We are in the midst of an unprecedented crisis. Covid-19 has spread all over the world and the UK is now in lockdown to try and slow down community transmission. Non-essential business such as cafes, restaurants, cinemas, and clothing stores have all closed their doors. People are staying at home rather than travelling to visit family and friends.
It’s likely that many small businesses will never recover. Your local pizzeria that employed less than 10 staff and the small boutique hotel you stayed in last summer – these businesses can’t stay closed indefinitely. They have wages...
This is an Nguru spiny pygmy chameleon. It’s just a few centimetres long. What could it possibly have in common with a black rhino? The answer is – Wild Planet Trust. The charity behind Paignton Zoo, Living Coasts and Newquay Zoo carries out conservation work in Tanzania, home to both species.
This minute chameleon - a species new to Paignton Zoo and sadly not yet on show to guests – needs all the help it can get. It’s Critically Endangered, largely due to the ravenous demands of the international pet trade.
The chameleon is well named – it comes from the Nguru Mountains of...
Gross materialism raises its ugly but seductive head as we move towards Christmas. In Exeter, this is partly symbolised by the Christmas market apparently competing with the Cathedral for custom on Cathedral Green, in this annual clash between Christianity and Consumerism.
Shrewd Santa is the sacred figure of our age stimulating desiring and devouring in malls and missives across the land. As Giles Fraser put it in the Guardian, ‘the great circus of greed is playing itself out all over the country’.
We are once again drawn into a world where material ‘goods’ become the main...
Two programmes offering funds for rural and small business projects is now open.
The South Devon Coastal Local Action Group (SDC LAG) and the Greater Dartmoor Local Economic Action Fund (GD LEAF) have been awarded a total of £3.5 million to allocate to business projects which encourage and promote business growth, productivity and create jobs.
Both were originally set up in 2008 to invest in economic, environmental and community based projects to encourage innovation and promote the prosperity of the South Devon area.
In celebration of three successful years in business, founders of Thermalogica Terri Bainbridge and Lisa Portman hosted a party at the newly opened Exeter Cookery School.
It’s no coincidence that Thermalogica celebrated turning three during breast cancer awareness month. It was Terri’s own battle with breast cancer that led to her opening Thermalogica with childhood friend, Lisa, in 2013. In 2016, they remain one of the few UK based clinics specialising in thermal imaging as a means of early clinical detection and prevention of disease. Since opening their doors, the clinic has...
Over 174,675 businesses based in the South West1 must automatically enrol eligible employees into a workplace pension scheme before 1 April 2017, including businesses employing only one or two people.
Automatic enrolment can be complex and small businesses can be stretched - often with little experience of running a pension scheme, so the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) has created Pension Solution to help small businesses through the automatic enrolment process.
Commenting, Laura Webb, Head of Membership Relations, Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association...
Small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are growing at their fastest rate since the economic crisis in 2008 as private sector firms added over 600,000 net new jobs across the UK in 2014, new research shows. The Growth Dashboard 2015 - a new study by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC), which brings together academics from five of the country’s leading university business schools, and in partnership with the Business Growth Service - sheds new light on patterns of growth around the UK. The surprising findings show that while London has the highest start-up rate in the country, it is...
UK SMEs1 are collectively planning to increase investment in their digital capabilities by £53 billion over the next two years, prioritising their websites over mobile technologies, according to new research2 from Santander Corporate & Commercial.
The survey of UK SMEs reveals the average firm has committed £33,212 to digital investment in the past year, and intends to increase this by £28,224 in the next two years. However, many firms are looking to invest significantly more: 8% of the companies surveyed estimated they had spent more than £100,000 on digital capabilities in...
