An Open Letter to Keir Starmer

14 March 2025,

Rt.Hon Sir Kier Starmer MP,

Prime Minister,

10 Downing Street,

London,

SW1A 1AA.

Dear Prime Minister,

We all want economic growth but as shown by the latest GDP figures the country is going in the wrong direction.

Businesses like this one are the beating heart of Britain’s economy, it is businesses like this that generate the wealth that Government taxes to pay for public services.   It is only through healthy profitable business that as a country we can afford any public services.

It is in your interests and the interest of the country that business is as free as possible to expand and grow as it is this growth that feeds directly into the country’s economic growth and also with growth there is more profit to tax.    Whilst you say you want to see the economy growing your government’s actions are loading business with yet more costs.   We have two killer blows about to hit us, increase in employers NI that for us will add an average of more than £1000 to the cost of each employee and an increase in the minimum wage which though not directly affecting us will make it much more difficult to justify employing inexperienced students.    The third killer blow is the Employment Rights Bill which seems to be designed to make the life of employers’ absolute hell.

There appears to be a naivety in Government that no worker will try and get one over their employer, but if you provide the tools some will use them and it absorbs a massive amount of time and effort for no constructive value.   As it is it is already a nightmare navigating the legal requirements of employing people, instead, please concentrate on making the economy as dynamic as possible.   In this way if an employee is not happy in their job they can have the confidence to leave it in the knowledge that they will easily be able to get another one.

We need entrepreneurs to take risks in this country and whilst some are still doing so many are sitting on their hands or have left the UK as the environment is no longer conducive as a result of tax and regulation.   This is not a party political matter as the last lot were just as bad, we are groaning under the weight of the state in its many forms.   What is disappointing is that you have no one, as far as I can see, who has run their own business around the cabinet table.

Perhaps, some of you are gardeners and would understand the problem if you were to think of a successful economy or business, in terms of a garden.   You can only produce flowers and vegetables if you start with a fertile seedbed containing the right nutrients, to feed your growing plants.   The new businesses are the seeds you are planting in the economy seedbed of straightforward regulation, a supportive infrastructure of banks, services and availability of labour etc.   Your established businesses are your fruiting trees and bushes that with the gentle pruning of good management give you regular crops from which a percentage is taken for others in tax.   As gardeners we look to maximise the growth of what we plant and tend and we do that by doing all we can to make it easy for the plants to prosper.   The last thing we do is to restrict growth by blocking out the light or adding hostile materials  or organisms to the soil, we know that we must nurture our plants to get the best crops from them.

In exactly the same way you must nurture the UK stock of businesses by encouraging them to keep growing by minimising the load the state puts on them through regulation and taxation.   In the same way you don’t help your apple trees to crop well if you reduce the amount of water they can have or deprive them of light.   In the same way you make it ever more difficult to complete in an already very competitive world when we are subjected to substantial increases in employment taxes and regulatory costs.   Shiny new tools don’t make for successful gardening and whilst I very strongly welcome your push for infrastructure development such as new runways at Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton these like AI are simply tools, they alone will not bring about growth that will only happen when the economic environment is right and people like me feel that it could be worth the risk to commercialise a new idea.

By their very nature entrepreneurs, to be successful, have to be determined and independently minded, the last thing they want is other people interfering in their business.   For them to produce of their best they need Government to provide a secure framework within which they can work.   A robust and fair legal structure and stable economic conditions, we are not looking for subsidy or ‘help’.    Politicians and civil servants come up with all sorts of schemes to provide help and advice to those in business and quite frankly almost all are a complete waste of time.    I sought advice on trading with the EU post Brexit and it was crap.    I then looked at how the US had managed to substantially grow their exports to the EU and employed the same method as them and we now sell considerably more into the EU than we did pre Brexit.    Almost all of those offering the advice have never been involved in business themselves and advise without any practical experience and would be best deployed to other areas.

Please stick to minimising the cost of the state on us and we will do the rest.   Picking winners doesn’t work as a successful economy is a whole ecosystem of different and diverse players, if your soil is fertile and your seedbed is good all sorts of businesses will grow successfully.   But, following the present path of making your garden ever more hostile through employers NI increases and introducing pests like the proposed workers rights bill is simply going to see further months and ultimately years of stagnant or falling GDP.

Yours faithfully

Alastair MacMillan

CC: Rt.Hon Jonathan Reynolds MP, Rt.Hon Rachel Reeves MP, Rt. Hon Angela Rayner MP & others

(Photograph: © UK Parliament / Maria Unger, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Alastair MacMillan runs White House Products Ltd, a manufacturer, distributor and exporter of hydraulic components to over 100 countries. He is a supporter of the Jobs Foundation.

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