BKL tax partner David Whiscombe comments via the UK200 Group on a report from the business department’s select committee, which said that most small business initiatives weren’t helping. The committee said that the 600 taxpayer-funded support initiatives on offer to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were “poorly communicated, confusing and not focused enough on business needs”.
Most of government has no experience of the real world of small business. And for avoidance of doubt, assisting fictitious Chinese companies at £8,000 a day does not for this purpose count as experience of running a small business. Of course support initiatives are too complex and inaccessible to be useful to small businesses.
But of course everyone knows that they aren’t there to actually support small businesses – they’re there to give the impression that government is doing something to support them, which is a quite different objective and one which they perform quite well. The best thing that government can do to support small businesses is get out of the way and leave them to get on with it.