The hospitality group said it wanted to save money in light of cost pressures coming from business rates and national insurance contributions.

Its new five-year plan includes the increased cost-saving target and steps to cut capital spending by more than £1 billion.

It will also replace its 197 restaurants with an integrated food and drink model which it said was more efficient and preferred by hotel guests.

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Whitbread said the plans to reduce its 30,000-strong workforce were subject to employee consultation, and that it expects to retain a significant proportion of those affected through redeployment.

Chief executive Dominic Paul said: “We always challenge ourselves to improve and, in light of significant cost increases in the form of business rates and national insurance, as well as the implied market discount to our inherent value, we’ve looked hard at the options open to us to maximise value creation over the medium and long-term.

“This has been a rigorous process and we’ve approached all options with an open mind.

“Our new five-year plan builds on our strengths and drives a significant acceleration of our strategy.”

SOFIAH NICHOLE SALIVIO

News Editor

Hammer has launched Hammer Stack, an on-premises AI infrastructure platform for businesses, positioning it as part of a wider shift towards sovereign AI infrastructure.

The launch comes as many companies struggle to move artificial intelligence projects from pilot stages into day-to-day use. Hammer argues that the main obstacle is not demand for AI tools, but the difficulty of building and running the underlying infrastructure at scale.

Many organisations began AI work in public cloud environments because they offered an easy starting point for experimentation. But as workloads expand, those environments can become harder to manage, with costs rising and large datasets becoming expensive to move.

This issue, often described as data gravity, can leave businesses with data stored in one environment and computing resources tied to another. Hammer says that separation creates architectural constraints that hinder performance and make it harder to generate a return on AI spending.

Sovereign focus

Hammer Stack is designed as a fully integrated platform that keeps AI workloads on premises rather than in hyperscale public cloud systems. It is intended to let organisations decide where models are trained and deployed, with an emphasis on data control, policy requirements and regulatory obligations.

The platform combines AMD EPYC processors, NVIDIA GPUs and networking, and VDURA storage in a rack-level design. The package also includes APC power management and support for liquid cooling.

Rather than selling it as a standalone system, Hammer has presented Hammer Stack as the hardware layer for its existing Hammer AI Works ecosystem. That broader offering includes advisory services, a community model and a sandbox environment called The Labouratory for testing proof-of-concept projects before production deployment.

Production barrier

Hammer argues that many AI initiatives fail not at the software stage, but in the move from test environments into production systems. In its view, piecemeal infrastructure decisions can create what it calls “accidental architectures” that work in isolated trials but break down under full operational demands.

The new platform’s rack-level validation is intended to reduce that risk by integrating compute, storage, networking, power and cooling into a pre-designed module. The aim is to give partners and customers a more predictable route from experimentation to live deployment.

Hammer is also linking the product to a wider market debate over sovereignty in AI systems. For many European organisations, especially those handling sensitive data, questions over where information sits, who controls access to it and how it is processed have become more prominent as AI use expands.

Those concerns have helped create demand for infrastructure that can run advanced AI workloads without relying entirely on large US cloud providers. Hammer is seeking to position itself in that market by offering an option that keeps data and compute resources under customer control on site.

Channel role

Hammer operates as a value-added distributor focused on enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity and data products across Europe. Hammer Stack will be supported by specialist AI consultancies alongside its channel network, reflecting the technical complexity of designing and managing AI systems in production.

Financing will also form part of the offer, with leasing and subscription-style models available to customers that want to align infrastructure spending with actual use. That approach is aimed at reducing the upfront cost of deploying AI systems on premises at a time when many businesses remain cautious about large capital commitments.

The launch reflects a broader effort by suppliers across the IT market to address frustration over AI returns. While spending on generative AI and large language model projects has surged, many businesses are still trying to prove commercial value from those investments once trial projects end.

Hammer framed that gap between ambition and implementation as one of the defining issues in the current AI market. It argues that organisations need infrastructure that matches their own data location, governance rules and operational priorities, rather than defaulting to the architecture of a hyperscale cloud provider.

“AI should run where your data, policies, and priorities dictate, not where a hyperscaler decides,” Hammer said.

National Car Parks (NCP) entered administration in March after what its insolvency practitioners described as severe financial pressures and insufficient cash to meet its obligations.

As part of the initial restructuring, just over 20 “commercially unviable” car parks across the country were earmarked for closure in late March, with a little over 30 roles made redundant in total at those sites.

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The NCP‑run car park in Marlborough Road in Banbury was included in that first wave of closures and has now shut for good.

It is not known how many jobs have gone in Banbury specifically, but the administrators have confirmed that the redundancies linked to this initial closure programme number slightly above 30 across all affected locations.

The rest of NCP’s estate – more than 300 car parks nationwide – continues to trade while the administrators explore options for the business.

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Two NCP car parks in Oxford city centre remain open and are among the sites being operated under the administrators’ control.

NCP, a familiar name in town and city centres for decades, has been hit by changing travel patterns, more home‑working and rising costs.

Its fall into administration has put nearly 700 jobs at risk across the company, although only a small proportion of those have so far been cut through the first round of car park closures.