The Budget must deliver on the Chancellor’s warm words
For most of this year, Westminster has treated a rise in capital gains tax as all but certain. Senior cabinet ministers openly called for it to match income tax, and founders I know were working out whether to sell early or leave before it landed.
In a welcome move, John Healey has now ruled it out, promising a Budget for “bloody-minded entrepreneurs”, and saying he wants the businesses they build to “grow here and stay here”.
Helm, which brings together 400 of Britain’s scale-up founders, launched the Stop the Creep campaign this summer to call time on the steady rise in taxes on people who build businesses. Our open letter warned that Britain was training its entrepreneurs for export.
More than 160 founders, business leaders and parliamentarians have since signed it, and ruling out any new tax on capital is one of the five decisions we have asked the Chancellor to take.
It is hard to read the Chancellor’s words without recognising the case our members have been making for months.
When we polled our members last month, almost nine in ten said a new tax on capital, led by capital gains tax, was what they feared most. For a founder, it is the tax on the one payday that comes after years of risk, missed salaries and personal guarantees.
The Chancellor deserves credit for listening to founders who have been forced to clear one hurdle after another, from higher employers’ National Insurance to cuts in the reliefs that reward building a business. Their faith in the Government is at a low ebb, and when we last asked our members how they would vote, not one said Labour.
Last month, just four per cent of our members were confident the Budget would be good for business.
A figure like that explains why these signals are welcome, and why founders will judge the Chancellor on what is in the Budget rather than on a newspaper interview. Much more needs to be done, starting with employers’ National Insurance, a rise Healey still defends as necessary. Businesses of every size are under huge pressure, and cutting the threshold at which employers start paying from £9,100 to £5,000 has made every entry-level and part-time hire more expensive.
The rate founders pay under Business Asset Disposal Relief, which rewards people for building and selling a company, has risen from 10 to 18 per cent in the space of a year. Scrapping reporting requirements for smaller firms, as the Treasury isexpected to do, would help, though nobody leaves Britain over paperwork.
Founders leave because the reward for building here keeps shrinking while the United States, the UAE, Portugal and Singapore compete for them. Close to 6,000 business owners left the UK in the two years to January 2026.
If Healey wants founders to grow here and stay here, he should reverse the National Insurance rise and restore the threshold, return Business Asset Disposal Relief to 10 per cent and rule out a wealth tax or an exit charge on founders who leave.
Most important of all, he should commit to no further business tax rises or new regulatory costs on employers for the rest of this Parliament. Certainty is worth more to a growing business than almost any relief, and that promise would do more for investment and hiring than anything else in the red box.
Founders need long-term stability, which is why we have asked him to publish a three-year roadmap for business tax rates and allowances alongside the Budget. Three Budgets in a row have come back to business for revenue, and founders can plan around a tax they dislike far more easily than one that might change at every fiscal event.
None of this is easy with inflation at 3.5 per cent and public debt above £3 trillion. Yet the Treasury’s own reasoning on capital gains tax shows why it matters, with HMRC estimating that a ten-point rise in the higher rate would cut receipts by £3.6 billion as people delay sales or leave.
I moved to London from Australia twenty years ago because it was the best place in the world to build a business. But over the past couple of years, Britain has been losing what made it so special, and we need to get it back. The Chancellor has shown he is listening, and on 28 October he can give Britain’s founders a reason to stay.
Andreas Adamides is CEO of Helm, the UK’s largest networking organisation exclusively for high-growth business founders. Coined as the founders-only club that is ‘powering London’s entrepreneurs’, Helm represents 400 members with a combined revenue of £8 billion.
