Steve Rigby, Co-CEO Rigby Group plc Director of Family Business UK
Foreword
Family businesses are the beating heart of our economy. In every corner of the country our businesses underpin thriving local communities, creating valuable jobs and supporting economic growth.
Together, the family business sector employs half the UK’s private sector workforce in 4.8 million businesses, annually contributing £225 billion in tax – a quarter of all tax receipts.
Our unique business model is centred on long-term planning and investment that is reliant on companies being passed seamlessly from one generation to the next. Towns and regions across the UK have prospered through multi-generational ownership of businesses in which employees are treated as extended family and giving back to the community is deemed the right thing to do.
For more than 100 years our sector has been supported by a favourable policy environment. Business Relief, or Business Property Relief (BPR) allows businesses to be passed from one generation to the next without penalty.
From personal experience, I have had the opportunity to step in as the second generation to jointly lead Rigby Group plc, investing in our 9,000 employees to grow the company into the largest in our region and one of the largest in the UK. In 2025, we will celebrate Rigby Group’s 50th anniversary and our charitable Foundation its 32nd year. While Rigby Group is a large business, 75% of family businesses in the UK are SMEs with first generation owners. Without BPR they, and their families, could be denied the opportunity that I, and thousands of others, have had to build and expand a thriving business that gives back to our economy and community.
“ The single most important issue to the family businesses we represent, has been the retention of Business Property Relief ”
Together with other incentives like Gift Holdover Relief (GHR), which enables the gifting of business assets free from Capital Gains Tax, there is a clear and well-understood mechanism that promotes serial entrepreneurship, including by families. These incentives reward the risk takers in our economy, by providing much needed motivation to invest. This approach is hard to grow and quick to lose. BPR also supports the AIM stock market. At a time of material fund outflows, capital shortages and when London’s place as a global financial centre is at risk, BPR provides an important support for successful fledgling companies seeking to grow through equity investment.
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