Higginson Strategy and Helm hosted a post-Budget panel on Thursday 29 October at One Birdcage Walk, asking an audience of business leaders whether the Budget was good for business. Nobody in the room said it was. About half called it negative and the rest called it neutral.
John Higginson, Editor in Chief of Comment Central and Founder of Higginson Strategy, chaired the session, which was co-sponsored by Helm, the founder network for UK scale-ups.
Andreas Adamides, CEO of Helm, which leads the Stop the Creep campaign supported by Higginson Strategy; Sir Vince Cable, former Business Secretary and Leader of the Liberal Democrats; and Tim Sarson, Partner and Head of Tax Policy at KPMG made up the panel.
To open the session, Sir Vince called it “a budget of small things” and said growth of around one per cent next year leaves businesses little to plan around. He said Britain sits in the middle of the pack, and that most of the world’s growth is now coming from India, China, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa.
Mr Adamides said Helm’s members were at first thrilled when the Chancellor announced a 10% rate on the first £10 million of lifetime gains under Founders’ Relief before reading the small print of the consultation. The tests on growth, headcount and innovation, and the five-year UK residency requirement, could shut out many of the scale-up founders the relief is meant for. He said the Chancellor had listened to one of the campaign’s calls in not raising Capital Gains Tax but he repeated Helm’s call for a U-turn on the national insurance increase.
Mr Sarson said the biggest numbers in the Budget were the ones nobody announced: the freezes on income tax thresholds and fuel duty. After those came the measures to close the tax gap. His advice to founders was to respond to the Founders’ Relief consultation, because Treasury does take well-argued responses seriously.
Questions from the floor covered energy costs, youth unemployment, the tax paid by big tech, the misclassification of platform workers, and help for small firms working in emerging economies.
Higginson Strategy will submit a response to the consultation on behalf of Stop the Creep and Helm. If you want your views included, need help writing your own, or want to shape the debate going forward, get in touch with the Higginson Strategy team.
Sir Vince Cable “By far the most important thing in the Budget that’s hardly been commented on is the big increase in public sector investment through institutions like the British Business Bank and the National Wealth Fund. I think this is actually a big positive step for the UK.”
Andreas Adamides “Founders build a company over many years. They sacrifice pensions, they’re underpaying themselves, and they finally get an exit. That’s where you want to be rewarded. We’re not going to stop campaigning, and we’re going to keep pushing to get this to make sense.”
Tim Sarson “We’re not all going to get what we want. Half the country wants those difficult decisions made, which means slashing expenditure, raising tax, etc. The other half, probably often the same people, want much more generous incentives for their particular type of business or household. You can’t have both. Actually, having a Budget where not that much changes and there’s a bit of stability might not be the end of the world.”