Budget ‘has to have growth as number one focus’, say manufacturers
Manufacturers are urging the UK Government to use the forthcoming Budget to focus on measures to boost growth, warning of the danger of any further increases in business taxes.
Make UK said its call followed its study showing that manufacturers’ business costs had already risen significantly this year in response to the increase in national insurance contributions (NICs).
Companies feared further burdens and costs from changes to inheritance tax and the looming implementation of the Employment Rights Bill, the report said.
Stephen Phipson, chief executive of Make UK, said: “Business is facing a potent combination of weak demand at home and abroad, as well as escalating costs across the board.
“If we are to get growth off the floor, then it is going to be business that provides it and this Budget simply has to have growth as the number one focus.
“In particular, energy costs are now an existential threat to deindustrialising the UK and we need to get them down as a matter of urgency.
“Government needs to stop sitting on its hands on the energy support scheme and continually kicking the can down the road hoping the problem will resolve itself. The scheme needs to be brought forward and backdated to when it was first announced.”
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It’s not ‘growth’ (meaning material economic growth) that business needs but demand. That demand can only arise from the public sector – investment in housing, hospitals and schools, increased wages, pensions and benefits, and reduced government-mandated costs in energy and services, especially interest rates. The current high interest rates are not serving any useful economic purpose. Such expenditure, meeting real needs, has positive multipliers and would supply the boost that local and regional economies are crying out for. Household and small businesses all over the country are being sacrificed by Labour’s self-defeating policies. And there is no future in the… Read more »
Increased demand can only come from people having more disposable income.
Indeed, Barny, as I say above.
The run up to 2008 shows what happens when demand (debt) is stimulated during an energy crisis to subtitute for that energy shortage.
The ‘energy crisis’ is a product of government mismanagement and foolish political choices which cost all of us much too much. And it was by far only a minor contributory factor to the 2008 crash. As indeed it will be to the imminent next one…
That crash and the next one are about wildly excessive stock market and (upper range) housing bubbles which are feeding private debt – which the government will probably ignore until the (private sector) banks need to be bailed out – again (by the public sector)!