Comment: Consumers need support from the Chancellor’s Budget

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I sense that the Budget lobbying process can feel a bit like firing your carefully crafted submission over the gates of Downing Street.

I sense that the Budget lobbying process can feel a bit like firing your carefully crafted submission over the gates of Downing Street and hoping it finds the right person and a sympathetic ear.

I can’t be certain what the Chancellor will say next week - the British Retail Consortium and the many other organisations that have spent the past few months trying to influence it are about to hear the results. But what we’re trying to do is communicate to the Government that we understand what it is trying to achieve and to provide answers - imaginative and sensible policy solutions - that help it reach its objectives.

We called our submission Re-establishing Growth because it’s framed around the opportunity the Government has to help the retail sector, not simply as an end in itself, but as a driver of what the Government most wants to deliver: meaningful recovery.

Our message to the Chancellor is that the priorities we’ve set out would help the sector to open stores and create jobs, which would then produce growth.

Our headline recommendations are about supporting customers and holding back business costs. In fact, the case for hard working families is the case for hard working businesses.

Consumer spending must recover before the economy can, so easing pressure on household budgets is crucial. We’re suggesting bringing forward increases in personal tax allowances and scrapping above-inflation fuel duty rises for the rest of this parliament.

An independent study produced for us by Oxford Economics shows retailers’ operating costs have increased by a fifth since 2006 and it is centrally driven costs that have risen most rapidly. Retail Week readers will be very familiar with our joint campaign for a fairer formula for determining what happens each year to business rates and for a freeze of rates this April.

These are among the points we’ve been making to the Treasury and which we’ve also been working to make relevant to individual MPs. Retail provides 3 million jobs across the UK. That is an impressive statistic, but making that local - showing that, for instance, 8,000 people in the Chester constituency owe their incomes to retailers, for example - is a lot more powerful.

And the time is right for a more positive tone with Government. I’m not ignoring the challenges that we face at the moment but I’m not saying we’re facing catastrophe either.

The encouraging sales growth at the beginning of this year is actually gathering momentum. We’re asking the Government to lift the mood of consumers. We’ve now got reasons to talk confidence up too.

So how will we measure the success of Wednesday’s Budget? There might well be different routes to the same destination, but I want it to leave more customers with more money that they are willing to spend and retailers with more money they are able to invest.