Doug Richard to Business Link: I shall not mourn your passing

I noted then, and I shall do so again now, that in those organisations were some good people doing some great work. But they were the exception not the rule. The reality was that they were, in large part, private companies who had bid in response to open tenders by the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) whose greatest expertise was in winning the tenders and fulfilling the metrics those tenders requested.

 

The failure in the organisations should be laid squarely at the origin of the problem: the creation of the RDAs. These organisations were neither local nor national. They were too large to be nimble and responsive on a local level and too small to be national endeavours.

 

Furthermore, they were arbitrary in their geography. They neither followed the logic of the historic counties nor the de facto city-states that make up the landscape of the UK. Moreover they had a mis-guided insistence on buying from within the region under the notion that their remit was to spend their money locally whether the competence was local or not.

 

Further, they were run myopically. They were constantly re-inventing support, creating new programmes and paying little attention to what support businesses need. And they believed for reasons I shall never understand, that these small geographic regions each had businesses whose needs were somehow fundamentally different from every other region; when the reality was and is that businesses throughout the country, if not the world, largely need the same things in support.

 

Finally, they were channels for political support. The RDAs and thus the Business Links they funded were a cynical exercise in the uneven distribution of money. Thus we ended up with 10 pound in support for every citizen in Scotland for every one pound of support in the east of England. As though the need in Scotland or in the North East or the North West was seven-fold or 10-fold the need in Norfolk or Suffolk.

 

And in their waning days they were reduced to signposts because the thicket of support initiatives had grown so complicated that they needed an organisation solely to understand the welter of programmes they had created. They rarely or never mentioned their own effectiveness and applauded their ability to meet targets they had created for themselves. Harsh? Yes I suppose so.

 

But small businesses need training and support. I believe that. I also believe that government can do a few things well. In fact, government has an affirmative obligation to do some things very well. Which is why I called for a central web-based service whose primary remit would be to make complying with law and regulation as easy and effortless as possible. We are not going to get rid of regulation entirely but we could do a lot to make the burden of compliance less effortful.

 

We can add entrepreneurship into our schools, not by creating academies that are ghettos for enterprising students but weave it into the fabric of our core curriculum. Understanding how the world works is key to an engaged and empowered citizenry. Government can play a significant role there.

 

As for Business Links, good bye; I shall not miss your passing.