Healey Promises to Cut £800m a Year of Business Paperwork
The chancellor has promised savings of almost £800m a year in administrative and tariff costs, five days before the Budget, saying firms are “fed up with form-filling and pointless paperwork”. More than £600m of that is regulatory reporting, with up to £155m from extending tariff suspensions on over 250 products.
The itemised components are a simplification of company reporting worth up to £290m a year, the removal of duplicative reporting for asset managers at £105m, and £116m from streamlining house buying and selling. Those published figures come to roughly £755m, so “almost £800m” is the government’s own rounding of a total whose parts fall a little short. The requirement for the smallest firms to file profit and loss accounts at Companies House is paused until April 2028, which the Federation of Small Businesses welcomed as “averting a huge new weight of red tape on the very businesses with the fewest resources to deal with it”. The wider target is to cut the administrative burden of regulation by a quarter by the end of this Parliament, which the Treasury puts at 280 million hours a year. The business secretary supplied the line of the day — “a baker should be filling pasties, not forms” — while the CBI’s chief executive was cooler: “The test now is delivery.” One caveat readers should hold: this is a claimed saving to business, not a tax cut and not a saving to the Exchequer. The individual measures are published on Budget day.