2025: There may be trouble ahead, but reason to be cheerful too

As we begin a New Year one of our long-standing contributors, Ian Mean, takes a look at the challenges ahead for businesses and the county - and finds a significant silver lining too.

Putting it mildly, many businesses face real challenges as we enter 2025 and as a result, the government’s much vaunted growth seems somewhat lost, writes Ian Mean.

The key challenge is perhaps the outcome of the October Budget.

Put simply, it will leave many of our SMEs-the small and medium size businesses-struggling to survive following the National Insurance increase of 15 per cent from April.

One Gloucestershire boss I talked to last week told me the National Insurance rise would cost his business £30 000 - and that was for a relatively small business.

It is those SMEs-the engine driving the Gloucestershire economy -which will be hit hardest.

We have just under 30 000 of those SMEs here and when you look at the county council list of these firms you see that a lot of them are micro businesses-that is those with just 0-10 employees.

Here’s a sample of that SME list of companies here.Stroud: 5,785 of which 5,150 are micro firms;Cotswold: 6,075 of which 5,415 are micros; Cheltenham: 5,190 …