Peter Jones asks: What’s govt got to do with it?

Great points and food for thought Duane.

Comes back to your post a couple of months (I think) about the interviewee for whom working made their parents benefits drop so they decided not to work.

Having a safety net is important, but it should be a net not something that prevents people from working hard – whether for themselves or form someone else.

It’s a good point and to be honest, from where I sit (e.g not in the UK), it isn’t too bad to embark on a startup – or be self employed in the UK.

Theres plenty of support – free(ish) healthcare (although I admit it’s not the best, perhaps) – and lets not get into the benefits system because thats a different kettle of fish altogether.

It’s also very difficult for governments to offer much financial assistance to startups – for reasons which should be quite apparent.

Based on my experience when I used to live over there, though, I’d say that Business Link could do with being drastically revamped to turn it into the beginnings of a real support service offering advice and the like..!

I think Peter Jones is right Duane, there is too much emphasis on “Government Help” …businesses need to stand on their own feet.

However, there is one important thing that Governments can do and that is tackle the obstacles that they themselves put in the way of people starting and growing businesses. Unbelievable regulation, rules, requirements and the like. It is this that holds businesses down and causes no end of work, none of which adds any value to the enterprise. The regulation is often outrageous.

It’s about time we stopped all being mothered and got on with it. Present day society is getting too used to being “looked after” to the extent that we simply cannot and will not look out for ourselves anymore!

Early morning rant over!! :-)

40 years of socialism has sucked the life out of the British entrepreneur.

Way too many people are happy to spend their entire lives in unstimulating jobs and go home at night to a couple of cheap beers, a 42 inch plasma screen and 2 weeks in Spain.

It’s like eating vanilla ice cream every day.

Don’t get me started!

Garry: What obstacles? What regulations? Lots of “red tape” you read about in the press is urban myth perpetuated by companies whose business it is to advise companies on regulations. Companies like National Britannia (Health and Safety compliance), Peninsula (employment law compliance), etc. It serves their interests for people to think that there are lots of burdensome regulations they need to comply with, so more people use their services. So they push out press releases with nonsense figures like the average small business spends five hundred hours a day completing red tape paperwork, and the newspapers lap it up.

In the UK, we have it easy. Incorporating a company is trivially cheap and easy (I once incorporated in Denmark, where minimum capital required to register a company was 50k Euro!). Assuming you are smart enough to actually keep management accounts, then year-end filing requirements are trivial. In France, for example, you have to file accounts according to a statutory set of line items. Don’t have a line for “customer discounts”? You’d better go back and find that number, then, because it has to be in your French stat accounts.

See my old 0800handyman blog for more on this:

http://blog.0800handyman.co.uk/search/label/red%20tape

Bruce Greig

And another thing. At least we don’t have a tax system like the Norwegians do:

http://www.cloudave.com/link/the-entrepreneurial-tax-that-kills-business

(Norwegian entrepreneur hit with 1% tax on value of his shares. Just for owning them.)

Goverment backing off – what twaddle!! If government didn’t intervene we would be under the control of massive conglomrates. The fact theat the Competition Commission exists is proof enough that government is crucial in PROTECTING small businesses. Without regulation and interventions we would be swiftly bought out my global corporations who pay no tax and then we’d all be stuffed.

Go to a country such as Mexico where there is no welfare, and you’ll see 80 year old women struggling to sell dried fish to people on local buses. The welfare system is what makes our country a fantastic place to live and the envy of the world. It makes me very frustrated that people could criticise such a vital tool. I think if there was no welfare people would be even less entrepreneurial because there would be more risk.

Pete Bowen – do you think we’ve been living under socialism for 40 years?
Also the government (NHS, Education etc.) is the countries largest employer, and certain people want to shrink the size of it. What will this do to unemployment?…

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