Three weeks ago I had a tooth. Don’t be silent. The extraction took forty-five minutes, with the dentist braced against the chair like a man trying to start a lawnmower, and yet forty-five minutes were not the worst part. The week before that.
It was a week of throbbing, chewing specifically on the left side, paracetamol and ibuprofen in strict rotation, and lying awake in three mornings discussing with his own jaw. At the time I was in the chair, the mouth propped open like a pelican, which could take all the top row and I have thanked for the relief.
The waiting room has been a British business haven since the summer. Appointment on October 28th. The new man in the white coat is John Healey, and no one knows what dentist he is.
We know little about the latter. Rachel Reeves pulled her teeth with real dedication. Employers’ National Insurance, thresholds, business property relief, farms: out, one at a time, usually with a happy little speech about growth while we’re still numb. Healey, to his credit, got out of his training over the funding line. Whether that means he disagrees with the technique, or just wants to drill for himself, is a question every founder in the country is asking.
And the waiting room was very quiet. A survey of founders by Helm found only 4 percent confident that the Budget will be good for business, which is roughly the proportion of people who like size and polish. Nearly nine out of ten said the thing they fear the most is capital or asset tax. The Center for Policy Studies found 57 percent of small business leaders now believe the Government is actively working against them. That’s nothing to worry about. The patient gripped the armrest before the chair even reclined.
The problem is that every whisper that comes through the wall sounds like a drill. A tax windfall in banks, said one briefing. A crackdown on the VAT online market, said another. Capital gain is aligned with income tax, third whispers. Then, when you’re hitting the gas, a pleasant murmur business rate relief can go up and take thousands of small companies out of tax altogether. It’s the same as the dental hygienist saying “this can pinch a bit” and then leaving the room for two weeks.
Healey insists that the cost of doing business worries him as much as the cost of living, and he has spent the week having breakfast with retailers and hospitality bosses. Convenient. A wonderful bedside manner. But the dentist who continues to tell you how much he cares about comfort, while in The Treasury is chasing a £10bn shortfallis the dentist who wants to ask you to open more.
Here’s what business readers will feel in their own jaws. Waiting is not free. Waiting is the first installment.
Economists call it the value of delayed options, which is a polite way of saying that if you don’t know what the rules are going to be in a month, the rational thing is to do nothing. So the rent will be pushed to January. The new van remains ahead. The founders are thinking about selling out, or selling in panic before the 28th, which is worse. Business leaders immediately told the Chancellor that plans to hire young people depended on the size of the upcoming tax hike. Multiply the hesitation in the five and a half million companies and the Budget has already hit the economy a few weeks before the first step is announced.
And the timing is hardly cruel. Healey’s Budget landed as British retail and hospitality enter the golden period, about from October to Christmas when most of the year’s profit should be made. This is when stock is ordered, seasonal staff are hired and marketing budgets are spent. Each of these decisions is now made by speech in Westminster. Storekeepers can’t wait until November to decide how many temps to hire for December. Asking companies to make their biggest bets of the year blindfolded is not prudent fiscal management. It’s like an extraction order for Christmas.
This is the cruelest arithmetic in the British fiscal calendar. The company has paying almost £345bn a year in taxup nearly 13 cents a year, and on top of that they pay another, invisible levy every autumn: tax uncertainty. Six weeks of frozen decisions, delayed investments and hourly billed lawyers to model scenarios that might never happen. There is no line in the Red Book that records it. Each set of management accounts does.
So my plea to the new Chancellor is not about tariffs or relief, although I have views on both. It’s about method. Tell us what the treatment is, early and clear. Stop leaking. Act for one fiscal year and a tax framework that applies to all Parliaments. A known bill, even a painful one, can be budgeted for. Rumors can only be feared.
A good dentist, after all, is not someone who has never hurt you. It’s someone who tells you exactly what to do and then moves on.
My own extraction, for the record, is long, irreverent and all worth it. Forty-five minutes of certain pain beat the week of not knowing, and I will sign up for the same trade tomorrow.
Then I got the bill. He would drop the price when I was sick.