Budget: Small and Medium-sized Businesses

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. The OBR has upgraded Britain’s growth forecast for this year from 1% to 1.5%, reaching the same conclusion as the IMF, the OECD and the Bank of England, which have already upgraded their growth forecasts. We were the fastest-growing economy in the G7 for the first half of this year, and we are on course to be the second fastest for the year as a whole. He is right that the OBR has looked back at the previous decade and concluded that policies such as austerity and Brexit have weakened the economy more than previously thought, and that assessment then directly impacts its view of GDP for the remainder of the forecast period, but the past does not have to determine the future, and we will go further and faster with our growth mission. We are cutting inflation and cutting borrowing every year of the forecast so that interest rates can keep falling, giving businesses the confidence to invest; we are maintaining public investment to build critical infrastructure; and we are backing our fastest-growing companies. We beat the growth forecasts this year, and we will beat them again.

[Lord Tyrie (Non-Afl)]

Well, it is goodbye Budgets for growth and hello tax and spend, is it not? When Ministers are forced back just to reading scripts—completely unedited, as far as I can tell—we get a gist of the sense of lack of authority behind some of the remarks that have just been made. Budgets used to have detailed studies of incentive effects attached to them. Could the Minister tell us, and publish, any such studies of the incentive effects on small business growth for the tax measures in this Budget?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

The noble Lord was characteristically rude, but I will resist being rude back to him. There were very many measures—

[Lord Tyrie (Non-Afl)]

Could the Minister possibly say where I have been rude?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

There were several measures to help businesses scale up. The enterprise management incentive scheme will be significantly expanded and made available to more companies. Enterprise investment scheme investment limits and gross asset thresholds will be doubled, and venture capital trust investment limits and gross assets thresholds will also be doubled. The Government will obviously publish impact assessments for all those measures.