Paul Andrews

Family Business United is encouraging family business owners, leaders and representatives across the UK to join them in sending a letter to the soon to be appointed Prime Minister seeking a full reversal, or at least a review and consultation, on the damaging implications of the changes to Business Property Relief and Agricultural Property Relief on the long-term sustainability of multigenerational family businesses.

Family Business United is delighted to share the film from the National Family Business of the Year Awards 2026, an evening that saw the family business sector come together to celebrate the significant contribution of family businesses to the UK economy.

Many family businesses spend a surprising amount of energy trying to look less like a family business.

The result is a particular kind of isolation, one that has little to do with how successful the business actually is. Some of the most outwardly confident leaders in family business privately admit to feeling like they are carrying the weight of the company, and the family, almost entirely on their own.

Family business leaders are used to planning succession around the things they can control: when the next generation is ready, how the business is performing, what the family actually wants. Right now, many are having to plan around something they cannot control at all. A change of Prime Minister, an unsettled tax outlook and a steady drumbeat of speculation about inheritance tax, business property relief and wider reform have left plenty of family business owners wondering whether this is the moment to accelerate succession, delay it, or simply hold their nerve.

One of the clearest patterns among leaders who step down successfully is that they begin investing in interests, relationships and activities outside the business well in advance, rather than waiting until the handover to think about what comes next. This might mean taking on a non executive role in another organisation, getting involved in a charity, returning to a hobby that was set aside decades earlier, or simply protecting time for family and friendships that had been squeezed out by the demands of running the business.

Police launched a 'Hot Fuzz' style chase over fences and through eight gardens to catch a drug dealer.

For decades, family business owners across the UK could plan their succession around a simple assumption. Build the business, hold the shares, and pass them on at death largely free of inheritance tax. That assumption ended on 6 April 2026.

They may rarely make the headlines reserved for Germany's largest listed corporations, but the country's family firms remain, in every meaningful sense, the engine room of the German economy.

Have you ever been snacking on a juicy apple, only to be met with a pair of droopy eyes and a wagging tail begging for a bite? It's no secret that dogs love to beg for human food, and Dex is no different. But it can be hard to...