Politics
Andrew Griffith: Labour are determined to make April the start of fresh misery for businesses and the self-employed
Andrew Griffith is the Shadow Secretary of State for Business & Trade, MP for Arundel & South Downs and a former FTSE100 Finance Director & COO.
With just a fortnight to go, the reality of a new slate of socialist measures which will land on the heads of business in Labour’s ‘April Armageddon’ is setting in.
Just as Reeves’s first budget is looked back on as the catalyst that saw unemployment rise almost every month since, and 1 in 6 young people now unable to find a job, this April too will become a milestone. It will be looked back on as the moment when Labour showed once and for all that they don’t understand, or don’t care to understand, what makes our economy tick. What could have been the quiet, administrative start of another tax year will in fact mark a cacophony of a series of anti-growth measures crashing into force.
The broader economic context could not be worse. Last week we had confirmation that this year has started with falling GDP per capita, rising gilt yields and stubbornly high inflation. Business confidence surveys consistently plumb global pandemic depths whilst a declining construction sector is now less ‘build, build, build’ than ‘burn, burn, burn’. And that’s before we talk about energy costs.
The most well understood April assault – thanks to Conservative campaigning and judicious use of opposition day debates in Parliament – is the Chancellor’s staggering rise in business rates. They are already a conceptually flawed tax, levied before businesses have made a pound of revenue or profit and calculated through a capricious method of valuation. Now they’re set to get even worse. While pubs have been granted a temporary reprieve, that U-turn doesn’t extend to shops and restaurants who face an average 50 per cent increase in the coming years. Nor does it help hotels who will see their rates double.
Conservatives have already committed to exempt thousands on our high streets from business rates entirely, cutting them for a quarter of a million shops, pubs, and restaurants. This is fully funded by our plan to reform welfare and get those who can back into work. I hope in time we can go further. Unfortunately, before our plans ride to the rescue, Labour’s changes will have shuttered hundreds of beloved high street outlets and the jobs they create along with them.
While private enterprises are hit and firms close, it’s not all bad news — well not for the public sector anyway.
For on the first of April, Labour’s new super-quango will open its doors. The ‘Fair Work Agency’, an Orwellian name if ever there was one, will have Stasi like powers to raid any business, seize documents, and conduct sweeping and expensive investigations even where not a single employee has raised a complaint. It’s a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach befitting a government that already tried to mandate every Briton carry a digital ID. The powerful body is to be run by a left-wing, trans activist, career civil servant who, has never created a single private sector job in her life. Woe betide the employers her organisation will set its sights on. Along with the repeal of all the job killing measures in the (Un)Employment Rights Act 2025, we will disband this socialist interloper into relations between employers and employees on day one in office.
If having read so far about April’s Armageddon made you feel a little queasy, there is some better news. Under Labour you will now be entitled to paid sick leave at your employer’s expense on the very first day you (don’t) show up for work. It’s a shirkers charter and a policy that could only emanate from a government in thrall to a public sector where recent data shows days lost to “sickness” are surging. The burden will fall brutally on small businesses and those who employ big workforces such as the care, hospitality and retail sectors with the additional cost estimated at around £450 million per year. No one wants the profoundly ill dragging themselves into work, but as so many employers attest: in the real world, the incentive to self-certify a case of the ‘Monday blues’ from under the duvet may be irresistible for some.
Incentives matter and groups representing employers have warned repeatedly that more red tape, the NI ‘jobs tax’ and above-inflation hikes in minimum wages will deter hiring. This is the reason why – shamefully – youth unemployment in the UK is now for the first time ever higher than the EU average. We Conservatives will not let them get away with this. Rumours already abound of a soviet tractor era government scheme for taxpayer subsidised job. It’s clearly the wrong answer, but it’s also an attempt to solve a problem Government created in the first place. Instead, unleashing the jobs market now sits alongside unblocking the housing as part of our distinct and optimistic offer to the next generation.
No employees to worry about? You’re not off the hook; April has its designs on you too. A special treat is in store for sole traders and the self-employed. Those who have a turnover over £50,000 will be captured by HMRC’s “Making Tax Difficult” scheme.
Far from bringing HMRC into the 21st century (or even into the 20th when the telephones that they refuse to answer were invented) the scheme will require signing up to often expensive and complicated tax software for the taxwoman’s convenience. Once again, the hard-working small businesses and sole traders who create growth are treated like criminals from the outset. While civil servants shovel cash into any number of Whitehall woodchippers, great care is taken to watch every penny that passes through the hands of businesses regardless of the burden that will impose. For small business owners their scarcest resource is time and Making Tax Difficult will steal away more Sundays lost to unpaid hours wrestling with this.
Here too Conservatives have already announced a different approach. As I said at our party conference, HMRC must be transformed to be a partner not a predator: competent and respectful of those whose hard work pays their salary. That’s why we would put in place a rating system, just as companies have with Feefo or Trustpilot for every interaction between taxpayer and tax collector.
There’s plenty more work to be done to hold this anti-business, anti-growth Government to account and develop the carefully considered policies Britain’s businesses need to help us grow. What’s never been clearer, however, is the contrast between a Labour government packed from frontbench to back with trade unionists, public sector lifers, and activists who simply don’t get it. They’ve never run a business, they’ve often never even worked in a business, and they’ve never had to take responsibility for employees.
2025 was the year Labour killed jobs. This year may well prove the year they kill the high street. Conservatives were quick to spot this and to launch high profile campaigns in support of private enterprise, risk takers and wealth creators on both occasions because many of us know precisely what it takes to run a business.
Businesses are aching for a government that understands them, and that is precisely what we are building.