Healey promises £800m "pointless paperwork" bonfire for businesses before Budget

"British firms are fed up with form-filling and pointless paperwork." That is not a slogan from a business lobby — that is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Healey, talking up his pre-Budget gift to firms: a package meant to cut £800 million a year off the cost of doing business in Britain.

The announcement, made on Friday 23 October ahead of Healey's first Budget on Wednesday next week, is aimed squarely at giving companies what the government keeps calling "breathing space". Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Healey are meeting small business leaders at No 10 on Friday to sell it in person.

Healey's £800m red tape package: what's in it

The Treasury says the £800 million is built from four main planks. Streamlined reporting requirements should save £290 million. Cutting "duplicative reporting burdens" for asset managers adds £105 million. Reducing red tape around buying and selling homes — costs borne by businesses in the transaction chain — saves £116 million. And extending import tariff suspensions on more than 250 products saves up to £155 million. The remainder, the government says, will be set out in the Budget itself.

The tariff measure matters to importers. The suspensions cover sectors including chemicals, plastics, automotive and food and beverages. They were due to expire at the end of December; they will now run for another year.

The broader ambition, set out as part of the package, is to cut the regulatory admin burden on business by 25% before the end of this Parliament. That is the number the Treasury will be judged against — and it is an unusually concrete target for a government that has been vague about delivery since taking office.

"Getting government off their backs": Burnham's pitch

Burnham put the case in plain language: "If you run a business, you want to spend your time serving your customers, creating jobs and growing your firm, not filling in unnecessary forms. It's not right that pointless bureaucracy gets in the way of people working hard to build something that matters to their high street."

The phrase "getting government off their backs" will raise eyebrows, coming from a Labour prime minister. But it is deliberate. This budget is being pitched, in the words of one government source, at "the white van man and the beautician" — small, family-run firms that Healey and Burnham believe have been over-taxed and over-regulated compared with the tech giants.

There is a companion move aimed at those giants. Reporting requirements for many smaller enterprises are expected to be cut, while online retailers selling through platforms such as Amazon, eBay and Temu face a crackdown — with the platforms themselves made responsible for collecting the tax owed by sellers using them. The expected revenue, up to £1 billion, would be ploughed back into cutting business rates for small family-run businesses.

Healey Budget 2026: what businesses want next

Context matters here. Healey's headroom is thin — the Resolution Foundation estimates the Iran war's impact has roughly halved his fiscal headroom to about £12 billion — and he has promised this budget will be "sensible" and "focused", not a repeat of the huge tax-and-spend events of his predecessor Rachel Reeves. The red tape package is the sweetener; the harder choices come on Wednesday.

The sceptics' case: will the savings actually stick?

And not everyone will be convinced by paperwork savings. The business lobby has seen versions of this promise before — every government since the 1990s has pledged to cut red tape, and the form-filling has a habit of growing back. What makes this one worth watching is the specificity: named sums, named sectors, a named deadline at the end of the Parliament.

One shadow hangs over it from the government's own side of the ledger. Healey has pledged to ease costs for households as well as firms, and small businesses will be doing the maths next week: does £800 million of admin savings outweigh the tax rises — including a possible further hit on gambling and betting duties that has William Hill's owner Evoke already closing 270 shops — that the Budget is widely expected to bring? The breathing space is welcome. What it costs is the question.

Sources

1. UK government promises to save businesses £800 million in paperwork and tariffs — Reuters
2. Healey plans to slash 'pointless paperwork' in bid to save businesses £800m — Press Association
3. UK Chancellor unveils plans to cut GBP800 million in business red tape — Morningstar/Alliance News

Editor's note: no embeddable video of Friday's announcement was available at the time of publication. Full coverage can be found via the sources above.

Photo: Gillfoto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (representative image of 10 Downing Street).