Labour’s broken promise to build 1.5 million new houses – coupled with successive Budgets saddling small businesses with soaring costs – have left Britain’s ‘White Van Man’ with “little reason to hope”, sources have told GB News.
Chancellor John Healey’s Budget last month had been billed as giving business owners “breathing space”. It included an extension of fuel duty cuts, the tripling the tax-free trading allowance, and an additional £1.5billion in funding for social housing.
But many self-employed Britons have questioned whether the Treasury has actually tightened the purse strings even further.
The People’s Channel has investigated the ongoing troubles tradesmen – the backbone of every city, town and village across the UK – are grappling with under Andy Burnham.
Britons rely on plumbers, electricians, carpenters, bricklayers, mechanics and couriers every day. But the industry is facing a crisis.
For one, Angela Rayner, the Housing Secretary, has failed to deliver anywhere near the 1.5 million homes she promised would be built by 2029.
In fact, Silvia Andreoletti, of the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) think-tank, told Britain’s News Channel housebuilding has virtually ground to a halt.
She blames excessive red tape and Net Zero requirements “allowing planning and safety approval to take years”.
In London, housing starts were 72 per cent lower in 2024/2025 compared with 2023/24, according to the Centre for Policy Studies. Yesterday, it emerged Britain’s construction sector shrank at its fastest pace since June, with housebuilding suffering its worst month of the year.
Fewer houses being built means fewer projects and ultimately fewer tasks for tradesmen of every speciality.
“This is not due to a lack of demand: there are hundreds of thousands of families who would like to move to a bigger home and young people who want their own place, all of whom would need the services of tradesmen,” Ms Andreoletti said.
“Instead, Britain’s paralysed housing market makes that impossible, leaving people without homes and tradesmen without work.”
Ministers recently announced a suspension of certain biodiversity net gain requirements for small housing projects on brownfield sites, which could speed up approvals for some developments.
The Government also pledged an additional £1.5billion for its affordable homes programme over the next decade. However, the impact of this will be limited, claims Ms Andreoletti.
She explained: “It completely misses the actual issue. The housing market doesn’t need us to pour more money into the problem: more investment without addressing the high costs and regulatory burdens on developments is just burning Government money and driving up prices for everyone else.
“It won’t deliver many more homes overall, because there won’t be more land available or more firms willing to take on projects; at best, the same number of homes will be built, but they’ll be social housing at an eye-watering cost to the Government rather than financed by private investors.”
Ms Andreoletti added this is “one of the many reasons” Whitehall is set to miss Sir Keir Starmer’s pledged 1.5 million new properties by nearly a third.
Ms Rayner admitted to the BBC there is a “slim chance” this ambitious goal is achieved. “A single two per cent increase in investment won’t fix that,” Ms Andreoletti fumed.
More than 300,000 homes must be built each year to meet Labour’s 2024 manifesto target. However, numbers have barely risen above 200,000.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) said in a statement: “Our bold planning reforms are working to get this country building again, slashing planning bureaucracy and making more land available to speed up house building. New housing starts are up 20 per cent compared to this time last year and up 298 per cent in London alone. We are also backing developers by investing over £40 billion in social and affordable housing and a new £16billion National Housing Bank to give the sector confidence to build the homes we need.”
Amid Labour’s failure to “build, baby, build”, attention diverted to Mr Healey’s inaugural Budget, which had been lauded as a reset with relations between politicians and the trading sector at an all-time low.
“I don’t know anyone in a van that feels like the Government are in their corner,” Charlie Mullins, founder of Pimlico Plumbers, told GB News. “If Labour are trying to help companies with vans, I’d have to see what would happen if they said they were against them.”
According to Statista, there are an estimated 885,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK’s construction industry – the largest of any sector.
Yet the disconnect between tradesmen and Labour has long been evident.
Back in 2014, Emily Thornberry, MP for Islington South and Finsbury, posted a now infamous Twitter post depicting a terraced house with three England flags flying and a white van in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. After being accused of being a “snob” by the homeowner, the former shadow minister duly apologised.
Earlier this year, former Chancellor Rachel Reeves was heckled by a van driver during an interview in Leeds, West Yorkshire, with the motorist accusing Labour of “ruining the country” and declaring the party “useless”.
Ms Reeves responded by defending her patriotism and reminding him of the importance of “good manners” before the motorist hit back, accusing the Government of running the country into the ground.
A disconnect between ordinary citizens and political elites was highlighted recently when Liberal Democrat City Hall member Hina Bokhari suggested tradesmen should ditch their white vans to save cash amid surging fuel costs.
She claimed ladders and fridges could be transported via a cargo bike instead, to the shock of Conservative London mayoral candidate Festus Akinbusoye, who joined her for the interview on LBC radio.
Mr Akinbusoye, whose facility management company employs 40 people across the UK, branded Mrs Bokhari’s remarks as “naive”.
