Andrew Griffith MP is Shadow Secretary of State for Business & Trade and Conservative MP for Arundel & South Downs.
It’s a common refrain that Whitehall doesn’t care about the little guy.
Small businesses, the self-employed, those looking for their first job — they’re not wrong to feel neglected or ignored. This Labour government rarely thinks about business but if it does so at all, it is big business to which they turn. Perhaps as those tend to be unionised. Or they feel more comfortable amongst their armies of lawyers and lobbyists. Maybe it’s just ignorance in that if you’ve never worked in the private sector, every business seems the same.
Either way, there is a key dividing line here between Labour and our own Conservative approach.
By contrast, when I think about business – reflecting the composition of my own constituency of small towns with no single large employer at all – it is the hair salon, the chain of bakers, the one unit lock up in an industrial estate, an early years nursery, the pub or a self-employed tradesman with a van who is front of my mind. The type of family or privately owned businesses which make up 5.6 million small businesses employing 13 million people.
So, we Conservatives will put the smallest businesses, the self-employed and those at the very start of their careers or thinking of starting a business one day at the heart of our policy making.
Of course, it’s not either/or. We do need the Rolls Royces and GSKs. But good policy making starts with the end in mind and it is the smallest businesses where the rubber hits the road, where the margins of error are tightest and where the sort of ill-thought through policies and taxes that this government seems to specialise in, are fatal.
I’ve said on Con Home before that I believe in office Conservatives did not give sufficiently full-throated support to enterprise. Higher taxes post pandemic, permitting red tape to proliferate rather than be slashed, and allowing HMRC to do their worst on IR35. But the past year and a half have thrown this into stark relief.
A death tax which exempts private equity owners and multinationals but singles out British-owned family businesses. The £25 billion National Insurance rate rise and threshold changes which penalise hiring. Energy cost rises. Business rate hikes of tens and even hundreds of per cent on our high street premises.
Not for nothing is the online speculation about what the hospitality sector must have done to Rachel Reeves in a former life!
In meetings last week I spoke with dozens of business owners employing thousands of people. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things but having to make difficult choices. A hotel owner looking to move to an employment-lite, ‘’room rental’ model. A chain of early years nurseries and an education business pausing plans for growth. A pub and micro-brewery which may not survive and a family building firm with empty order books for the first time ever. All squeezed between subdued consumer demand and rising costs and taxes. Each having to work out where to pare back employee hours or who to have to let go.
Business-owners report working all hours and having to pick up work formerly done by employees just to keep their business alive. For many this comes at a time of life when their dream – and their reward for decades of early starts and late finishes – was to be stepping back a little and enjoying the fruits of their enterprise. It cannot continue like this, and for many sadly it won’t.
As I write, we still await the promised plan to mitigate some of the harm which the Chancellor’s last budget inflicted.
It has now been almost two months since she stood at the despatch box to proclaim that she had “permanently lowered” business rates on Britain’s high streets. A deceit rapidly laid bare by average increases of 74 per cent for independent pubs, 50 per cent for shops, 53 per cent for restaurants and a doubling for hotels. Hospitality and high street staples like salons, pharmacies and post offices will be ravaged by the biggest business rates rise in a generation.
As has become common, under pressure from Conservatives and others, then came the promised U turn. But despite the Chancellor finding time to hang out at the World Economic Forum, it was another week of waiting for Britain’s smallest businesses.
This ‘two tier’ attentiveness to the largest companies whilst ignoring the small is a pattern we are seeing repeated time and time again with Labour. To save a thousand jobs at British Steel, the Government summoned Parliament on a Saturday as if the country was at war and signed up to unlimited bailouts of taxpayers’ cash. A relief scheme on energy bills was reserved for only the 7,000 largest manufacturers with nothing for smaller and medium sized firms. And welcome though it is, the one group of businesses unexpectedly spared extra tax raids were the big banks. Yet in the hospitality sector, 100,000 jobs have already been lost since Reeves’ first Budget, with another 100,000 more at risk thanks to her second Budget.
This is where we Conservatives have a huge opportunity as well as the patriotic duty to oppose. While small businesses bleed out, Labour hand huge pay rises to their well-paid supporters in the public sector. Whilst the Chancellor does some creative accounting on her CV, young people struggle even to secure an interview to start the process of building their own experience of work. With unemployment amongst those aged between 16 and 24 revealed this week to afflict around one in six, pretty soon every family will know a son, daughter, niece or nephew blighted by the experience of not being able to find employment.
As a team, we are already putting forward polices to help.
The Shadow Chancellors’ announcement that we need permanently lower business rates, confirming we will scrap them entirely for thousands of pubs, restaurants and high street businesses. Claire Coutinho’s Cheap Power plan. Scrapping the family business death tax. And back at October’s Party conference, I announced policies to unleash a new generation of entrepreneurs by stripping away the prohibitive barriers which prevent a side hustle transforming into a small business: scrapping the rules that treat every business start-up like an Albanian crime syndicate when trying to open a bank account; encouraging entrepreneurs to hold HMRC to account by rating their experience with HMRC like a handyman or food delivery app; and reversing all of the intimidating deterrents from hiring contained in the 330 page red tape (Un)Employment Act imposed by this government.
The self employed will be helped by reforming IR35 and a simpler, fairer tax system.
Britain’s entrepreneurial spirit is not broken although many feel understandably crushed by this government right now. I’m optimistic that the strength of our millions of existing small businesses and the ambition of our young people to create new ones will make our country rise again.
Our mission is to have the policies and leadership to help them.
