Small Companies (Micro-Entities’ Accounts) Regulations 2013

Debate between Baroness Donaghy and Earl of Erroll

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I will ask a quick question. This issue occurred in relation to something else where there were exemptions for small companies, SMEs or micro-companies. It is in the definition of companies that qualify as micro-entities. The third criterion that can be applied is the number of employees: not more than 10. It then talks about averaging the number of people in contracts of service. If you employ two people part-time—for instance, one who has young children and wants to take them to and pick them up from school, and the other who is retired, say, and happy to fill in for the rest of the day—you are employing two people, but you only have one full-time equivalent. In that kind of situation, or with people working seasonally or casually, this criterion could discriminate against small employers who are trying to get several people all doing a bit of part-time work for them, because the number of employees could then easily exceed 10. Therefore, it should probably be worded as full-time equivalents in future. I will not suggest anything here, but I want to flag up the general point to regulation-makers that it would be fairer on small entities if there was some way to bring it back to full-time equivalents.

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

First, I welcome anything that makes life easier for small businesses. I have often felt that the definition of small and medium-sized enterprises that fits in with the European definition is somewhat misleading in our country because a medium enterprise as per the definition would be regarded as quite a large company in the UK, so to recognise micros in this way is more than welcome.

I have a question for the Minister that I suppose relates to the flexibility of the definitions of turnover, balance and staffing, referred to by the previous speaker. I hastily looked through both the impact assessment and the regulations and could not find anywhere how the updating of the turnovers and balances will take place. What length of time is considered reasonable? I believe that the issue of part-time equivalents is quite important, particularly for companies of this kind that might start off in a fairly informal way. It is actually written in to the regulations, which I presume means it is quite inflexible.