Lord Walker calls for Healey to cut business taxes
Iceland boss Lord Richard Walker has urged Andy Burnham and John Healey to cut taxes for businesses and to stop focusing on the cost of living.
Walker, who backed Labour at the last election, said Healey should ease costs for employers.
The supermarket chief was the cost of living tsar under Sir Keir Starmer’s government before leaving with the change of Prime Minister.
He said on Sunday that “warm words towards business won’t be enough” and added that the government should “stop focusing on the cost of living and start focusing on the cost of getting Britain back to work”.
“Their first priority should be simple: make it cheaper to employ people, invest and grow,” he wrote in The Sun on Sunday.
“Every rise in employers’ National Insurance, every punishing business rates bill, and every other additional cost imposed by Whitehall changes the calculation about whether to create another job.
“The October Budget should begin shifting the tax burden away from jobs and productive investment.”
Tax cut and ending triple lock pension calls
His intervention on Burnham’s cost of living drive is just the latest in a string of attacks on policymaking in the UK.
Before Burnham came into office, he said publicly that Ed Miliband would be a “disaster” as Chancellor as he said energy policy had become “far too ideological”.
In the House of Lords, Walker also hit out at the “unsustainable” triple lock pension, which uprates the state pension every year by whichever is highest out of inflation, wage growth of 2.5 per cent.
Walker echoed the Confederation of British Industry and other business groups’ demands for Burnham to cut national insurance for employers, which was raised by Rachel Reeves in the first budget of the Labour government.
The tax hike in 2024 raised about £25bn yet employers have blamed the added cost of hiring for the dramatic slowdown in the jobs market.
The hospitality sector has meanwhile pushed for Burnham to cut VAT and reform business rates to boost high streets.
Top entrepreneurs and business bosses including John Caudwell and Lord Stuart Rose wrote to the government to “stop the creep” of small tax hikes on businesses and households.
Rose, who is the former chairman of Asda and Marks & Spencer, said he had “never been more concerned about the cost of doing business” and added that taxes and regulation had become “serious impediments to growth and employment”.