Autumn Budget: B&Q boss hands Reeves tool kit for growth
Ahead of the Autumn Budget, City Reporter Samuel Norman sits down with top industry names for a Budget Briefing. This week, the boss of retail stalwart B&Q warns truly fixing the foundations starts with building confidence.
After Labour’s monumental 2024 general election sweep, Chancellor Rachel Reeves seized her economic tool kit, telling Britons she was “fixing the foundations”.
But as we march towards the end of the year, the building blocks of growth are crumbling, and the employment scaffolding is wobbling.
The UK grew 0.3 per cent in the second quarter, a slowdown from 0.7 per cent in the first three months of the year, and economists are pencilling in a modest 1.3 per cent for the full-year.
And on Wednesday, fresh data revealed the unemployment rate surged to five per cent.
Reeves will be tasked with fixing these problems when she delivers her Budget on 26 November, and one top retailer has said she must ditch a “short-term fix” tool kit for some heavy machinery, prioritising growth.
“We see first-hand how confidence fuels growth,” Graham Bell, chief executive of B&Q – a member of FTSE 100 giant Kingfisher alongside Screwfix – tells City PM.
“When people feel secure about the future, they invest in their homes, their skills, their communities and that’s when the economy really starts to move.”
But for that confidence to be unleashed, the boss of the retail stalwart is calling for “no more surprises”.
The retail sector suffered a hammer blow last year with a double whammy of an increase to the national minimum wage and the hike in employer’s national insurance, meaning firms had to dig deep to deliver more tax receipts.
“The UK retail sector can be a powerful growth engine for the British economy,” Bell says, but adds it must come “with the right policies”.
Retail’s biggest barrier
Business rates – which Bells counts as the “single biggest barrier to growth for retailers” – are set to get a major overhaul in the Budget.
The tax is calculated by taking a property’s rateable value – an estimate of the unit’s open market annual rent – and combining it with a flat business rates ‘multiplier’. It is slapped on shops, offices and warehouses across the country.
Legislation working its way through Parliament will introduce a higher multiplier for properties worth over £500,000 to pay for a lower figure for small sites and retail, leisure and hospitality businesses.
Larger store units, like B&Q, risk getting swept up in the overhaul, which is set to result in a bigger bill for businesses with multiple ‘anchor’ stores.
“Don’t penalise us for having a retail model with a large shop floor,” Bell urges, with the warehouse-style units B&Q occupies set to have a rateable value well over the £500,000 threshold threatening to take a hefty chunk out of the company’s bottom line.
The higher multiplier has been tabled as a way to sustainably fund the relief given to smaller high street shops, but Bell warns it would “restrict our ability to invest and contribute to the UK’s growth goals”.
“Remove large stores from the higher multiplier, focus on balancing taxes out, and you’ll level the playing field, protect jobs, and unlock real growth from a sector ready to deliver.”
Archaic rules tearing up the high street
Whilst on the home front Bell battles the threat of rising business rates, he is also seeing off the rise of cheaper alternatives located overseas.
The frenzied surge of e-commerce giants has hit Britain’s high streets, with B&Q now competing with the likes of Amazon’s easy access service and cheap direct-to-consumer models such as AliExpress and Temu which target price-sensitive DIYers.
These firms are being given a leg-up by the “archaic” de minimis rule, Bell says, which allow low-value goods to enter the country more cheaply through an exemption in customer duties.
“This is having a damaging impact on the British high street,” he adds.
“It’s not just retailers struggling; many of our suppliers are telling us they don’t know how they can compete.”
The US scrapped the exemption for goods originating in China and Hong Kong in May 2025, before extending it to all countries,while the EU axed the exemption for low-value goods in July 2021.
“The UK cannot be the last out of the blocks, or we may face intense product dumping,” Bell warns.
Whilst not just the “right thing to do” by business, Bell adds it would ensure consumers were protected by making sure the products “meet the same UK standards”.
Earlier this year, the EU set out plans to tighten checks on the likes of Temu and Shein as the 27-state bloc clamped down on fair competition and product safety.
Downing tools on building goals
Bell speaks to City PM as the latest employment data provides a sobering snapshot into the issues laying in Britain’s labour market.
Chair of UK Hospitality Kate Nicholls nailed the blame directly on the Chancellor for her policies in the 2024 Budget and called for radical action on 26 November.
Bell notes there are 140,000 trade vacancies across the UK, according to training academy PfP Thrive, leading to “stalling essential housing and infrastructure projects”.
Labour laid out a mission to build 1.5m homes by the end of 2030.
“If we’re being honest, we have a massive mountain to climb if we have no one to build them,” The B&Q chief says.
Whilst the government has appeared bullish on apprenticeships, Bell says “talk alone won’t fill those roles.
“We need to concentrate on action, now, to attract young talent into the trades and incentivise them to stay there for the long term.”
Reeves is expected to be staring down a £30bn black hole as she turns to construction targets to cement her economic strategy.
But as she dons her hard hat and straps up to unleash growth, Bell urges Reeves: “You can’t build an economy without builders.”