The government doesn’t have a clue about small business and has spent the last 10 years grabbing headlines and under-delivering, says Doug Richard

Thanks to the government we have an uncertain economy. Right now, some see a bullish market, others a bearish one and they are preparing accordingly. Some are inevitably wrong. As business owners, we cannot predict and we cannot plan. This uncertainty creates a clear track leading downward.

The question then is: having created the uncertainty, what should the government be doing to stem it? After all, it has put into place laws and policies with very little or no warning, thought or evidence that it can execute on them.

When the government puts a policy in place, which it then quickly takes away, you can’t act fast enough, so it’s essentially playing unfairly. In addition, it is undermining its credibility and destabilising the economy as a result.

By way of example, the current hot issue is CGT relief. (Concession? What concession!) It is not the only subject that should be talked about; it’s probably not even the most important. But it’s a good example of what I mean. It was put into place hurriedly. There was no forewarning. It was intended to solve one problem, but actually creates many more. It’s like hitting a pea with a hammer. So it suggests the government is not being honest about what it’s saying. So it’s either dishonest or incompetent.

Call for competence

Policy One of this government should be to stop coming up with new grand visions and begin to try to do things well and get things done. We don’t need vision, we need competence. A very large part of GDP is sucked up by the public sector. It’s not that we don’t need the services, it’s that we need these performed more efficiently.

This means that government has to stop a culture of ministerial meddling; amateurs at the top with no professional competence setting the policy and then executing it. No corporation in the world would have its top executives revolve through sales, marketing and operations on a twice-yearly basis?

In the context of business support alone the government has created an industry. My own paper, The Richard Report on Small Business totalled this at more than £12bn a year. Very little or none of which serves any purpose whatsoever. The irony is that the government has spent 10 years putting in place thousands of programmes one after another, each one garnering a headline, without serving a purpose. None of these were measured, but were intended to solve all problems.

Now it plans to cut 3,000 programmes to 100, but doesn’t have a mechanism to do so. Its infantile approach was to send out a questionnaire saying ‘what should we do?’ and now it has admitted recently it doesn’t know the answer.

Three wishes

Infrastructure, taxation and regulation are three big issues. Transport and infrastructure improvement, including high speed broadband nationwide, are core elements for success in this country. We need to improve business agility, and that means less regulation and taxation. Government says lowering taxes just helps the few, but it removes the shackles from small business which creates the jobs that it can then tax and take credit for.

None of these things are being dealt with in any way. The fact is, Brown doesn’t meet with small businesses. He doesn’t meet with anybody. And he certainly doesn’t understand the role small business plays in this country. He doesn’t understand what role government should play in the support of small business, full stop