Budget: businesses like ours need childcare support and green incentives now

At Heck, we are often asked to comment on what’s going on in the economy. We all had a very early start last week being interviewed by ITV Good Morning Britain for a post-budget reaction.

Our reaction was mixed. There were two incredibly important announcements in the budget that are business-critical for us, but when we reflected on the details, we felt the initiatives didn’t go far enough to encourage growth in our industry.

We work closely with Harper Adams University to recruit interns and graduates into jobs at Heck. I was interested to see women now account for 59% of students across their degrees.

In our business, over 60% of our team are women. That’s a far higher percentage than in the rest of the meat industry, where 36% of the workforce are women, according to 2022 research by Meat Business Women.

In the run-up to the budget, childcare was being discussed avidly across Heck. My sister, Ellie Keeble, is head of HR at Heck and speaks to the team on a daily and weekly basis about the challenges to access childcare. She herself has a nine-month-old son.

We support new mothers with extended post maternity leave and ensure their career path stays on track. But across the board, we hear about our team having to rely on extended family when parents go back to work after maternity and paternity leave. The availability of childcare is also a massive issue.

So, while we were encouraged by the announcements in the budget, it’s not going to support the food industry soon enough. Our team needs access to affordable childcare now to help us maintain our production and growth, so we implore the government to accelerate these changes.

The other burning issue we’re facing is the ongoing cost of energy. It’s a daily juggling act to balance increasing costs with our journey to net zero, while also finalising our Scope 3 emissions work. All this at a time when we’re seeing a 90% increase year-on-year in our electricity bill.

We are constantly looking at ways to future-proof our business, and we’re taking action into our own hands in terms of electricity. For instance, we’ve installed an energy monitoring system to identify ‘hotpots’ so we can reduce our electricity consumption by 10%. We’ve also looked at alternative methods of energy creation such as anaerobic digestors or solar panels. But as long as margins in the food industry remain low, the capital investment is still prohibitive.

We are also making great strides in our journey to net zero. For instance, we have reduced plastic by 50 tonnes, saving 175 tonnes of CO2. We also now provide carbon labelling on all our packaging so customers can buy with the climate in mind, perhaps swapping pork for chicken and vegan.

So my request to the chancellor is simple: fast-track changes in childcare and incentivise green investment. This will help our business future-proof itself and provide stability, all while getting great people back into the industry to provide growth.