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Blog posts tagged Vince Cable
Summit for nothing?
November 04, 2010
So the coalition government set out its stall this week by outlining measures it believes will aid the UK’s five million or so small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs).
Hosting the launch event – loftily entitled the Summit for Small Business – Business Minister Mark Prisk said: “I entered government with the goal of making this the most entrepreneurial decade in our history and I'm confident today's announcements will make that a reality.” Big ambition. Bold claim.
All the major parties agree on the pivotal role SMEs are likely to play in reviving the UK economy. SMEs provide 60 per cent of the nation’s jobs and half of its GDP. And with so many public sector workers likely to lose their jobs, many will hope to find gainful employment in the private sector.
The government’s three main aims, as revealed at the Summit, are to: improve access to finance; make it easier for SMEs to win public sector contracts; and allow social tenants (ie someone who rents a property from a local council or housing association) to start their own home-based businesses (currently this isn’t allowed).
Despite the taxpayer bailouts and criticism from business groups, still too many small firms are met with refusal when seeking a bank loan or overdraft extension. Business Secretary Vince Cable has certainly been a vociferous critic of the banks in this regard.
The government says it is committed to ensuring a wide range of finance options for small businesses. The Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) scheme will remain live for another four years. According to the government it will make “£2bn available to viable small companies [that lack] credit history or collateral. This will provide support to 6,000 SMEs a year.”
A further £200m will be committed to Enterprise Capital Funds, which will “support equity investments in the highest-growth potential businesses over four years.” The first of the new funds is expected to begin investing in early 2011.
The government will also work with banks in their response to the Business Finance Taskforce green paper, including the £1.5bn Business Growth Fund, mentoring and drawing up of a new lending code. Vince Cable said: “The government is doing its bit. The banks [must] play their part [by increasing] normal commercial lending to get the economy growing.”
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne noted: “The private sector is also taking steps to provide a diverse range of finance options for businesses – a development which is welcomed by government.”
The government also wants to make sure SMEs are awarded at least one-quarter of public sector contracts, which will be welcome news for those eager to get a slice of a multi-billion pound pie. To speed up the process a standardised ‘Pre-Qualification Questionnaire’ (developed in co-operation with the Federation of Small Businesses) will be introduced in December. Designed to ease cashflow pressures, the government has committed to pay 80% of its prime contractors within five working days and these must pay their suppliers within 30 days (more good news for many small suppliers).
Cable, Osbourne, Prisk et al are not the first politicians to make speeches underlining the huge contribution SMEs make, as they quietly go about generating wealth and providing employment. Praise is one thing. Time will tell whether these latest measures are enough to have any a quantifiable positive effect on SMEs’ fortunes in the difficult few years yet to come.
Mark Williams, Start Up Donut editor
Sole traders and micro-firms: the true Credit Crunch victims?
August 05, 2010
It’s a familiar criticism and one with which I have more than a measure of sympathy. Those nasty, greedy banks, eh? After all we’ve done for them, letting them off scot-free for the mess we’ve all ended up in, even bailing out some of the worst offenders with obscene amounts of taxpayers’ money.
And how do they repay our generosity? By not lending money to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), that’s how. Well, there’s gratitude for you.
With many of the banks recently announcing huge profits, it could become difficult for some of them to continue to justify their ongoing reluctance to make credit more available to businesses – especially with mounting government criticism from Vince Cable and others. And then there are the bankers’ bonuses, of course. God forbid the day when these aren’t being paid.
Better access to credit at affordable prices could seriously ease the cashflow crises many SMEs regularly face, yet despite having direct experience of the serious strain lack of cash creates, why are so many SMEs so bad when it comes to paying their own suppliers on time?
As a freelance editor and writer, unfortunately, I speak with a lot of experience. And it’s not just the knock-on effects of having to wait for cash, as bad as these can be. It’s also the additional unpaid effort that must go into chasing money.
Not all of my customers are ‘bad payers’. There are a couple who realise that one-man-band freelances simply cannot afford to wait for their invoices to be paid. We must pay our bills and operating expenses and try to put food on the table like anyone else. Understanding customers are worth their weight in gold. These are the people you want to work for, the ones for whom you don’t mind going above and beyond the call of a purchase order form or commissioning note.
However, no matter how great the work you do or how much flexibility you show, there are other customers who use every delaying tactic in the book to get out of paying their bills on time, from pretending ‘X from accounts is on holiday at the moment’ and ‘Oh, I don’t remember receiving your invoice…’ to simply ignoring polite email reminders.
They know they can exploit the situation by ignoring timid ‘please pay within 30 days’ requests at the bottom of invoices, because – what are you going to do – charge them interest? What, at current rates? Good luck. Even if you are prepared to ask for interest (providing you’ve made this apparent in your terms and conditions), they’ll probably stop using you. After all, it’s a buyer’s market in most sectors at the moment and always has been.
In recent years, things seem to have become much worse. The ranks of the brass-neck late-payers – the sworn enemies of cash-strapped sole traders and micro businesses throughout the land – seem to be swelling. Delaying paying invoices, often to everyday self-employed people who need the money to survive and who themselves cannot get bank credit, seems to have gradually become ‘the way things are done’, a kind of malevolent current business convention.
In the post-Credit Crunch world, were it not for the millions of sole traders and micro-firms who have no choice but to bite their tongues and wait patiently for their money, the situation for many larger businesses would be much more bleak... You’re welcome.
Mark Williams, Start Up Donut editor
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