Labour is killing aspiration and placing a block on recruitment, say small business owners on Healey’s home patch days before the Budget

The displays may be colourful but the pre-Budget mood is bleak at a garden centre in Chancellor John Healey’s Yorkshire constituency. 

Tony Airey, who has run Wentworth Garden Centre with his family for 40 years, should be looking forward to the busy festive period. 

Last Christmas, however, they had to cut staff rather than hire extra workers after rises in National Insurance contributions and the national minimum wage.

Airey worries any further minimum wage rises would be ‘unsustainable’.

Then there’s Angela Rayner’s ‘horrendous’ Workers’ Rights Bill bringing in the right to sick pay from the first day of illness regardless of hours worked.

‘These mitigate against employers taking on more staff, particularly youngsters,’ Airey said. 

And he’s not the only business owner in Healey’s Rawmarsh and Conisbrough constituency – home to 90,000 people in South Yorkshire, including some of Britain’s most deprived neighbourhoods – to be worried ahead of Wednesday’s Budget.

Barnsley and Rotherham Chamber, representing businesses in the area, has called for ‘direct and urgent’ action on National Insurance for under-25s to tackle the youth unemployment ‘crisis’.

‘We also call for a targeted tax reduction package to ease energy and business rate pressures,’ chief executive Carrie Sudbury said. 

‘These measures would give firms the headroom they need to hire, innovate and compete.’

But the Chamber said Healey’s partnership with Prime Minister Andy Burnham had ‘begun to steady the ship and renew a sense of optimism into South Yorkshire’s business community’ compared with the Starmer-Reeves years.

Its latest members’ survey found 57 per cent of firms expected turnover to rise in the next year, while 51 per cent anticipated improved profitability, up from just 34 per cent in the previous quarter.

‘Employers are ready to consider investment, expand and drive growth, but they need decisive action from Government to sustain that trajectory,’ said Sudbury.

Wentworth Garden Centre, which employs 15 full-time staff plus part-time and seasonal workers, was visited by Healey in September last year. 

He posted photos on his Facebook page with Airey and praised the business for having ‘something for everyone’. 

But three months later, after Rachel Reeves delivered her last Budget, Airey wrote to Healey saying: ‘The Chancellor left the small business sector at a loss in terms of how the Budget provided any stimulus for growth in our sector (quite the reverse).

‘This administration is killing aspiration and deterring people from doing and achieving what we have done. We have placed a block on recruitment and investment.’ He warned: ‘The more you impose taxes, the less the “take’’ will be.’

He accused Labour of providing ‘absolutely no incentive’ for people to set up in business ‘often at great personal and financial risk’.

Down the road in Rawmarsh, an industrial suburb of Rotherham, the mood was a bit more upbeat.

Brewery owner Mick Warburton believes the ‘signs’ are there that Healey and Burnham ‘want to help hospitality’, and he is hopeful of more help for small businesses and action on beer tax.

The ex-steelworker set up Chantry Brewery in 2012 with his brother Kevin, also an ex-steelworker, and former bank worker Sean Page. They employ 35 people at the brewery, its in-house bar and three more pubs.

Warburton said: ‘When Labour was last in power, I believe John Healey was instrumental in bringing in small brewers’ relief which gave 50 per cent off beer duty to small brewers. Without it we wouldn’t have been able to start.’

Chantry was praised by Healey in August, when he filmed a video there to promote the new regime’s 20 per cent cut to business rates for pubs, clubs and music venues.

As he tried a specially brewed ‘Chancellor’s Choice’ beer, Healey said: ‘Britain is full of brilliant businesses like this. The Government wants to back them; give them a bit of breathing space from the cost of business pressures.’

But Warburton said: ‘It is difficult for pubs – a lot of people haven’t the money to spend.’