Businesses rue missed opportunities in John Healey's 'do no harm' Budget: Beckie Hart

While this may not have been the Budget business was hoping for, it also wasn’t the Budget the Chancellor wanted to deliver. A lack of fiscal headroom and creeping inflation – as a result of conflict in the Middle East – severely limited the government’s room for manoeuvre. Nevertheless, this will go down as a missed opportunity to put the private sector in the driving seat of our growth ambitions.

With energy and employment costs continuing to rise, while business taxes and red tape constrain investment, firms across Yorkshire & the Humber will rightly be asking “what comes next?”

Small moves to help households can only go so far, but to really transform livelihoods across the country, we need a fit and firing private sector that is delivering jobs, growth and opportunity. Businesses want to roll up their sleeves, but they need to understand more about the government’s direction of travel.

Recognition that energy policy costs should not be loaded onto business bills going forward shows that the Chancellor is listening to business. But there’s still much to be done to achieve a secure and resilient energy system for the long term, while ensuring that energy costs don’t hold back investment in the UK now. All eyes are now on the Prime Minister’s forthcoming ten-year plan – expected sometime before Christmas.

Increases in the National Living Wage and the youth minimum wage will take more account of rising youth unemployment – which is welcome. But again, there’s a sense that the Chancellor could have done more.

Reducing the cost of hiring by increasing the employer NICs threshold would have given firms more space to create entry-level jobs and help more young people into work. That’s why the forthcoming Milburn Review is so important. It represents the next opportunity to bring business and government together to boost employment.

Efforts to simplify the tax regime are welcome, however many of the 98 measures in the Budget actually added complexity rather than reduced it. We also saw further additional complexity in rates carve-outs to support retail, hospitality and leisure businesses.

While that will undoubtedly help many struggling firms, it ultimately falls short of the bigger prize: reform of the whole business rates system. Wholesale reform is long overdue and would really support firms across the economy. And while the banking surcharge may not have been as high as many had feared – and is encouragingly time-limited – it does weaken the sector’s overall competitiveness.

There’s no doubt that fiscal discipline matters, and the Chancellor is right to make it a top priority. But at a time of exceptional geopolitical pressures, using some fiscal headroom to absorb genuine short-term shocks is always preferable to loading additional permanent costs onto business and weakening investment. Transforming the country depends on profitable business, and that’s the message we’ll be taking to government in the weeks and months ahead.

Beckie Hart is CBI regional director for Yorkshire and Humber