Founders' campaign asks Chancellor to reverse three tax moves
Stop the Creep wants employers' National Insurance cut back, entrepreneurial reliefs restored and a fixed roadmap for business tax. Two of the three land directly on what a founder keeps.
John Caudwell, who founded Phones 4u, and Lord Stuart Rose, the former chief executive of Marks and Spencer, have added their names to Stop the Creep, a campaign run by the founder group Helm.
The campaign says more than 150 business leaders and parliamentarians have now signed. Others named include Christos Angelides, chief executive of Reiss, Charlie Mullins of Pimlico Plumbers, Luke Johnson of Gail's Bakery, Johnnie Boden, and the shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith.
It makes three asks of the Chancellor. Reverse the rise in employers' National Insurance, restore the entrepreneurial reliefs that have been cut, and publish a stable roadmap for business taxation.
The National Insurance ask is the one with a price a founder can read off a payroll. Employer contributions are charged at 15 per cent on earnings above a secondary threshold of £5,000 a year.
That threshold is the part that bites at the small end. A company employing people on modest wages pays the charge on almost all of it.
The measure has raised more than the Treasury expected. Employer contributions in the year to the end of March came in around £4 billion above the official forecast, a £28 billion increase on the previous year.
When the rise was announced, the British Chambers of Commerce found that 82 per cent of member firms would reconsider their plans because of it.
The second ask is vaguer in public, and matters more to anyone sitting on equity. The reliefs at issue are the ones that reduce the tax due when a business is sold or passed on, so they set what a founder keeps at exit rather than what the company pays each month.
The campaign has not published rates or thresholds for the reliefs it wants restored, so the cost per founder cannot be read off its demands.
Caudwell built Phones 4u before selling his business group for £1.5 billion. He switched his support from the Conservatives to Labour at the 2024 general election and has since said he was "misled" by the party's pro-business promises. Over the weekend he told The Telegraph: "I do not think the Labour Party is electable".
Mullins sold Pimlico Plumbers in 2021 and has already moved to Spain over the tax burden. Helm's chief executive, Andreas Adamides, calls that "training entrepreneurs for export".
Helm describes itself as the UK's largest community of scale-up founders. It says its members run businesses with combined revenue of more than £8 billion and pay £1 billion a year in tax, and that the average member is chief executive of a company turning over £21 million a year.
Polling of business leaders published by Helm this month found 6 per cent consider the Prime Minister pro-business, with more than four in five expecting trading conditions to stay the same or get worse.
Both measures the campaign cares about are settled on 28 October. For an owner-manager, that is one date covering the cost of the next hire and the tax on an eventual sale, which is an argument for knowing your payroll exposure at the £5,000 threshold before the Budget rather than after it.