On Wednesday the Chancellor will deliver his spring statement. The Economist’s Bagehot column reasonably concludes that Sunak’s popularity is about to take a hit. It’s easy to make voters happy when you give out £400bn, as he did during the pandemic. But that’s now over. Inflation may hit 10%; energy bills may cost the equivalent to raising the rate of income tax by six percentage points; the price of diesel may reach £3 per litre by the end of this year; and, unless he changes his mind, we have a 2.5p rise in national insurance from next month.
Make no mistake about it. These will be tough conditions for doing business – not least for small businesses. That’s why we’ve joined forces with Enterprise Nation to set out what the Chancellor should prioritise to support them.
In our Access to Finance briefing paper we recommend:
– allowing micro businesses to use the new Help to Grow schemes and create a new tax relief to help the self-employed acquire new skills;
– helping entrepreneurs to scale and innovate by scrapping the sunset clause for EIS, SEIS, & VCTs and simplifying the process for Advanced Assurance;
– ruling out an Online Sales Tax;
– reinstating and expanding the New Enterprise Allowance to £100 per week for up to a year, allowing recipients to access more of it upfront, and expanding the eligibility of the scheme to all 23-year-olds earning less than the National Allow micro businesses to use the new Help to Living Wage;
– using data to make it easier for small businesses to learn about the wide array of support schemes available.
This isn’t exhaustive of course, but it would be a start. You can read more about it here.
The Chancellor should also cancel the rise in National Insurance, or at the very least raise the income threshold for paying employee’s NI, as recommended by Robert Colvile and Tom Clougherty.
Although the Chancellor can’t change the macro-economic conditions, he can and must be ambitious about growth – it’s really our only option. In a week where the Government released an unforgivably damaging Online Safety Bill – both for tech and freedom of speech – the Government has a lot of making up to do.
As Sam Dumitriu writes: “In theory, leaving the European Union was meant to free us to diverge from some of the bloc’s anti-tech instincts. Yet, the most significant divergence to date will be replacing the relatively pro-innovation e-Commerce Directive and its sensible liability protections with a bill that’s as, if not more, badly drafted than the Cookies Directive. At least with the Cookies Directive you can avoid the annoying mandated pop-ups with a nifty browser plugin.”
Rishi claims he wants “a future economy built on a new culture of enterprise.” Now’s the time to prove it.
S(tuck) In
Our Access All Areas project is just the first of four reports we’re undertaking with Enterprise Nation. We’ll also be looking at Access to People, Access to Markets, and Access to Government. If you run a small business and want to get involved, drop our events team a message and I’ll make sure you’re invited to the next roundtable. We may end up using you and your business as a case study.
For those running scale-up companies, we have a dinner on Tuesday in London with FTI (see below), which we may be able to squeeze you into. This is focused on the founders of high-growth businesses, as we want to explore the unique challenges they face. Just drop me an email with some information about you and your business.
Entrepreneurship Education x3
Everyone has a view on education. We’ve all experienced it in one way or another and we all know it could be better. While education can never be distilled down into a single goal, a goal that’s becoming increasingly important is for schools to prepare young people for the modern workplace. After all, it’s undeniable that the modern world of work requires entrepreneurial skills in a way that wasn’t the case in the past.
Through the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Entrepreneurship, of which we’re the Secretariat, we’ll be investigating this issue over the coming months. We have put out a Call for Evidence, and would be incredibly grateful if you could respond to it.
There are a lot of questions, but we honestly don’t expect you to answer them all (unless you really want to). If you were able to focus on just one or two that you feel best-placed to answer that would be great. We may get in touch to use you as a case study in the report.
See the questions and respond here.
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