Kemi Badenoch: BPR Summit Speech

Today, [Monday 16 December 2024] Kemi Badenoch MP, Leader of the Conservative Party, has spoken at the Business Property Relief Summit, hosted by the same organisers as the #SaveFamilyFarms rally in London. 

The text of her speech is as follows: 

Checked against delivery 

“I want to let all of you know that as the Conservative Party leader and also as an MP for a rural constituency, a constituency that has many small businesses, I understand what it is that you are dealing with.

I'm here to let you know that we get it.

We have experienced very much what you are seeing because we have business backgrounds as well. If you look at the shadow cabinet, you will see people who have started businesses, who run family businesses, who understand what it is that is required in order to keep all of your enterprises going.

And that's what I wanted to talk about today.

Why is BPR so important? And I know you've had lots of panellists and Emily has been conducting really good conversations, but at the end of the day, what matters is what the politicians understand, what we think and what we are doing.

So, I'm here to give you the Conservative Party's perspective.

Why is BPR so important?

The aim of Business Property Relief is to ensure that family businesses are not broken up or sold on the death of the owner.

Family businesses are different. They are special.

Farms are the sine qua non.

Everyone knows how hard it is to keep a farm going, and it is often the only people within the family who understand how the business works and how to keep it surviving.

And so that's why we're really disappointed that Labour is cutting that hundred percent relief for assets over a million. We know that scrapping BPR is going to be incredibly damaging.

Yes, it is true that we do need to fund public services but you have to do that in the right way.

It's no good simply rushing somewhere and grabbing money you can see if you damage the business that's underneath, it will not be able to create more growth, more profit, more taxes for the next year.

We have to do this in the right way.

If inheritance tax applies to these assets for small businesses painstakingly built over time, they may not exist again.

And that is why we are opposed to the decisions that we have made on agricultural property relief and business property relief.

This decision is going to drain investment and growth out of the British economy.

And my team had been doing a lot of research into what the impact of this new change is going to be. Research done by CBI Economics shows that Labour's changes to BPR could cause 125,000 job losses. So just for some context, that figure is equivalent to the entire population of Blackburn.

That's a lot of people.

That's a lot of jobs.

Where are they going to go afterwards?

The CBI also said that those changes would mean family businesses will have to cut investment. They'll have to cut it by over 16%.

They also have to reduce headcount.

So it's not just about no longer being able to invest in the business. It's about removing jobs which currently exist, 10.2% losing turnover of 7.3%.

That is a lot.

In aggregate, it comes to about £2.6 billion of a loss in tax revenue.

The government says it is doing these things to raise taxes. We believe that actually it's going to shrink the tax take because it will destroy the businesses that provide that income.

CBI economics also says it will hit total economic output by 9.4 billion.

85% of family businesses plan to decrease that investment. More than half of them, more than half of family businesses think that they're going to be letting people go.

We cannot afford this.

And I think that as an Opposition, we need to make sure that we are holding the government to account.

I'm not here to make all the jokes about them. You would have heard all the jokes about CVs and them never running a business and needing freebies.

But I think this is really serious.

It is really serious.

We need the government to understand how business works.

If you look at the economy today, you'll find that fewer and fewer people are entrepreneurs.

Our economy is becoming more and more bureaucratic.

We have fewer people starting businesses.

We have fewer people getting into agriculture.

It's too difficult. Everyone wants to do what's easy, and so we end up creating a bureaucratic class that doesn't really understand how stuff works.

And when people like that get into government, they make changes like the ones we've seen to APR and BPR, which are damaging.

And that is why today I can tell you that we will reverse this damaging tax grab at the earliest opportunity.

We had a budget in March that was able to deliver funding for public services without the sort of damaging tax cut.

It cannot be done again.

The reason why Labour is going for these taxes is because it's choosing to spend money in places that it does not need to. Places that are not essential public services.

But we understand the contribution that small and family business make to the UK economy.

You often hear us talking about being the party of business. Sometimes people think that we're the party of big business.

We are not.

We are the party of entrepreneurs.

We're the party of every business because we know that it is not government that creates growth, it is business that creates growth.

And actually, a lot of the time. government needs to get out of the way.

And that's what I'm offering you today.

The Conservative Party is under new leadership.

We know that we made a lot of mistakes.

We're not here to pretend that everything was fine when we were in government.

And life is difficult.

Times are tough, not just in this country, but across the world.

But I know that if we don't do right by those people who are starting out, who are entrepreneurs, we're creating small businesses, family businesses, medium sized enterprises, we're not going to have those big businesses of the future.

And we also need to think about the next generation.

I'm very worried that many young people look out and feel that there is no hope for them.

They can't afford their student loans.

They can't afford mortgages.

They can't afford to start a family.

We need to give them hope.

I would like to see so many more of them doing what you do.

Everyone in this audience remembers when they first started their business, or when they first took over from their parent and from their grandparent and what that was like.

You had hope.

You had optimism.

You thought tomorrow was going to be a lot better.

Many young people today do not believe the tomorrow is going to be better and we need to change that.

So we will reverse this damaging tax and we won't just have a charm offensive with you like other parties.

We are going to show you that we understand, that we are going to deliver.

So on behalf of the Conservative Party, I want to say thank you for bringing this to us.

And I want to let you know that we are on your side.

We understand what you're dealing with and we are going to fix it.

Thank you very much.”

ENDS 

Notes to Editors

Details of the BPR Summit can be found here.