Asda boss accuses Labour of 'constraining' companies

Labour is not doing enough to support business and has become “more and more difficult” to deal with, Asda’s chief has warned.

- KARL MATCHETT

Allan Leighton, who has been chair of the supermarket since 2024 after a spell as chief executive in the late 1990s, said Labour used to “go out of their way to try and engage with business” when he was last running the company but were now “less helpful”.

Businesses are being left to deal with problems created by those in Westminster, he suggested.

“Politics and government have a much bigger impact on what happens today than they did,” he told the Retail Week x The Grocer conference this week.

“You know, I think in [the Nineties], most of government was pretty business-friendly, and over a period of time that’s got... more and more difficult.”

He is the latest supermarket chief to speak out about the government’s approach to business, with Tesco boss Ashwin Prasad warning last month that Sir Keir Starmer is “sleepwalking” into a joblessness epidemic.

Mr Leighton suggested firms were being left to deal with a “lot of constraints today that are not of their own making”.