A year after tax rises removed thousands of jobs from the economy, businesses are braced for a new set of disastrous Labour measures
Daily Telegraph 20/03/26
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. What started a year ago when the rise in employer National Insurance contributions kicked in and thousands of jobs were kicked out of the economy will continue this April when the next set of measures come crashing down on businesses.
The broader economic context could not be worse. One in six young people are now unable to find a job, GDP per capita is falling, and gilt yields are rising as we battle stubbornly high inflation and rising oil prices.
Even after a year of job cuts and hiring freezes, Labour’s choices have business confidence stuck at levels not seen since the global pandemic.
All of this is down primarily to a Cabinet that neither understands nor cares to learn how business works. Rather than embracing the private sector, they see it as something to be feared and curtailed.
The most well-understood April assault is a staggering rise in business rates that seems almost calculated to crush our high streets. It’s a deeply flawed tax as it is; business rates are levied before a single pound of profit or revenue has been earned and calculated through increasingly speculative valuations.
It’s much as if the tax man turned up to tell you what he thinks you’ll earn before you earn it, and that the bill for this fantasy income is due today.
While pubs have been given a temporary reprieve, this limited U-turn has made the policy sting even harder for the thousands of businesses that have been excluded. Shops and restaurants are still facing an average 50 per cent increase in the coming years while hotels 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. What I hate is knowing that for hundreds of beloved high street outlets, it won’t come soon enough; shutters may come down permanently before help arrives.
If rising taxes weren’t bad enough, Labour is also targeting employers. The start of April will see Labour’s new anti-job super-quango open its doors. The “Fair Work Agency”, as it’s been cunningly named, will have Stasi-like powers to raid any business, seize documents, and conduct sweeping and expensive investigations. It’s a mad, guilty-until-proven-innocent approach that slots in neatly between mandatory digital ID and abolishing jury trials.
It’s probably too late for a U-turn on this. Labour has already hired a Left-wing activist career civil servant to run it. We will still scrap it, on day one, along with all the job-killing measures in the (Un)Employment Rights Act it sprung from.
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 £450m.
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.
Finally, those who don’t have employees will also feel the pain this April, thanks to HMRC’s “Making Tax Difficult” scheme. It will capture sole traders, landlords, and the self-employed with a turnover above £50,000 with expensive diktats to procure specialised software that essentially plugs their live accounting right into HMRC’s network.
Here, once again, the hard-working who create growth are treated like criminals.
While civil servants shovel cash into any number of Whitehall woodchippers, those stuck with the bill live under the microscope of the pettifogging bureaucrats.
The real cost to business will be time – the scarcest resource of any small business owner stolen away, so Sundays are spent not with family but on unpaid hours wrestling with tax software.
The Chancellor was out in force again this week, proclaiming a Government focused on growth yet oddly believing this will come from closer links to the “no-growth” EU.
If 2025 was the year Labour killed jobs, this may very well prove to be the year they kill the high street. Conservatives were quick to spot both disasters, like the Hubble telescope can spot asteroids heading towards Earth.
We won’t stop campaigning to stave off disaster, but there are none so blind as those that will not see. This Government is very blind, and the asteroid is very near.
Andrew Griffith is Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade
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