The British Business Bank slashed its headcount in the last year as the government-owned economic development bank underwent a major restructuring. The bank – which backs loans from financial institutions in a bid to drive up UK small business lending – said in its annual report “a number of colleagues
Samuel Norman
Tuesday 21 July 2026 3:40 am | Updated: Friday 17 July 2026 3:45 pm
The British Business Bank slashed its headcount in the last year as the government-owned economic development bank underwent a major restructuring.
The bank – which backs loans from financial institutions in a bid to drive up UK small business lending – said in its annual report “a number of colleagues were placed at risk under collective consultation”.
Around £9m was saved as part of the review process, with £6.3m of this coming from staff costs.
David Hourican, the British Business Bank’s finance boss, told City AM the program had removed around 15 per cent of its cost base.
He said it was made up of a “natural mix” of nearly 50 full-time employees exiting the business along with it “sharpening” its operating expenditure. The bank recorded 604 full-time staff in its annual report as of March 2026, but Hourican said this did not reflect the expiration of notice periods which were realised after the financial reporting period.
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The number of temporary workers was cut to 61 as of March, from 85 the year prior.
“We’re trying to diminish the amount of temporary resource that we have,” Louis Taylor, chief executive of the bank, told City AM.
“We’re running this to be efficient as well as to be effective,” he added.
British Business Bank eyes automation push
The savings from the review were earmarked to “enable greater investment into technology and automation,” according to the report.
“We should increasingly have systems that are scalable… so as we massively scale that, we should not be massively scaling the need for people in the back office, mid-office functions. It should be scalable,” he said.
As part of the restructuring the business also merged its 20 separate financing programmes into separate banking and investment divisions.
Taylor said the bank was previously facing the market with 20 names of programs “that made no sense” and had criteria “that were repelling as much as they were embracing companies”.
“We’ve changed the culture of the organisation to be more courageous and catalytic in the market, which commensurates with the ambition the government gave us.”
The state-owned body had its funding capacity increased to £25.6bn in last year’s Spending Review from nearly £15.6bn previously. It is owned by the Department for Business and Trade and overseen by its own board of directors.
In the last year, it posted a pre-tax profit of £426m, a major jump from £144m the year prior. This was driven by a mammoth £422m positive turn in the valuation of the bank’s assets.
Around £194m of those gains from the recovery of its venture growth portfolios, which previously faced broader macroeconomic headwinds.
In January 2026, the bank committed to investing £25m in Kraken Technologies, as the firm split from Octopus.
Taylor is set to bow out as chief executive of the bank come September with Hourican to step in on an interim basis.
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