“People in power do not understand the skills trade,” he told the People’s Channel. “This Labour Government has been more challenging than Covid!”
Mr Healey’s Autumn Statement was supposed to offer a fresh start. Nevertheless, Adam Healey, head of Manchester-based building firm IMR Services, told the Daily Express it did “next to nothing” for the self-employed tradies, adding: “I’m really disappointed by this Budget. Instead of tackling the big issues, they have tackled lots of tiny, insignificant ones.”
The headline policy for tradesmen was the extension of the 5p fuel duty cut, which will remain in place until July, offering just six months of additional relief.
Ms Andreoletti predicted this could save tradies driving an average of 20,000 petrol miles a year in their vans just £10 a month.
No11 also made permanent the 55p tax-free mileage rate for the first 10,000 business miles, while increasing the rate for additional miles to 35p from April 2027. Downing Street is also tripling the tax-free trading allowance to £3,000, measures officials say will provide further support for the self-employed.
Conversely, Ms Reeves had already raided taxes on van owners in her 2024 Budget by reclassifying many pick-up trucks as company cars rather than commercial vans. This raised the ceiling for flat benefit-in-kind rates from 20 per cent to 37 per cent, based on CO2 emissions. It saw some van owners’ tax bills quadruple.
Edmund King, President of the AA, urged the Government to cut fuel duty by a further 5p, warning higher fuel costs also feed into the price of transporting goods and running businesses.
Daniela Hathorn, Senior Market Analyst of Capital.com, told Britain’s News Channel: “The decision to maintain the 5p fuel-duty discount offers some immediate relief, particularly with energy prices remaining elevated.
“However, freezing fuel duty does not necessarily mean cheaper petrol or diesel. Global oil prices, refining costs and retailer margins continue to influence what motorists pay at the pump. For businesses operating fleets of vehicles, sustained high fuel prices can quickly erode margins, potentially forcing them to raise prices for customers.”
Mr Healey’s statement came against the backdrop of his pledges in The Sun in September, where he recognised Britain’s tradesmen and self-employed have had it “tough”.
“The white van drives Britain’s economy,” he told the newspaper. “Four million strong, the country’s self-employed workers add at least £366billion a year to the UK economy.”
He added: “I want Brits who are self-employed or running their own businesses to make more profit, invest more and spend less time on forms. So they’re at the forefront of my mind.”
Coupled with a lack of projects and rising fuel costs, tradies continue to tussle with rising employment costs, kickstarted by Ms Reeves’ National Insurance (NI) changes and exacerbated by Mr Healey’s minimum wage hikes.
Research from the CPS found by April 2027, it will cost businesses an additional £4,462 a year to employ a 21-year-old on minimum wage in comparison to 2024.
The employer NI rate increased from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent in April 2025, while the threshold at which employers begin paying contributions fell from £9,100 to £5,000.
The changes represented a major additional expense for companies employing staff, with Mr Mullins arguing the dual impact on employers felt “more like 30 to 40 per cent”.
The National Living Wage will now also rise from £12.71 to £13.21 per hour, which the veteran plumber revealed will be an “immediate hit to tradesmen’s pockets” and could upend staffing costs by up to four per cent.
Ms Hathorn added: “Higher employer contributions increase the cost of hiring and retaining staff, particularly for smaller firms operating on tight margins.
“While larger businesses may have greater flexibility to absorb these costs, smaller employers could respond by delaying recruitment, reducing investment or passing additional expenses on to customers. This could ultimately affect both employment opportunities and the cost of services.”
The crises facing tradies reflect a wider problem. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) last month downgraded its growth forecasts for the UK, slashing them from 1.6 per cent to just 1 per cent for 2027.
Reform UK’s Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick commented: “The Chancellor’s nothingburger offered nothing for the millions of tradespeople and small business owners who actually keep this country running.
“Far from scrapping their rise in fuel duty, the chancellor confirmed that just as prices are likely to drop a bit, he’ll keep them sky high with a tax rise.
“If this Government actually wanted to back British workers, they would have followed our lead and dramatically raised the VAT threshold, cut fuel duty, made it cheaper to hire British workers and scrapped tax on overtime.”
Ms Andreoletti echoed Mr Jenrick’s concerns, arguing the Budget gave tradesmen “little reason to hope”.
“There’s been no real help with their key issues – red tape, high taxes and employers’ NI, less demand for services because of the housing crisis – and they’re staring down an economy that gets bleaker by the day, with more borrowing and higher taxes looming on the horizon,” she fumed.
Despite Mr Healey’s promises to put the nation’s self-employed workers at the “forefront” of his agenda, many tradesmen fear he is doing little to alleviate the rising pressures threatening businesses across the land.
A Treasury spokesman said: “The Chancellor has given self-employed people breathing space by extending the fuel-duty cut, permanently increasing tax-free mileage rates and tripling the trading allowance to make it easier to start and grow a business”.