Caudwell and Rose back Budget push

John Caudwell, the Phones 4u founder, and Lord Stuart Rose, the former chief executive of Marks and Spencer, have joined a campaign calling on the Chancellor to halt and reverse the creeping taxes that its signatories say punish founders for growing their businesses.

The two are the most prominent of a wave of new backers for Stop the Creep, run by the founder group Helm, which describes itself as the UK’s largest community of scale-up founders. They sign alongside Christos Angelides, chief executive of the fashion retailer Reiss, and Charlie Mullins, who founded Pimlico Plumbers. The campaign says more than 150 business leaders and parliamentarians have now added their names.

The signatories warn of a “death by a thousand cuts” for Britain’s wealth creators. Other backers include Luke Johnson, chair of Gail’s Bakery, Johnnie Boden, founder of the clothing retailer Boden, and dozens of politicians, among them the shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith.

What the campaign is asking for

Stop the Creep makes three demands. It wants the rise in Employers’ National Insurance reversed, the entrepreneurial reliefs that have been cut restored, and a clear, stable roadmap for business taxation set out so that founders can invest with confidence. The campaign’s published case argues that Britain risks becoming an incubator economy, world class at creating businesses but unable to keep them.

Employers’ National Insurance is the sharpest of those targets, and the one with the broadest reach beyond the founder class. Employer contributions are currently charged at 15 per cent on earnings above a secondary threshold of £5,000 a year. The measure has cost 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 year before. When the rise was first announced, the British Chambers of Commerce found that 82 per cent of member firms would reconsider their plans because of it.