Well, that’s what the new government is calling it. Let’s hope they mean it. New legislation has been introduced and new Ministers have been appointed specifically to champion the cause of small businesses. But having listened to some of the announcements and read the proposals, I can’t help thinking it’s more of the same rhetoric that we have heard previously.

The new Minister for Small Business has never run one, but then there probably wasn’t a candidate in the senior Tory ranks that has, so you can’t blame the individual. It’s the system.

Lack of consistency is a big problem
Then there’s the question of whether the government knows what a small business really is. For VAT purposes, you are only small enough to avoid registration if your turnover is under £80,000. For accounting purposes small is about to be defined as £10 million! Consistency? There’s another of the problems.

So exactly what help is promised to those of us who run a small business? The government’s flagship proposal is the setting up of a Small Business Conciliation Service, which will apparently help small businesses to settle disputes with large companies ‘quickly and cheaply’. What world do they live in?

There are never ‘disputes’ between large and small businesses. The big boys pick on the little ones – they decide how long they are going to take to pay your bill, they give you no help with cash flow generally and when they want to promote your product in the retail sector, they demand that you make a contribution to it.

Don’t pass on the cost of price wars to small suppliers
I’ve seen it from all of the big retailers to a number of my clients. They do it in different guises, but it all comes back to the same thing – they want to reduce their selling prices on your products, so you have to suffer the financial consequences.

My simple interpretation of the argument between the supermarkets and the farmers over the price of milk is that it is yet another example. Let the supermarkets have a price war – that’s good for all of us – but don’t allow them to pass the cost of that war on to the milk suppliers. Let it come out of their own profits – they are plenty big enough given recent results.