In the past days, I was running a survey amongst employers on their top priorities that they believe the upcoming Budget 2024 should be addressing. Whilst I cannot claim that the results are based on a scientific representative sample, I managed to collect responses from 51 different employers, which allows us to get at least an indication of what these top priorities are likely to be.

As seen below, the overall top priority is “Controlling Inflation”. This is hardly a surprise, as business owners know to well that if inflation is not tamed, the rising costs they have to contend with will have them lose their competitiveness. The 2nd priority is “Reducing Corporate Tax rate”, which is frequently mentioned and gains traction when businesses feel that their profitability is being eroded. All other priorities are as shown below.

When delving deeper and seeing the differences in the responses gathered from businesses that employ more than 50 persons versus those businesses than employ less than 50 persons, we can see some differences between the two as shown below.

Whilst the top priority for employers employing less than 50 persons is that of “Controlling inflation” the top priority for employers employing more than 50 persons is that of “Reducing the Corporate Tax Rate”. This could be interpreted as the smaller businesses being more concerned with their future sustainability of their business if cost inputs keep rising.