A Budget for Business Builders

By Elliot Conway

The long awaited, much anticipated Budget for 2025 finally landed yesterday - and buried beneath the headlines is a clear message for Britain’s owner-led businesses: this is a Budget designed for builders.

Not for speculators, not for hype cycles - but for the people who keep Britain running: manufacturers, industrial services, logistics, power, infrastructure, specialist distribution.In other words: the world we at Alderway live in every day.

A few takeaways stood out:

1. Stability is back - and that matters far more than “giveaways”.

The Government is doubling the buffer on the UK’s fiscal rules and is reducing borrowing every year through 2030. That stability ripples into the real economy: lower inflation, more predictable costs, and a clearer environment to invest - particularly helpful for capital-intensive SMEs feeling the squeeze of the last three years 

2. Public investment is rising - and it’s going into the backbone of the country.

Over £120bn of capital investment is protected, including upgrades in transport, energy, health infrastructure and major regional programmes.The OBR expects this uplift to raise potential UK output by around 0.4 percent over 10 years, with cumulative benefits building beyond that 

For sectors like power, data centres, energy resilience, industrial installation, advanced manufacturing and critical maintenance - this is a long runway, not a one-off announcement.

3. Productivity pressures will reshape the SME landscape.

The OBR has revised down medium-term UK productivity growth - a sobering reminder that many businesses will need investment, digitisation, and professionalisation to stay competitive.That’s precisely where partnership-oriented capital - patient, hands-on, operationally engaged - becomes valuable.

4. Real help for high-street and local businesses.

Permanent lower business rates for retail, hospitality, and leisure (funded by higher rates on very large online warehouses) may give many owner-run businesses the breathing room they’ve lacked for years. 

The Budget directly cuts next year’s CPI by 0.4 percentage points - the largest non-crisis drop the OBR has ever forecast from government policy 

For business owners: this means more predictability in input costs, wages, and working capital needs.

What it means for the founder-led businesses we speak to every week

Across the UK, thousands of exceptional SMEs are carrying the country’s essential industries. But many are constrained by:

• Rising wage and compliance pressures

• Under-investment in systems and people

• Owners approaching retirement without succession options

• Fragmented sectors where scale helps everyone

• Surging demand in energy, power, infrastructure and industrial services.

The Budget won’t magically fix any of these - but it creates a more stable, more investable environment to tackle them.

At Alderway, we see this as a moment of opportunity: not to squeeze businesses, but to partner with them - preserving legacy, backing people, modernising operations, and building companies that will matter 20 years from now.

If you’re an owner thinking about succession, scale, professionalisation, or simply feeling the strain of being the one who always has to hold everything together - we’d love to talk.

This Budget feels like the start of a new cycle.

The next decade belongs to the builders.