Subscribe to our newsletter to receive business tips, learn about new funding programmes, join upcoming events, take e-learning courses, and more.
Take the first step to successfully starting and growing your business.
Join for free)
Posted: Fri 11th Sep 2026
5 min read
Enterprise Nation presented three big asks in its 2026 Budget submission: small business relief, AI adoption and support for young founders.
Ahead of the Budget on 28 October, we delivered our 12,000-word submission to the Treasury in no uncertain terms.
In his covering letter, Aaron Asadi, Enterprise Nation’s CEO, said:
"Any measure that raises a small business's costs or paperwork should wait. Any measure that cuts a cost or a form should go ahead."
Three in four small business owners now pay themselves under £20,000 a year, up from 63% last year. Seven in 10 have delayed or cancelled plans to grow because they cannot afford to. More than a quarter have considered closing altogether.
Those figures, drawn from Enterprise Nation's quarterly Small Business Barometer and our most recent report, Growth on Hold, have fed into our Budget submission to Chancellor John Healey.
VAT tops the list of pressures. Six in 10 small businesses put it in their top three concerns, and on the high street that rises to 54% naming it their single biggest challenge.
Enterprise Nation is not calling for a blanket cut; it’s asking for a decision.
The current uncertainty around hospitality VAT, which has been in limbo since the pandemic-era reduction ended, is itself a cost, the submission argues.
Previous VAT cuts have seen only 20% to 50% reach prices, fading within two months. Ireland's temporary hospitality rate ran for eight years and cost €490 million in 2017, with what economists call "significant deadweight", money spent on businesses that would have survived anyway.
Relief, though, is only the start.
Only 21% of small businesses use AI regularly, against 44% of large firms, and just 6% have built it into daily work.
This is not a marginal difference. It is the productivity divide that will shape the UK's service economy for the next decade, and closing it is "the biggest productivity measure available to this Budget," the submission states.
The submission recommends the government funds a national digital and AI adoption service, delivered through the advisers small businesses already trust, moving from diagnostics to one-to-one support as a firm matures and mirroring Singapore's CTO-as-a-Service and New Zealand's Digital Boost.
Enterprise Nation puts the cost at around £13.75 million a year, £53.35 million over four years.
Sixty-two per cent of 25 to 30-year-olds are considering starting a business, and 66% do not know government support exists.
Six in 10 founders under 25 started as a side hustle. A generation already sees enterprise as its route into work; the Budget can make that route cheaper and clearer.
Enterprise Nation is calling for three measures: automatic flow of unspent apprenticeship levy funds to small firms hiring under-25s, raising the trading allowance to £3,000 to match the new Self Assessment threshold, and writing enterprise education into the curriculum frameworks due next spring.
We’ve aligned each ask with decisions government has already made rather than working against them.
The apprenticeship levy reforms that took effect in August cut fund expiry from 24 months to 12, so unspent balances now lapse twice as fast. An auto-match would redirect money employers have already paid, before it disappears.
The trading allowance has sat at £1,000 since 2017 while the reporting threshold moves to £3,000; raising it completes a reform government has started.
And the curriculum review endorsed the applied skills that enterprise projects deliver. The marginal cost, Enterprise Nation argues, is near zero.
Whether any of it lands, we will have to wait and see.
What is not in question is the weight behind it: over one million founders who use Enterprise Nation's platform each year, and 180,000 active members whose priorities are now on the Chancellor's desk.
Keep an eye out for our Budget coverage and let us know your views via our community channels.
