Marks & Spencer CEO Stuart Machin said Chancellor Rachel Reeves needs to “change course” in order to “break out of our economic doom loop of ever-higher taxes and lower growth”.

Writing in The Times, Machin criticised Reeves’s “catastrophic” £25bn rise in national insurance and called for “no more taxes that hit consumers and the everyday economy”.

The M&S boss noted that the retail industry had faced an “alphabet soup of taxes and regulations” over the last year.

He called on Labour to rethink its inheritance tax raid, insisting that the government should be “backing our farmers”.

Machin said: “The Chancellor has two paths ahead of her. More of the same: plugging fiscal holes with tax rises, stoking inflation and suppressing demand,’ Mr Machin wrote in an article on the M&S website.

“Or change course: spend less, borrow less, tax less, regulate less, reduce inflation and enable growth.”

Ahead of the November Budget, the CEO called on the Chancellor to reduce public spending.

He added: “Ministers must prioritise and spend within their means, instead of coming back to businesses or the British public for more.

“There are clear options for reductions in spending, even if they present political challenges.”

Machin highlighted that they had been told that last year’s tax rises were a “one off” and that he refused “to believe that geopolitics makes that pledge moot”.

“The world economy was volatile then, it is volatile now, and it will be volatile for the foreseeable future.”

The exec said the M&S tax bill had grown to around £650m per year, driving up prices as companies transferred increased costs to shoppers.

He noted: “Add all this to the impact on farmers in our supply chain from changes to inheritance tax and you’ve got a recipe for disaster, heaping pressure on the price of the weekly shop for families across the country.

“So what do I hope to see in the Budget? No more taxes that hit consumers and the everyday economy. 

“I don’t know what planet Treasury bureaucrats are on when they propose increasing VAT, a regressive tax that would hit working families and stoke inflation.”

Earlier this month, it was reported that UK retailers were set to avoid the top business rate tax band in the upcoming Budget.

Last week, it was also reported that retail spend slowed in September amid Budget concerns, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC).

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