the welcome is warmer and the tax letters are kinder. That is a solvable problem, but only if Burnham does the one thing this government has been allergic to, which is actually listening to entrepreneurs about how to unlock the funding rather than lecturing them about fairness.

So can he win us over? Yes, he can, and I would rather like him to. But it requires a leap that does not come naturally to a man whose instincts were forged in the Labour movement. He needs a Lord Young of his own, a proper entrepreneur with calloused hands and scar tissue, sitting at the heart of Downing Street, not a special adviser who once read a book about disruption on the train to Manchester. He needs to treat founders not as a cash machine to be tapped but as the goose that lays the golden egg, and you do not, if you have any sense, threaten the goose.

Burnham has charisma, a northern soul, and a genuine knack for sounding like he means it. What he lacks, so far, is a credible promise to the wealth creators that their success will be celebrated rather than confiscated. Make that promise, and keep it, and he could be the most pleasant surprise this country has had in years. Break it, and the flywheel stops, the money leaves, and we are all the poorer for it. Over to you, Andy. The kettle is on.

Richard Alvin

Richard Alvin is a serial entrepreneur, a former advisor to the UK Government about small business and an Honorary Teaching Fellow on Business at Lancaster University.

A winner of the London Chamber of Commerce Business Person of the year and Freeman of the City of London for his services to business and charity. Richard is also Group MD of Capital Business Media and SME business research company Trends Research, regarded as one of the UK’s leading experts in the SME sector and an active angel investor and advisor to new start companies.

Richard is also the host of Save Our Business the U.S. based business advice television show.

Iran has denied a claim by Vice-President JD Vance that it will allow nuclear inspectors back into the country, after the first round of talks between Washington and Tehran to reach a final deal to end the war.

Following negotiations in Switzerland, Vance said on Monday that discussions with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could be happening “as soon as today”.

But Iran’s foreign ministry told state media that Tehran had made “no new commitments” on nuclear inspections.

Iran and the US continued to share conflicting remarks on the nuclear issue on Tuesday.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said it had no plans to allow inspectors to access nuclear sites bombed by the US and Israel last year.

US President Donald Trump said that despite Iran’s “protestations and false statements to the contrary”, it had “fully and completely agreed” to inspections.

“If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations!” he posted on social media.

Meanwhile, the US has temporarily waived sanctions, allowing Iran to sell oil in US dollars for the first time in decades.

In a joint statement released on Monday, mediators Qatar and Pakistan said that after the first round of talks in the Swiss resort of Bürgenstock, the US and Iran had agreed to “a roadmap towards reaching a final deal within 60 days”.

Vance described the talks as having laid a “very good foundation”.

The US vice-president said the teams had discussed the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and “de-confliction for the regional ceasefire”.

The 60-day sanctions waiver issued by the US Treasury on Monday dismantles central pillars of Washington’s long-running embargo, which has historically choked off Tehran’s economy.

The emergency licence authorises the production, sale and delivery of Iranian crude and petrochemicals until 21 August.

Iranian oil can even be imported directly into the US, under the sanctions relief.

It unlocks banking transactions, insurance and transportation and does away with the complex networks that Iran has previously used to sell crude.

The Market Street multi-storey car park was operated by National Car Parks (NCP) until the company went into administration in March

An Exeter city centre car park that collapsed into administration earlier this year could generate hundreds of thousands of pounds for Exeter City Council. Members of the city’s executive voted unanimously to bring the Market Street multi-storey car park back ‘in-house’ as a pay-and-display facility.

The site had previously been operated by National Car Parks (NCP) until the company fell into administration in March, citing a downturn in trade since the Covid pandemic.

Exeter City Council owns the car park, which sits close to the Corn Exchange and the Cathedral.

Cllr Michael Mitchell (Lib Dem, Duryard and St James) said that NCP had been paying in excess of £50,000 a year in rent for the building, and questioned whether the new arrangement would prove financially viable.

Corporate resources director Dave Hodgson confirmed that estimated annual income from the car park under council management would be approximately £425,000, though certain costs would need to be deducted from that figure.

Cllr Susannah Patrick (Lab, Exwick) said: “It is regrettable that the lease was abandoned, but I am delighted to see us moving quickly and decisively on this.”

Meanwhile, Cllr Duncan Wood (Lab, Pinhoe) told the meeting: “This is a key location, and it has always seemed a little bit odd that we run every car park in the city apart from this one.”

Members were equally united in backing a proposal to convert the vandalism-affected Cathedral and Quay car park from a pay-and-display facility to a pay-on-foot model, whereby drivers settle their fees upon departure, based on the duration of their visit.

The future of the car park is set to be debated by the council in July, with a report highlighting that it has been a hotspot for anti-social behaviour for several years and requires a number of repairs.

Public consultations will take place prior to any changes being implemented.

One of the world’s largest photography agencies has struck a multi-year licensing agreement with OpenAI, a remarkable turn for a company that only months ago lost a high-profile copyright battle against another artificial intelligence developer.

Getty Images said the deal will see images from its library surface within ChatGPT’s search display, folding richer visual features into the chatbot. Crucially, the agreement stops well short of handing OpenAI the keys to Getty’s archive: it does not allow the images to be used to train OpenAI’s own image generator, Dall-E. Neither company disclosed the financial terms.

Investors liked what they saw. Shares in Getty Images jumped as much as 65 cents, or roughly 108 per cent, to $1.26 in early afternoon trading in New York, a rare burst of optimism for a stock that has been badly bruised this year.

