Economic and Taxation Policies: Jobs, Growth and Prosperity

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of a number of small businesses, and I join in thanking my noble friend Lord Elliott for convening today’s debate. It has been extremely wide-ranging in its scope on the matter in front of your Lordships’ House, and there have been many interesting and insightful contributions from all sides.

What can I add, as the final speaker on the list? Well, I might just pick up on a point mentioned in passing by my noble friends Lord Risby and Lord Horam. They touched on the astonishing fact that not a single member of the Cabinet today has any real meaningful experience of running a business. I think this is a factor in the current predicament that the UK finds itself in under this Government: not a single decision-maker around the most powerful table in the land really understands what it feels like to be worried about making payroll at the end of a month, because their financial security has always been somebody else’s responsibility.

This is a Cabinet that has next to no commercial experience, even of the most basic business activities; that has never worried about paying a supplier, like so many small and medium-sized enterprises now across the country; that has never chased a late invoice, filed a company return or dealt with the burdens of red tape, such as that contained in the Employment Rights Bill; and that has never, in a business setting, hired, fired or managed a team—even though the Prime Minister is now getting used to having to fire people in a different context. Crucially, and stunningly, this is a Cabinet that has never created a job—not one single job—through entrepreneurialism.

I have no doubt that the cadre running the country at the moment were the very best think tank researchers, charity workers, academics, trade union officials and professional politicians, but I am afraid they seem ignorant of the pressures that those running businesses in the UK today currently faced. We have 0.1% growth, the highest inflation in the G7, soaring debt, rising unemployment and record high taxes. I must warn Ministers opposite that, as we go into the next fortnight, for many millions of business people across the UK this will be the Budget of sleepless nights, genuine fear and anxiety for those running companies large and small, terrified of the Chancellor’s next move by a Government who are pushing job creators and employers to the very edge.

The Government have blithely shredded their key election pledge not to raise taxes on working people. That is a total and unforgivable breach of trust on the Government’s core fiscal commitments. As with every Labour Government, it is now the case that the Treasury is racking up debts, including £100 billion in annual debt interest costs.

What has been the result of these fiscal policy choices a year into the Labour Government? What do we have to show for the increases in employers’ NI contributions, business rates and capital gains tax? What do we have to show for hiking the cost of employing the average worker by £900, abolishing the key elements of agriculture and business property reliefs, and countless other measures? I contend that the Government’s headline economic achievement so far has been taking 80% of workers out of income tax altogether in Mauritius, with their disastrous Chagos Bill, a deal that will cost tens of billions of pounds. This Labour Government are delivering seismic tax cuts; it is just that they are doing it in a country more than 6,000 miles away, while here at home, in just two weeks, they no doubt plan to hike income tax on millions of workers in Britain. Even in the long litany of the Labour Party’s history of economic failure, the Starmer and Reeves project will surely go down as one of the most flabbergasting chapters of all.