Briefing: ‘Growth Britain’ needs resilience in every postcode

John Healey’s first big speech as chancellor on 7 September set out a mission to make Great Britain ’Growth Britain’ again.

He put fiscal discipline first, promised to draw a line under the rise in business costs since Covid, committed to cutting the burden of regulation by a quarter over this Parliament and said he’d convene the major regulators to find out where they’re holding British business back.

At the upcoming budget on 28 October, he’ll publish a roadmap to fiscal devolution, moving money and power, in his words, “into every postcode”.

There’s a lot in what he said for insurance brokers to welcome and Biba has positioned its budget submission as an offer to help him deliver.

Brokers are a good fit for his agenda. They are one of the more geographically spread parts of financial services. We have 1,700 member firms working from 2,700 offices – with two-thirds of them outside London – employing around 132,000 people and arranging some £150 billion of premium a year.

That footprint is exactly the kind of local expertise the chancellor is asking mayors and strategic authorities to build growth around.

Rating request

The submission, available on the Biba website, makes one request for October and four proposals for the longer term.

The pressing request is that insurance premium tax (IPT) stays where it is, with a commitment to hold both rates for the rest of this Parliament.

We understand the pressure the chancellor is under. IPT raised £9bn in 2025-26, up £157million from the year before, and we don’t dispute that it’s a dependable source of revenue.

But it sits inside the premium on a car, a home or a business, and customers can’t easily avoid it. WPI Economics puts the average household’s IPT bill at around £146 a year. More than half of people WPI polled said they’d cut back elsewhere if it rose and over a quarter said they’d reduce their cover.

Businesses said they’d raise prices, invest less or take on less protection. A rise would work against the line the chancellor wants to draw under business costs and against the help government is giving households with energy bills from this autumn.

Holding IPT steady keeps the money coming in and keeps the government’s own affordability message intact.

Four proposals

The four longer-term proposals are aimed at the ten-year Plan for Growth and Resilience, where the Treasury has said the structural work will happen.

On cyber, we’ve proposed a time-limited IPT exemption for qualifying SME cyber policies, reviewed after three years, and a joint push with the National Cyber Security Centre and our own Accredited Cyber Insurance Broker Directory to close the gap.

43% of UK businesses had a breach or attack last year and around a third of SMEs still hold no cyber cover. Government is investing in technical cyber resilience. Financial resilience is the other half of the same job.

On devolution, we’ve proposed SME resilience partnerships run through Strategic Authorities in three to five pilot areas, funded from the Local Growth Fund and Integrated Settlements rather than new bodies.

Local brokers know which industrial estates flood and which manufacturing clusters are exposed on cyber. Put that alongside local leadership and you get better continuity plans and quicker recoveries. We’ve also asked that devolved investment in housing and infrastructure considers insurability at the planning stage, so public money buys assets that stay protected.

On young people, the chancellor was right to call youth unemployment a scar and the technical pathways from 14-years-old, the bursaries and the SME apprenticeship incentives are the right response.

We’ve asked that insurance broking is named in them. Around half of brokers will reach retirement age within 15 years and our Talent Toolkit and work with the Chartered Insurance Institute are ready to be plugged into whatever the Milburn review recommends.

On regulation, the 25% commitment and the pledge to halve the senior managers and certification regime burden are welcome and we want to see them reach smaller firms.

The number of authorised general insurance intermediaries has fallen to 3,494, down 9% in a year and 54% since 2006. The Financial Services and Markets Bill is the chance to reform the Ombudsman and make the authorisation and appointed representative reforms work for small brokers as well as large ones.

When the chancellor convenes the regulators, we’d be glad to give him the broker view.

The idea running through all of it is that resilience is a form of fiscal discipline. Every household and business that can absorb a shock without falling on the state is a future cost avoided. Insurance is how that happens and brokers are the people who make it work for the customers who need it, in every postcode.

We’ve written the submission in the government’s own terms because we think the objectives are right and we’d like to help meet them.

We want members to read our submission and, if speaking to local MPs, Mayors or local business groups, make the case make the case for holding IPT first and for local resilience second.

The chancellor has some hard choices to make on 28 October. We hope this is one he’ll find easy.