Craig Peters, chief executive of Getty Images, framed the deal as a vote of confidence in licensed content over the free-for-all that has defined much of the AI land grab. “High-quality, licensed visual content makes AI-powered search and discovery more useful and more trustworthy,” he said. “This partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared recognition of that, and together we will deliver richer visual experiences to ChatGPT users.” The full terms were set out in Getty’s own announcement of the partnership.

Getty’s total catalogue stands at about 609 million images, placing it among the largest photography platforms on the planet. Yet scale has offered little protection from the market’s anxieties. The shares have shed more than 50 per cent of their value this year, dragged down by fears that AI-powered image generators could hollow out demand for traditional photo libraries altogether.

That existential worry helps explain Getty’s other big move: the company is finalising a $3.7 billion merger with its long-time rival Shutterstock. The two argue that combining forces will create a business with an unrivalled photo library and, just as importantly, the scale to invest in its own image-generation models rather than simply ceding the territory to Silicon Valley.

The OpenAI agreement marks a striking strategic pivot. In 2023, Getty sued Stability AI, the UK-based developer behind the Stable Diffusion model, alleging it had scraped more than 12 million images from Getty’s library without permission.

The case proved a cautionary tale about the limits of existing copyright law. Unable to prove that the training had taken place in the UK, Getty was forced back onto a secondary infringement claim, arguing that Stability had effectively imported an infringing product in breach of British copyright rules. A High Court judge found against the agency, ruling that Stability’s model did not actually store or copy images from Getty’s library. As Business Matters reported when the judgment landed, the decision was widely read as a setback for rights holders, even as parallel proceedings rumble on in the United States. Stability itself had earlier cast the lawsuit as an “existential threat” to the generative technology industry.

Having tested the courtroom route and found it wanting, Getty appears to have concluded that licensing is the surer path to getting paid.

It is not alone. Across publishing, music and now stock photography, the licensing deal has emerged as the industry’s preferred answer to the AI question. Getty signed a comparable agreement with Perplexity AI last November, while OpenAI has lined up deals with major publishers including News Corp, owner of The Times, as well as The Guardian and the Financial Times. The chatbot’s growing commercial ambitions are increasingly visible elsewhere too, from advertising trials within ChatGPT to its preparations for a stock market debut.

For Getty, the calculation is straightforward enough. If AI tools are going to reshape how people find and use images, the agency would rather be paid to be part of that future than litigate its way through it. As Bloomberg noted, the market reaction suggests investors, for now at least, agree.

Amy Ingham

Amy is a newly qualified journalist specialising in business journalism at Business Matters with responsibility for news content for what is now the UK’s largest print and online source of current business news.

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The Silicon Valley investor John Doerr, an early backer of Google and Amazon, has written the second-largest cheque in a $40 million funding round for Isometric, the London-based industrial certification firm.

Doerr, the billionaire chairman of Kleiner Perkins, the California venture capital firm, invested in a personal capacity alongside the lead investor AVP, which counts the insurer Axa as its anchor backer. The round also drew fresh money from the venture firms Plural and Lowercarbon Capital, and builds on a $25 million raise struck in late 2022.

Eamon Jubbawy, founder and chief executive of Isometric (pictured), said attracting investors of Doerr’s stature would help the company “open doors”.

“We are not selling a simple product into small and medium-sized companies,” he said. “We are selling a suite of certification services into the largest companies in the world. The contract sizes can get very large over time, and having someone like John on board can help to unlock those doors to make those deals happen.”

Jubbawy set up Isometric in 2022 with an initial aim of bringing a more trusted certification process to schemes that remove carbon from the environment. Since then, more than a hundred companies have used its services when buying carbon credits as part of managing their emissions obligations.

Having built that registry of projects, each of which can be scrutinised by independent third parties, Isometric has since pushed into the broader industrial certification market. Deploying several different large language models to build its artificial intelligence tools, it now works with customers such as the miner Anglo American and the tech giants Microsoft and Google to check and certify that suppliers are meeting the environmental standards they have promised.

“Someone like Microsoft or Google wants to certify the carbon projects they are buying from, the clean energy and sustainable fuels they are procuring,” Jubbawy said. “If they are building out data centres, they want to certify the green steel and green cement, and certify the water usage, as they need to be within environmental safety guidelines. There are so many different certification products that they need.”

That breadth matters at a moment when corporate Britain is under growing pressure to prove its green credentials rather than simply assert them, a theme running through the government’s seventh carbon budget and its push to shield smaller firms from the next fossil-fuel shock.

Jubbawy said that by using AI to analyse data sets, Isometric was able to speed up and sharpen the accuracy of certification, cutting the time required from “months” to “hours”. The firm has been contracted to certify more than 16 million tonnes of carbon to date.

It is the kind of productivity dividend that analysts increasingly expect from well-targeted AI adoption, with one study estimating a £105bn revenue uplift for Britain’s mid-sized firms if the technology is taken up at pace.

The company has grown to employ 80 people across London and New York, including 15 with PhDs.

Jubbawy is no first-time operator. He is one of three co-founders of Onfido, the ID verification software provider acquired by the US security group Entrust in 2024 for $650 million. The co-founders, who met at Oxford University, together held about 16 per cent of the business.

For Doerr, whose early bets on Google and Amazon helped define a generation of Silicon Valley investing, the wager on Isometric is a smaller, more personal one. But for a London firm trying to sell trust to the world’s largest companies, a name like his on the share register may prove worth rather more than the cheque itself.

Jamie Young

Jamie is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, bringing over a decade of experience in UK SME business reporting.
Jamie holds a degree in Business Administration and regularly participates in industry conferences and workshops.

When not reporting on the latest business developments, Jamie is passionate about mentoring up-and-coming journalists and entrepreneurs to inspire the next generation of business leaders.