Whitehall’s Red Tape Stasi is trying to kill small businesses like mine
We pride ourselves in the UK on our enterprise-friendly environment, and how easy it is to set up a business. I can vouch for that. It’s relatively straightforward. But the government machine is undermining this, and using endless red tape to strangle small businesses that are merely trying to provide services to the public sector.
In fact, if we want to know why this country is suffering from a productivity crisis, a good first step is to look at the insufferable burden of administration. Sir Humphrey might beam with delight, but the ordinary business owner is left swamped and wondering if it’s all worth it. No wonder more than 30,000 UK businesses are expected to go bust this year – the highest level for two decades.
A case in point: just this month, my company won a contract to provide a couple of days of training to the public sector. Two days isn’t much, but such projects are the lifeblood of small businesses like mine. But what I hadn’t, and couldn’t, have accounted for was the vast “due diligence” process I was required to go through just to set up the contract and get paid.
This process required wrestling with online forms running to dozens of pages, and obliged me to submit everything from certificates of incorporation, insurance and annual accounts going back years, to policy statements on, among other areas, environmental protection, preventing modern slavery, preventing sexual exploitation and any number of other issues that are completely irrelevant to a training business run from a home office in Kent.
The contrast with the private sector is vast. There, you typically quote for the work, do it, then invoice. Simple. But when it comes to the government, well, just getting my head round the portal interface took me a couple of hours. The entire process would have taken me a day, involving discussions with accountants and insurers. Possibly more. And all for a contract that, in total, was for only two days of work.
In the end, I refused. I’m happy to prepare as thoroughly as the next person to ensure that my training courses are fabulous. But what I’m not prepared to do is spend hours on Whitehall forms.
And the amazing thing is that when you look the red-tape beast in the eye and refuse to budge, it blinks, whimpers and backs down. At least it did with me, and I don’t have particularly scary eyes. Together, we found a sensible shortcut that saved a whole lot of bother, so we could get on with the business of actually doing the work.
But how many small companies, particularly those starting out and hungry for business, would have felt they had no choice but to dive headfirst into that endless, unnecessary form-filling? Many, I’m sure.
It’s now 14 years since David Cameron’s government issued a report aptly entitled “Lightening the Load”, saying micro businesses were “unreasonably expected to cope with the same levels of paperwork as larger companies”. Hear, hear. But if this was recognised this back then, why is it, more than a decade later, still treating one-person outfits like multinationals?
In my experience many civil servants are smart, decent and dedicated to the public good. But too often they are let down by the machinery that employs them. And it’s the 13 million of us who work in the small-business sector who suffer.
