We need a bigger plug for the enterprise gap

10 Aug 2010 at 13:33

Anonymous

The problems surrounding the lack of growth of new enterprise in deprived areas is so much bigger and more complex than appears to be being addressed by government. There are factors which, although may appear 'minor', severely detract from the attraction to citizens of those areas to self-employment. If we begin with the language that is used by the mainstream organisations; lets start with the word Business. For so many this conjures up images of people in suits with briefcases and 'Companies', in fact even Business Links own adverts showed images of people in very smart business clothing. People with titles like 'Company Director', 'Company Secretary' all very real and necessary, and yet so far removed from the man or woman in these areas who simply have a desire to be self-employed doing something they know and understand where they believe they have a future; they do not (or certainly the many I have spoken to) consider themselves as 'going into business', but much more simply 'working for themselves.' This should not in any way be interpreted as 'dumbing down' , but rather taking a real and fundamental look at how we approach the process. There is such a big gap between the services that those same, self-employed people need and their ability to reach them. They might just get as far as going on a start-up course, but expecting those same people to find an accountant, much less shop around for other services; training and related services that they need to be successfully self-employed, is a chasm as yet unfilled. This chasm was never filled by Business Link, the shortfall I believe that we are seeing nationally, is not from those, who in any economic culture would be the 'natural entrepreneurs', but is in fact, those ordinary people who in the past would never have considered self-employment whilst jobs were plentiful and their mobility not restricted by the now, huge cost and difficulties in mobility for economically disadvantaged groups. There is little access to small amounts of readily accessible funds to assist the self-employed. I recently spoke a senior person within the regeneration sector and asked why the only grant available to people in Stoke-on-Trent is cumbersome and difficult to access, I was told that the process was necessary to enable these funds to be accountable with maximum transparency. I suggested that maybe much smaller sums could be made available (the grant I mention is £1500), say of £200-£500, and I was told that we simply can't be seen to be 'giving away money!', yet is that not what we do in the benefits system? To be fair to the person I spoke to, they agreed that the system was not really fulfilling the need, and also that, it should be possible to somehow create a much better system that allowed people to start becoming self-employed. We have built up an entire back catalogue of language and terminology which the newly self-employed do not understand. We have created images of self-made millionaires, big business and smart technological talk, and for the average man or woman, this might just as well be a parallel universe, this is quite simply not the world in which they live. Even for the existing businesses in the City of Stoke-on-Trent, at least 40% of those are not even online! (This is a generous estimate, it is likely to be even greater than that, possibly nearer 50%.) How can we possibly talk about creating sustainable jobs and a culture of entrepreneurism when those who should be assisting the process and the recipients are inhabiting totally different worlds, and as yet there is little to connect those two. As far as the National Insurance waiver is concerned, most people in disadvantaged areas don't even understand how the NI system works for business and the self-employed let alone see any benefit in the waiver, and accepting that as an incentive to larger Companies to create jobs in the more disadvantaged areas then, yes, but it's still not enough. Many of the so-called incentives, do not reach their targets. You might just as well offer everyone in the North a 10% discount at Harrods. Since there was very little liklihood of them ever going in there to shop, it would be meaningless. We need senior government people to spend time with those who spend their days working in these areas; we need people who are not afraid to try new approaches, and where there is a culture of freedom to fail, and to learn from those failures, we need a break from the time-worn approaches that are just not working. We are currently 'doing what we have always done, and we are getting what we have always got'. We know that Bizfizz is one method which works for deprived areas, perhaps we need to take that approach and apply it more widely to the services on offer to the new self-employed. Taking a more flexible and ground up look at what really happens. There are far too many people making vast fortunes from the situations in these areas; Shops offering credit at 2000%; Pawn shops; Discount stores selling cheap imported goods, which ironically, themselves have robbed these same areas of their manufacturing jobs; Warehouses employing people only at minimum wage levels, with 12-15 hour shifts and short-term contracts; Companies relocating because many of these areas are now seen to be good for 'cheap labour' and people with little expectation of advancement. This list is not exhaustive. We need to get under the skin of the problem and not be afraid of what we will find. Until that happens I fear we may be popping a sticking plaster onto a broken leg.