'It feels pretty brutal' Business owners shaken by wage and tax rises

Marie Cooper has plans to grow her Midlands engineering business next year, making more of the pistons and pipework that planes, cars and oil-field machinery need.

- Jasper Jolly Julia Kollewe

That should have aligned well with Rachel Reeves's hopes to grow the UK economy, but after the first Labour budget since 2010 Cooper has been left looking at tens of thousands of pounds in extra taxes.

She estimated that her business, CBE+, will have to pay about £30,000 more in national insurance contributions (NICs) from next April after Reeves raised the levy on employers by 1.2 percentage points and lowered the threshold at which an employer has to pay on a worker's salary from £9,100 a year to £5,000. "We're probably looking at two people that we are not going to recruit next year" because of the tax rises, said Cooper, whose business, in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, employs 85 people.

The NICs increase was the key revenue-raising measure in a budget that focused tax rises on businesses to fund a huge increase in state spending. Large parts of UK industry were left smarting after Reeves outlined £40bn in overall tax increases.

Shevaun Haviland, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), said it was "a tough budget for business to swallow". Reeves had promised the most "pro-business" government in history in the run-up to July's election.