A chancellor for businesses making a profit

One week before he stands up in the Commons, John Healey has used an interview with Patrick Maguire of the Times to frame the UK budget 2026 as one aimed at wealth creators. Healey said he wants to be a chancellor who backs businesses in Britain making a profit, and praised entrepreneurs who keep going under pressure - some, he suggested, through sheer bloody-mindedness.

The reasoning he gave was blunt: if a firm is not making a profit, it has nothing to put back into the business. The government, he said, wants profitable businesses to grow in Britain and to stay there.

Acknowledging pressures on business

Healey did not pretend the recent years have been easy for firms. Drawing on his one-to-ones and round tables with businesses, he acknowledged a run of pressures:

• employment law
• regulation
• tax
• input costs
• supply chains

He said government has made business life harder over the past two years, and he is conscious of those cost pressures in the same way as household cost-of-living pressures as he goes into the budget for both businesses and households. Cutting the 'cost of living' for business, he argued, matters just as much as cutting the real cost of living for families.

No detail, but regulation cuts expected

As expected ahead of a budget, the interview carried no real detail on the measures Healey will put before MPs. According to Maguire, though, the chancellor is expected to use the budget to make significant cuts to regulation on businesses.

One likely target is paperwork. Reporting requirements are likely to be abolished for many smaller enterprises, The Times understands. A senior Treasury source described the regulation due to be cut as "the sludge choking firms".

Defending his predecessor

Some of Healey's remarks - that tax rises and the Employment Rights Act have increased costs - sound like an implicit rebuke to Rachel Reeves, his predecessor at the Treasury. Healey rejected that reading when it came to her signature measure, defending Reeves's increase in employer national insurance on the ground that she had to deal with the "dereliction of duty" of the last Tory government on the economy.

The budget reaches MPs on Wednesday next week, with no details yet of how Healey will cut business costs.