Three weeks ago I had a tooth out. It did not go quietly. The extraction took forty-five minutes, with the dentist braced against the chair like a man trying to start a lawnmower, and yet the forty-five minutes were not the worst part. The week before was.
It was a week of throbbing, of chewing exclusively on the left, of paracetamol and ibuprofen in strict rotation, and of lying awake at three in the morning negotiating with my own jaw. By the time I was in the chair, mouth propped open like a pelican, he could have taken the whole top row and I’d have thanked him for the relief.
That waiting room is where British business has been sitting since the summer. The appointment is 28 October. The new man in the white coat is John Healey, and nobody quite knows what kind of dentist he is.
We know a fair bit about the last one. Rachel Reeves pulled teeth with real dedication. Employer National Insurance, the threshold, business property relief, the farms: out they came, one after another, usually with a cheerful little speech about growth while we were still numb. Healey, to his credit, walked out of her practice over a funding row. Whether that means he disapproved of her technique, or simply wanted the drill for himself, is the question every founder in the country is turning over.
And the waiting room has gone very quiet. A survey of founders by Helm found just 4 per cent confident that the Budget will be good for business, which is roughly the proportion of people who enjoy a scale and polish. Nearly nine in ten said the thing they fear most is a tax on capital or assets. The Centre for Policy Studies found 57 per cent of small business leaders now believe the Government is actively working against them. That is not anxiety. That is a patient gripping the armrest before the chair has even reclined.
The trouble is that every rumour coming through the wall sounds like a drill. A windfall tax on banks, says one briefing. A crackdown on online marketplace VAT, says another. Capital gains aligned with income tax, whispers a third. Then, just as you are reaching for the gas, a soothing murmur that business rates relief might rise and take thousands of small firms out of the tax altogether. It is the dental equivalent of the hygienist saying “this might pinch a bit” and then leaving the room for a fortnight.
Healey insists the cost of doing business worries him as much as the cost of living, and he has spent the week holding breakfasts with retailers and hospitality bosses. Lovely. Very good bedside manner. But a dentist who keeps telling you how much he cares about your comfort, while the Treasury hunts for a £10bn shortfall, is a dentist who is about to ask you to open a little wider.
Here is the bit business readers will feel in their own jaw. The waiting is not free. The waiting is the first instalment.
Economists call it the option value of delay, which is a polite way of saying that when you don’t know what the rules will be in a month, the rational thing is to do nothing. So the hire gets pushed to January. The new van stays on the forecourt. The founder thinking about selling holds off, or sells in a panic before the 28th, which is worse. Business leaders have told the Chancellor directly that their plans to hire young people depend on the size of the tax rises coming. Multiply that hesitation across five and a half million firms and the Budget has already cost the economy money weeks before a single measure is announced.
And the timing could hardly be crueller. Healey’s Budget lands just as British retail and hospitality enter the golden quarter, the stretch from October to Christmas when much of the year’s profit has to be made. This is when stock is ordered, seasonal staff are taken on and marketing budgets are spent. Every one of those decisions is now being made with one eye on a speech in Westminster. A shopkeeper can’t wait until November to decide how many temps to hire for December. Asking firms to place their biggest bets of the year blindfolded isn’t prudent fiscal management. It’s like booking the extraction for Christmas Eve.
This is the cruellest arithmetic of the British fiscal calendar. Firms are already paying almost £345bn a year in tax, up nearly 13 per cent in a year, and on top of that they pay a second, invisible levy every autumn: the uncertainty tax. Six weeks of frozen decisions, deferred investment and lawyers billing by the hour to model scenarios that may never happen. No line in the Red Book records it. Every set of management accounts does.
So my plea to the new Chancellor is not really about rates or reliefs, though I have views on both. It is about method. Tell us what the treatment is, early and plainly. Stop the leaks. Commit to one fiscal event a year and a tax framework that holds for the whole Parliament. A known bill, even a painful one, can be budgeted for. A rumour can only be feared.
A good dentist, after all, is not one who never hurts you. It is one who tells you exactly what he’s going to do and then gets on with it.
My own extraction, for the record, was long, undignified and entirely worth it. Forty-five minutes of certain pain beat a week of not knowing, and I’d sign up for the same trade again tomorrow.
Then I got the bill. He’d put his prices up while I was in pain.
