Thought of the Week Thought of the Week · 24 Aug 2026If you run a manufacturing business in the UK and your electricity bill keeps you up at night, there's a new government scheme worth knowing about. It's called the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme, or BICS for short, and after months sitting in consultation it was finalised earlier this year, with the full guidance for applicants published in August. If you've been waiting for the detail before deciding whether it's worth your time, that detail is now out, and for a lot of manufacturers the answer is yes.
Read the articleThought of the Week Thought of the Week · 31 Aug 2026We get some version of this question most weeks now: "we make [X], does that qualify for BICS?" It's a fair question, because the honest answer is that eligibility isn't decided by what industry you'd describe yourself as being in over a coffee — it's decided by two specific codes, and both have to line up.
Read the articleThought of the Week Thought of the Week · 7 Sep 2026Every so often a client tells us they've already looked into government support for their electricity bill and didn't find anything, only for it to turn out they were looking at the British Industry Supercharger and concluded — correctly, for their business — that they didn't qualify. That's a shame, because BICS is a different scheme with a different, wider net, and it's easy to assume one ruled out the other.
Read the articleThought of the Week Thought of the Week · 14 Sep 2026Numbers in government scheme documents have a habit of staying abstract until you put them against a real electricity bill, so let's do that.
Read the articleThought of the Week Thought of the Week · 21 Sep 2026There's a particular kind of scheme where the deadline feels like a formality until it isn't, and BICS has the shape of exactly that. The application window is short relative to how much evidence it asks for, and — unusually for a government process — there's no route to fix a mistake once you've submitted.
Read the articleThought of the Week Thought of the Week · 28 Sep 2026The BICS guidance is fairly clear about the pieces required for a complete application, and none of them are things you can gather in an afternoon, so it's worth listing out plainly rather than leaving it as a vague sense that "there's paperwork involved."
Read the articleThought of the Week Thought of the Week · 5 Oct 2026Of everything in the BICS guidance, the site electricity-mix rule is the one most likely to be misunderstood, because it sits underneath the sector and product tests rather than alongside them — and it's the one that actually decides how much money, if any, ends up on your bill.
Read the articleThought of the Week Thought of the Week · 12 Oct 2026Government schemes tend to get covered from one angle: what it says on gov.uk. It's worth also looking at how the businesses this is aimed at are actually reacting, because that tells you something the guidance document doesn't.
Read the articleThought of the Week Thought of the Week · 19 Oct 2026We've been through the guidance closely enough now to have a fairly good sense of where applications are likely to go wrong, and it's rarely the big, obvious things. It's usually one of a handful of specific, avoidable errors.
Read the articleThought of the Week Thought of the Week · 26 Oct 2026Submitting a BICS application isn't the end of the process, and it's worth understanding what comes after, partly so the wait doesn't feel like something's gone wrong when it's simply how the scheme is structured.
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