Only 17% of SMEs plan to increase investment this quarter — the lowest reading since the pandemic, according to the British Chambers of Commerce’s latest submission to the Chancellor. Five weeks out from the 28 October Budget, that’s not caution. That’s a business community putting its own decisions on hold to wait for a document that doesn’t exist yet, and my take is that’s the wrong call for most of them.
Here’s the thing about Budget speculation: almost none of it becomes law exactly as leaked, and even when it does, most measures don’t bite until well into the following tax year. A hiring decision, a piece of kit you need now, a lease you’ve been circling for months — pausing those on the strength of a newspaper’s “sources say” story means you’re trading a real, present cost (lost capacity, a missed opportunity, a supplier price that’s gone up while you dithered) for protection against a change that might not even happen. Fiscal headroom has shrunk to roughly £5bn from £24bn, so yes, something is likely to move on 28 October — but “something will change” has been true of every Budget for a decade, and businesses that waited for certainty before every one of them lost more time than they saved.
The counterpoint is real: if you’re weighing a genuinely marginal decision — one that only makes sense at today’s tax treatment and wouldn’t at a plausible worse one — a few weeks’ delay to see the actual detail is sensible risk management, not paralysis. Nobody’s arguing you should charge into a six-figure commitment on 27 October out of stubbornness.
But that’s a narrow case, and it’s not what’s driving a 17% investment figure. What’s driving it is treating every decision as if it were that marginal one, which hands six weeks of your business’s momentum to a Chancellor who hasn’t even delivered the speech yet.
So: if a decision stacks up on the numbers you can see today, make it today. Has the Budget actually changed your plans this year, or have you just been telling yourself it might?
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