The former chairman of Marks & Spencer and Asda has warned the Chancellor Rachel Reeves that businesses are facing “poor productivity” as the Budget will leave a “very large tax burden.”
Stuart Rose warned there is a Very bloated public sector” and the “prospects are not good” and he is “despondent” over the future of the British economy.
Rose warned that Labour’s policies are leaving businesses with “no growth” and insolvencies are up, pubs are closing at their fastest rate and thousands of retailers are set to go bust.
The British Retail Consortium (BRC)-Sensormatic Footfall Monitor has warned that overall shopping footfall for the year was down by 2.2% compared to 2023.
The Autumn Budget tax raid has left GDP forecast far lower compared to 2023 and many investors will be holding off, the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) warned that outlook is bleak.
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CEBR expects that UK GDP will grow by 1.3% in 2025 and 1.4% for 2026, but under a Labour government this is far lower than predicted in 2023.
Lord Rose told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday, “I like to go into every business period and every year thinking to myself that it’s going to get better.
“But I’m a bit despondent at the moment. I think it is very tough. We all tend to look in the mirror to see what we see and how could we improve ourselves?
“We think about how we did things well, or badly, last year and how can we improve ourselves and we either do something about it or we don’t.
“We have no growth. We have poor productivity. We have a very, very large tax burden, which has just been increased with the last Budget.
“We have got a very bloated public sector, so the prospects are not good.”
He added, “I mean, just a simple thing, I read the other day that there are more civil servants in the Ministry of Defence than there are on the front line in the Royal Air Force and the Navy put together. That is unsustainable.
“And whether it’s the National Health Service, whether it is policing, whether it is the infrastructure problems that we’ve got, if we do not improve productivity in the country, then nothing is going to happen.
“This is about people working together. It’s that old phrase that I think John Kennedy said – ‘don’t ask your country what it can do for you. Ask yourself what you can do for your country. We’ve all got to pile in.”
