Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Lord Cope of Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 12th January 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Cope of Berkeley (Con)]

My Lords, I want to reinforce some of what my noble friend the Minister has just said with regard to these definitions and whether they should include any financial criteria as well as the headcount. It is very important that they do, and I was disappointed to see that this amendment left out the financial provisions. If the Committee looked through the list of businesses that we were looking at the other day, while considering the amendment of my noble friend Lord Flight, your Lordships would see that some very large businesses with huge turnovers—or, for that matter, huge balance sheet totals—nevertheless have very few people working for them. They have very few employees and are not small businesses by any normal criteria. It is important to include financial criteria within these definitions.

[Lord Mendelsohn]

I thank the Minister for her reply. The noble Lord, Lord Cope, made an important point about the size of businesses and the financial criteria when evaluating the different areas to look at. One has to take note of the huge imbalance that there is in the volume of businesses with very small numbers of employees and characteristics. You could distort that by the introduction of certain financial measures but, as I said, it is not that we believe that there is an absence of financial figures. If you are looking at where you can target policy, that is so but we want to illustrate a point within this—that there is a common interest in the promotion of small businesses and in trying to create measures to do that.

Considering the deregulatory issues about burdens and other sorts of things is one side of it—my noble friend Lord Stevenson outlined some of our concerns in relation to them—but this Bill is not just about removing burdens of regulation. It has to be about being able to promote small businesses, and people who are engaged in the activity of developing them, by easing their burdens and making their commercial activities much stronger and more successful. In that context, when we talk about regulatory burdens, every single poll of small businesses here, in keeping with those in other places, will demonstrate strongly that those issues are dwarfed in significance for them by the problems of payments—access to credit, cash flow and other sorts of things.

Within that context, we are also looking at the challenges which small businesses have in relation to competing in markets dominated by larger companies. On the issues that they have about access to markets, turnover thresholds and employment and other sorts of things, we are keen to think about how you can use these measures to try to design policy, support and other sorts of levers for the future. With a sense that the Minister will reflect carefully on that side of the coin, I beg leave to withdraw our amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Deben]

I was referring not to that issue, but to the issue of clearing up the connection between business rates and home businesses. Unless we do that, there could be circumstances in which the home became liable to business rates and then it could be seen as a business property. I want to make sure that, if such a business was sold, the owner could maintain the right to sell his own property without VAT—

[Lord Cope of Berkeley]

And capital gains tax.

[Lord Deben]

Yes, the capital gains tax element becomes very serious in that regard. I know that my noble friend will tell me that, happily, it is all here, but I am just not sure that everybody will understand that. I want to make sure that the guidance makes it clear that people are protected.