Business News

At first glance, taking on an Apprentice is a very appealing prospect for small and medium sized companies. The chance to hire an inexpensive extra pair of hands to assist with the day to day running of a business whilst educating and employing a young person into the bargain should be a relative no-brainer for [...]

Iconic Norfolk furniture store Hovells is set to close it’s doors with the loss of more than twenty local jobs. Staff are in the process of being consulted across the company’s three locations in Norwich and Lowestoft as an ‘everything must go’ sale begins to clear over £2 million worth of stock from the shelves. [...]

From this week High Streets in Norfolk will be able to tap into a new online resource in order to help them increase footfall and revenue in the current economic downturn.  ’100 Ways to Help the High Street’ is a collection of helpful tools that if adopted correctly can have a positive impact on trading [...]

Eight universities including the University of East Anglia (UEA) are to join forces to research how the creative sector, including the TV and film industry can be protected in this rapidly evolving digital era. Led by Glasgow university, researchers will study issues including copyright and piracy which affect a sector currently worth more than five [...]

Aviva, the Norwich born insurer and the largest in the UK today posted it’s half year results for the first half of 2012. They revealed that pre-tax operating profits had declined by 10% on like for like figures announced this time last year. The reduction was partly due to the need to write off £876m [...]

Former Norwich restaurant By Appointment is to put it’s entire contents up for sale in an auction to be held at the St Georges Street premises on Saturday. The up market eatery which closed back in June this year has some 300 plus lots that are due to go under the hammer, and with no [...]

This autumn Norfolk County Council will hand thirty local job seeking youngsters an employment lifeline by awarding them a 12 month apprenticeship. News of the initiative, which will cost almost a quarter of a million pounds comes quickly on the heels of the announcement earlier this year – that hundreds of apprentices taken on in [...]

Norwich City Centre received a much needed shot in the arm yesterday when it’s businesses voted to invest an additional £3m over the next five years to create a Norwich Business Improvement District (BID). The windfall which will be created by the companies adopting a 1% increase to their annual business rates will form a [...]

Just six months after Sir Richard Branson was in Norwich to launch the brand new Virgin Money bank, staff have been hit with an ultimatum to ‘up sticks’ and move away from Norfolk or face the threat of redundancy. The bank which employs around 250 staff here in Norwich plans to reduce it’s Norfolk workforce [...]

Whilst it was announced yesterday that the national unemployment figures have fallen for the fourth month in a row, long-term unemployment has increased, with those who’ve been looking for work for over two years increasing by 18,000 to 441,000, the biggest number since 1997. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics take into [...]