M&S CEO warns raising taxes in the Budget is ‘the easy way out’
M&S chief executive Stuart Machin has warned the government that raising business taxes in the upcoming October Budget is a “short-term, easy fix” that will make “economic recovery harder”.
Taking to LinkedIn, the upmarket grocer CEO cautioned Chancellor Rachel Reeves that “hiking taxes” will have a knock-on effect for UK consumers.
Machin called on the government to fulfil its “bold ambitions” to overhaul business rates and give businesses flexibility over half of their apprenticeship levy funds, saying that the Budget is the “moment to put this right”.
The M&S boss said: “I keep hearing that the difficult decisions in the upcoming Budget are about raising taxes. They’re not. Hiking taxes is a short-term, easy fix. The much harder decisions are around fundamentally re-engineering the British economy, tackling the issues that have held us back for decades.”
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Machin said National Insurance was a “tax with no link to profit which hits bigger employers like us and our smaller suppliers” and described it as a “tax on workers”.
The CEO said he was “concerned” and that raising this tax would make it harder for employers to hires, “particularly if you hike other tax that hit retailers, like business rates or fuel duty”.
Machin likened Reeves’ upcoming decision to the changes he made when inheriting M&S after “years of drift had left the company in a precarious position”. However, he said that a move to raise prices and deliver short term profits would have been the “wrong thing” to do
He added: “Raising these taxes isn’t the hard decision, it’s the easy way out. It might improve the public finances in the short term, but it makes economic recovery harder and hits our customers and colleagues still struggling with the cost of living.”
Earlier this month, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) penned an open letter to the Labour government, co-signed by the Big 6 supermarkets, to reduce business rates to better support the UK.
