We started Hoxton Mix because starting a business in this country is harder than it needs to be — and almost none of that difficulty is the business.
 
It's the registered office. The forms. The letter from HMRC that arrives in language nobody outside HMRC uses. The compliance you didn't know applied to you until you'd already got it wrong. None of that makes a product better or wins a customer. It just sits between a person with an idea and the thing they're actually good at.
 
So we built the guardrails. Take the admin off the founder, absorb the friction, let them get on with running the business. That was the whole point.
 
Which is why the last two years have been hard to watch. Every guardrail we put up, government has added two more obstacles behind it.
 
Let's do the numbers, because they're rarely put in one place.
 
April 2025: employer National Insurance went from 13.8% to 15%, and the threshold at which you start paying it dropped from £9,100 to £5,000. That second change is the one that hurt. It isn't a tax on profit. It's a tax on the act of employing someone. The OBR scored it at £23.8bn in 2025-26 rising to £25.7bn by 2029-30, and assumed roughly 60% of it comes straight back out of wages.
 
November 2025: that £5,000 threshold was frozen until April 2031. Six years of nominal freeze — a stealth rise every single year, and almost nobody talks about it.
 
April 2026: dividend tax up two points, landing squarely on every owner-manager taking a low salary and dividends. Which is most of the small business economy. Same month, the National Living Wage hits £12.71 — up 11% in two years, and up 26% for 18-20 year olds.
 
January 2027: unfair dismissal protection kicks in at six months instead of two years, and the cap on compensatory awards is removed entirely. From 1 October this year, the window to bring a tribunal claim doubles to six months.
 
The government's own analysis concedes these costs "will be proportionately higher for small and micro businesses." The Regulatory Policy Committee rated its impact assessment red — not fit for purpose. The OBR left the Employment Rights Act out of its March forecast altogether, because nobody yet knows what it does.
 
Here's the part that should worry everyone. Firms aren't going under — insolvencies are actually down 10% year on year. They're doing something quieter and worse: they've stopped hiring. Payrolled employees are down 71,000 on the year. Hospitality is down 79,000. Retail employment hit a record low in March. Youth unemployment is 16.4%, with over a million young people not in education, employment or training — the first time above a million since 2013. In the first quarter of this year, more businesses closed than opened.
 
Meanwhile public sector headcount is up 37,000, with central government at a record high.
 
And who's making these calls? There is not one founder, one CEO, one owner-manager in the Cabinet. The Business Secretary's private sector career is a solicitor's traineeship he never finished. The ministers who have actually built something sit a rung below Cabinet, where they don't set the direction.
 
What I want to see on 28 October:

1. Unfreeze the secondary threshold and index the Employment Allowance to the National Living Wage. Stop taxing the decision to hire.
2. Lift the Small Business Rate Relief threshold from £12,000 to £25,000 rateable value.
3. Raise the VAT registration threshold to £100,000 and kill the growth cliff-edge.
4. A statutory sick pay rebate for small employers, and proportionality for micro-businesses on tribunal exposure.
5. Get late payment legislation through Parliament and open public procurement to firms under 50 people.

 
None of that is radical. It's just removing friction from people who are trying to build something — which is the same job we've been doing for years, one company at a time.
 
Burnham said before he had the job that the NI rise "wasn't the right decision." Good. He has until 28 October to prove he meant it.
 
You're the people this actually lands on. What would you add to the list?