Stubborn inflation has emerged as one of the biggest drawbacks from Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves’ first budget. She risks repeating the result with her second.
Business groups have warned in recent days that the Labour government’s policies on taxes, employment rights and the minimum wage threaten to pile billions of pounds of operating costs onto companies and stoke price increases for another year. This time, they say, the impact could be sharper since firms have smaller margins and thus less capacity to shoulder the burden without passing on costs.