Good morning. A week today John Healey, the chancellor, will be doing a media round defending the budget he is presenting on Wednesday next week. Ahead of that, he has given an interview to Patrick Maguire from the Times. As you would expect, there is no real detail in it about the measures he will be presenting to MPs. But the big picture message is very clear – and quite surprising, coming from a chancellor serving a PM who in some respects is steering left compared to his predecessor. Healey says that he wants to be on the side of bloody-minded entrepreneurs who make a profit, he acknowledges that government has made their life harder over the past two years, and he suggests that cutting the ‘cost of living’ for business is just as important as cutting the real cost of living for families.
In the quote that gives the Times its splash headline, Healey says:
I want to be a chancellor who backs business in Britain making a profit, and those entrepreneurs who, in the end, are the ones who challenge the status quo, come up with innovative ideas and are trying, some of them through sheer bloody-mindedness, to keep going through these sorts of pressures …
If you’re not making a profit, you’ve got nothing to put back into the business. And for the people who start up these businesses, the ones who really thrive and grow, they have to make a profit — and they will be much more inclined to put it back into their own business. But we want it to grow here and stay here.
And this is what he says about the government has recently been putting “a lot of pressure” on business.
If you talk to any of the businesses that have come in and have either had one-to-ones or round tables with me, I have recognised that in recent times there’s been a lot of pressure: employment law, regulation, tax, input costs, supply chains.
And so when I talk about the cost of business, and recognising that in the same way as we’re recognising the cost of living pressures, I’m conscious of that as I go into the budget for both businesses and households.
All chancellors – including all Labour chancellors – say they want to help businesses make a profit. But many people in the business community suspect that, when they face fiscal pressure, Labour government will usually default to treating business as a cash machine.
Healey’s comments about wanting to be seen as “a chancellor who backs business” and about how tax rises and the Employment Rights Act have increased costs sound like an implicit rebuke to Rachel Reeves, his predecessor. In his interview Healey defends her decision to increase employer national insurance, saying she had to deal with the “dereliction of duty” of the last Tory government on the economy. But Healey still gives the impression of wanting to be seen as markedly more pro-business than Reeves.
In his interview Healey does not give details of how he will cut costs for business next week. But, in his write-up, Maguire says:
[Healey] is expected to use the budget to make significant cuts to regulation on businesses that one senior Treasury source described as “the sludge choking firms”. Reporting requirements are likely to be abolished for many smaller enterprises, The Times understands.
Here is the agenda for the day.
۹.۳۰am: The ONS publishes crime figures for England and Wales and – separately – annual gender pay gap figures.
۱۰am: Ofgem chief executive Tim Jarvis and Department for Energy and Net Zero permanent secretary Jonathan Brearley give evidence to the Commons public accounts committee about achieving clean power by ۲۰۳۰.
۱۰.۱۵am: Kemi Badenoch gives a speech at the Police Federation’s annual conference.
Morning: Andy Burnham is in Manchester where he is getting a flu jab, and also holding a meeting with mayors at No ۱۰ North about mayors retaining revenue from business rates.
۱۱.۳۰am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Lunchtime: Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, speaks at a lunch at the Commons hosted by lobby journalists.
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