National Insurance Contributions and Employment changes
Expand – with these National Insurance Contributions (NICs) and Employment changes?
UK Property Market Insights – Written by Viewber Co-Founder, Ed Mead
It’s not a stretch to say that when the State gets involved in Enterprise, it’s usually a disaster. History is littered with examples of running over time and budget and seems to be repeating itself again now whilst hiding behind political rhetoric.
Linking farmers need to pay more inheritance tax to funding the NHS is unnecessary and inflammatory, and for the Chancellor to suggest she’s unhappy with low growth saying we need more investment seems tin eared and counter intuitive given her Budget.
Problems for businesses don’t end at the door to No 11 Downing Street, with the office of the deputy prime minister responsible for a new raft of measures on employment that could prove disastrous and lead to less employment on top of that caused by rushed and simplistic thinking on NICs.
A business I co-founded eight years ago, Viewber, is a classic example of what is likely to happen. We hear about huge businesses with huge potential bills, but little about SMEs as they don’t have the same voice. The cost of the NICs changes to us, with c.50 employees, is going to be the equivalent of two salaries – which we simply can’t afford. So instead of employing the two people we need to grow, we’ll make do with one.
The fact that Rachel Reeves seems to believe her NICs rises won’t affect ‘working’ people is ludicrous, and hearing Labour Party officials – none of whom appear to have ever run a business themselves, quite a worry in itself – simply defending definitions of what constitutes a working person and their pre-Election promise on NI rises is sickening and shows how out of touch they are already.
We recently had a starter who decided the job wasn’t for them and moved on immediately – to our intense relief. If this person had decided to, they could have immediately invoked a raft of ‘rights’ designed to cost us money and loss of productivity whilst tying up senior executives in a maze of red tape – the potential for large costs if mishandled could have been very serious for the business.
It seems one of the unintended consequences of Social Media, especially Tik Tok, is that young people are being trained on how to game the employment system – Rayner’s changes have just played right into their hands and made these influencers a load more money – not I suspect, her intention.
The upshot of this is a sudden, and probably lasting, change to the way businesses engage with employment. We’ve certainly seen a surge in demand for our outsourced viewing and assistant service – and given the problems now faced by employers, legislation and cost, why wouldn’t people want to explore alternatives.
If you’re trying to grow your business, it’s more difficult than ever – and given these businesses are the backbone of UK GDP I worry that we’re going back to the 70s.
Ed Mead is an FRICS, long term commentator on all things property and an agent since 1979 before launching Viewber in 2016.
Viewber is a tech enabled property services platform giving users access to thousands of Viewber members all over the UK able to do viewings, photographs, inspections and much more. Over 600,000 appts completed.
