The BCC has handed the Chancellor a shopping list. Here is what each item is actually worth to you.

City A.M. reports that the British Chambers of Commerce has warned Chancellor John Healey against raising business taxes at the Budget on 28 October. Shevaun Haviland, the BCC's director general, said that “piling more taxes on firms would be a road to ruin” and “the quickest way to destroy business confidence”, and argued the Treasury should be cutting the costs firms face rather than adding to them.

Alongside the warning came a list of asks: help getting young people into work, lower business energy bills, a cut to employer National Insurance for under-25s, government funding of 75% of the Renewables Obligation, and lower business rates multipliers.

Trade body wish lists are easy to nod along to and hard to act on, because none of them come with a number attached to your business. So here is the useful version. Take the two asks that can be priced precisely from published figures, run them through an ordinary small employer, and see what would actually land in the bank.

The test business

An eight-person café in an English town. Two staff aged 23 on £26,000 each, one aged 19 on £22,000, five others on a mix of full and part-time hours. Rateable value of £28,000. Nothing unusual about any of it.

For 2026/27 the employer's National Insurance rate is 15% on earnings above a secondary threshold of £5,000 a year, and the Employment Allowance — which most small employers can claim — knocks £10,500 off the annual employer NI bill. Assume this café's total employer NI comes to £18,000 before the allowance, so £7,500 is actually payable.

Ask one: cut employer NI for under-25s

The two 23-year-olds cost the business £3,150 each in employer National Insurance: £26,000 less the £5,000 threshold, at 15%. That is £6,300 for the pair.

If the relief the BCC is asking for existed, the café's payable NI would drop from £7,500 to £1,200. That is a real saving and it is worth having — roughly the cost of a part-time shift every week for a year.

But notice what it depends on. If this café's total employer NI bill were £9,000 rather than £18,000, the Employment Allowance would already be wiping it out entirely, and an under-25 relief would be worth exactly nothing. That is true for a very large number of small employers, and it is the part of the ask that never appears in the coverage. A relief only helps you if you are still paying the tax it relieves.

Before you get excited about a tax cut being campaigned for, check whether you are currently paying the tax. A surprising number of small employers are not.

The relief that already exists, and that a lot of firms are not using

Here is the more immediately useful half of this. The BCC is asking for an under-25 relief because a version of it already exists for younger staff, and it is significantly under-claimed.

Employers pay no secondary National Insurance on employees under 21, and none on apprentices under 25 on an approved apprenticeship, on earnings up to the upper secondary threshold of £50,270 a year. Not a reduced rate — nil.

So the 19-year-old in our café should be costing the business £0 in employer NI. Whether they actually are depends on one thing: whether payroll has them on the right National Insurance category letter. Under-21s belong in category M and under-25 apprentices in category H, and if they are sitting in the default category A instead, the business is paying £2,550 a year it does not owe on a £22,000 wage.

That is not a hypothetical filing error. Category letters are set when someone is added to payroll and are frequently never revisited, including at the birthday when they should change. Ten minutes in your payroll software, checking the NI category of everybody under 25, is worth more this week than the entire Budget campaign.

Ask two: lower the business rates multipliers

Business rates are worked out by multiplying your rateable value by a multiplier set by government. From April 2026 England has five of them, and which one applies to you is not obvious.

The small business multiplier is 43.2p and the standard multiplier is 48p. Retail, hospitality and leisure properties have their own lower pair — 38.2p for small RHL and 43p for standard RHL — and there is a high-value multiplier of 50.8p for rateable values of £500,000 or more.

Our café at a rateable value of £28,000 is retail, hospitality and leisure, and under £51,000, so it is on 38.2p: a gross bill of £10,696 before any relief. On the ordinary small business multiplier of 43.2p it would be £12,096. The sector multiplier is already saving it £1,400 a year, which is worth knowing if nobody has ever explained the bill to you.

A one penny cut in the multiplier the BCC is asking for would be worth £280 a year to this business. Meaningful, not transformative — and considerably less than the amount most independent hospitality businesses lose by never checking their rateable value or their relief entitlement.

The asks we could not price, and why that matters

Three of the five could not be turned into a number for our café at all, and that is not a criticism of the BCC so much as a description of how policy asks work.

“Help young people into employment” is a direction of travel rather than a measure. It could mean wage subsidies, training funding, a national insurance holiday or a rebadged scheme, and each of those is worth a wildly different amount to an employer. “Lower business energy bills” has the same problem: energy is a large cost for a café and a small one for a consultancy, and until somebody says which levy is coming off, nobody can work out their share.

The Renewables Obligation ask is the interesting one. It is a levy that sits inside commercial electricity prices, and moving 75% of it onto general taxation would reduce unit rates for every business paying it. Whether that is worth £200 or £2,000 to you depends entirely on your consumption, and the only way to find out is to get your annual kWh figure off your bills before the announcement, so you can do the arithmetic on the day rather than reading someone else's estimate a week later.

That is the general lesson about Budget campaigning. The asks land as headlines and are absorbed as moods. The businesses that get anything out of a Budget are the ones that already knew their own numbers well enough to work out, within an hour of the speech, whether anything in it applied to them.

What to do instead of waiting

The Budget is on 28 October. Nobody knows what is in it, the BCC's list may be adopted in whole, in part or not at all, and none of it will be certain until the Chancellor sits down. Meanwhile there are three things on the same subjects that are entirely within your control.

Check every National Insurance category letter for staff under 25. Under-21s should be M, apprentices under 25 should be H. If any of them are on A, you are overpaying now, and overpayments can be corrected.

Check you are claiming the Employment Allowance. £10,500 for 2026/27, claimed through payroll software, and a meaningful number of eligible employers simply have never ticked the box.

Look up your rateable value and your multiplier. Both are published. Confirm you are on the right one for your property type and size, and confirm you are getting small business rate relief if you qualify — the test is about the property, not your profit, which is the misunderstanding that leaves it unclaimed.

None of that requires an Act of Parliament, a lobbying campaign or a favourable Budget. It requires an afternoon. The BCC is right that costs are the problem; it is just that a decent share of the ones landing on small businesses this month are self-inflicted through paperwork rather than imposed through policy.