English: Official logo of the World Economic Forum. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
According to the WEF, the UK’s ‘high-growth small businesses’ are world news this week. WEF provides a curated list of some of this week’s most interesting stories on economic growth and social inclusion.
Source: 8 must-read economics stories of the week – Agenda – The World Economic Forum
Personally, I think that the UK’s small businesses could do with some serious help from Chancellor, George Osborne and his government colleagues.
Dr Alf’s Seven Point Plan
- The UK’s big-businesses have powerful industry lobbies and can employ tax experts to reduce their tax bills. Small businesses often don’t get the tax breaks – So there’s an urgent need to level the playing fields. For example, I would like to see small businesses get triple tax credits for investment in research and development. Also small businesses should get triple tax credits for professional development (there’s room for a whole new industry here).
2. The UK’s banking system favors those who work in big banks and their chums in big-business. Since 2008, small businesses have often struggled with mainstream finance from banks. More government guarantees are required to help ratchet up small business finance.
3. Local authorities should be encouraged to give small businesses, a three-year holiday from local taxation. This can be recouped from big-businesses operating in the local authority area, including shops.
Remember small business are better than big businesses for creating new jobs. Graduates are tired of stacking super-market shelves!
4. All UK public services in both central and local should give priority to small businesses.
5. The Brexit debate must major on cutting red-tape and bureaucracy for small businesses.
6. The media should be given incentives for sponsoring public appetite for small businesses. We need more people like Lord Sugar to step forward.
7. Finally, central and local government departments should get special fiscal incentives to replace big consulting firms with independent executives and consultants. This would create more competition, increase public value-for-money, enhance small business development and possibly create a new export opportunity. I know that my good friend John Gelmini has leveraged his UK public sector experience and is looking to major export opportunities.
These are a just strawman proposals. My personal brainstorm.
Why don’t you brainstorm this with your friends? Then tell George Osborne. Here’s his Twitter handle @George_Osborne
Please feel free to chip in with your own ideas below. If we get a bit of debate, perhaps we’ll share it with George!
Dr Alf's Blog 
Dr Alf’s 7 point plan is a very useful place to start and should be combined with “sunset ” legislation which would authorise a constabulary, fire command or local authority for say 2 years forcing them to merge and create shared service centres after that.
Kenya, which has been an independent republic for just 60 years, has, under its Transition Authority reduced the number of local authorities from the 230 plus it inherited from us under Colonial rule to just 47 within a country 6 times the size of ours.
Policing is done with a single national police force.
Changes on this scale would reduce business operating costs and force the pace of new business creation through shrinking the public sector down to size.
About 1% of SME’s have the ability to scale up and export.
These need to be identified and helped to do so by focussing most resources onto them not simply focussing on all SME’s equally.