For those of you who watch BBC East Midlands, you may have seen me on “Our Economy – The East Midlands Today Debate” and also a feature on my hopes for the budget on the local news.
The most disappointing announcement for me was that Nottingham has missed out on it’s bid for the Super Connected Cities fund. It’s a real shame for the city. There was an additional, smaller, fund announced so hopefully the bid team can dust themselves off and we can go again.
The day before the budget there were various discussions about discounted lending for small businesses (those with less than £50m turnover). This is an amendment to the existing Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme where the government underwrites this lending, protecting the banks.
What hasn’t changed are the rules around lending. So it will only be beneficial if the problem is the cost of credit rather than access to credit for small companies. Unfortunately what I am seeing is a problem with the latter rather than the former. I would have liked to have seen more focus on making finance and mentorship available to first time entrepreneurs.
I believe that the Chancellor has taken a fairly big gamble with taxation. He’s reducing the taxes of the wealthiest in our society, both personal and corporate, with the hypothesis that this will stimulate investment and spending. It will be very hard to judge whether this has had a directly attributable effect whatever the outcome.
Esendex and its team members are probably broadly better off as a result of this budget. Whether the country is, remains to be seen.
This leaves us with an important responsibility. We must continuing growing, exporting and investing so that we can further contribute to our local economy and community.
