Northwest Regional Stakeholder Event Business Support Simplification Programme (BSSP) 1 August 2007, The Lowry Centre, Salford Quays
Q&A Panel Session Panel Members Mark Gibson, Director General, Dept for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform Brian Leonard, Director General, Dept for Culture, Media & Sport John Bourne, Deputy Director, Dept for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs Simon Caunt, Deputy Director, CBI NW Mark Hughes, Executive Director of Enterprise & Skills, NWDA David Higham, Director Economy & Regional Issues, Government Office NW Chaired by Steve Bennett, Vice Chair of IoD NW & Chair of NW BSSP Steering Group
Question 1 Harry Knowles, Furness Enterprise, Barrow-in-Furness Concerning the business need – there is the business support need where we are trying to improve the competitiveness of business but there is also business support need where what we are trying to do is improve our community (where we have a deprived community with lack of businesses, lack of jobs etc). I can understand a more national approach for the competitiveness/improvement area of need but where we are trying to actually deal with worklessness type issues it seems to be that we need a much more localised flexible approach to that. I would welcome the panel’s comments please. Answer Mark Gibson I basically agree with what Harry has said. The issue is defining what is national and what is, in a sense, local. I think in the group that I was in with you, Harry, I gave the example of a capital investment need for a company. By and large, a company in Barnstable or Barrow who which wishes to invest in it’s plant and machinery or buildings in my view should have, in a sense, the same national or regional offer depending on what’s been approved by the European Commission. However, clearly there are, in this country, a number of deprived areas and those deprived areas will actually differ in their history as to why they are deprived. So Barrow is deprived because of a long legacy of heavy concentration of jobs in manufacturing, which has now been reduced, so a long period of people losing their jobs and in a sense becoming workless that way. Barrow does not have a large ethnic minority community; whereas Croydon does. So clearly there is a difference in deprived areas of the country in terms of their needs, and it is not the objective of the Business Support Simplification Programme, in a sense, to deny that local flexibility. It is, however, to ensure that local interventions are targeted on those depravations – on those local needs. I was in Croydon yesterday. Croydon in South London, you might not believe, has some of the most deprived wards in the whole country. They have received LEGI funding. That LEGI funding is being targeted. LEGI local enterprise, growth Initiative Funding, is being targeted only on those deprived wards, I was relieved to hear. So the salubrious bits of South Croydon are not getting access to that local enterprise,
growth initiative funding and that sort of very tight targeting of what the local problems are, I think is the way forward and absolutely completely justified in terms of both market failure, equity and whatever other justification you want to need. The trickiness is in defining the grey areas between the national and the local. So my capital investment point was at one of the spectrum, the sort of local deprived communities at the other. You can have a debate around one or two in the middle. Answer David Higham Just to build on what Mark has said, in the context of what we are doing in the North West and the particular issue that Mark identified about the importance of distinguishing between national, local issues and the importance of focusing on deprived communities where there are special issues of depravation is something that we are looking at. We have looked at it in the past and we will be looking at it in the future as we negotiate the local area agreements with local authorities in the North West over the next 12 months. So that is a particular issue that we will be looking at. Question 2 Peter Hensman, Chairman of North West Rural Business Sector Advisory Group At our meeting the other day we were very concerned, looking at the final area of the various themes (sales and marketing theme) that it concentrates solely on international marketing and support for international firms. Most of the people in the rural business community, many of which would be very small and their idea of export may actually be getting it out of Cumbria into Lancashire let alone across the world. Yet if they are going to learn to grow that is what they have got to learn to do and be helped with. I wonder if some thought could be given to changing that and including some support for national marketing and regional marketing and not just international? Answer John Bourne I am not sure I am qualified to speak on that particular aspect of rural. The answer is, in principal I would sympathise, but in terms of what’s in the consultation I am not sure I am qualified to answer. Answer Mark Gibson Well let me try and answer it. Clearly the Business Link offering is open to, in a sense, all rural businesses. So if a rural business farming business comes along to Business Link and says we need to know about sources of sales and marketing advice I would expect Business Link Northwest to be able to provide a quality service in that regard. Is it then justified for, in a sense, there to be sales and marketing help for every single rural business in the country? I think that is a genuine issue for debate in the consultation period. I can see a case perhaps for rural businesses in the most deprived rural areas, on the same argument I used before. But would you necessarily want to provide sales and marketing help for (and this is pejorative, so please forgive me) big farming barons in East Anglia? What is the difference between providing help to them and a multinational company? Would you go along to a multinational company and say offer them (British Aerospace) sales and marketing help? They would laugh in your face. So I think you actually do have to target a bit more. So it is the diagnosis offer, I think should be available to all, pointing, signposting to other support. Whether you want
to offer sales and marketing help in a sort of generic way to every single rural business, or indeed any business, I think that is an issue to think about in the consultation. Answer Brian Leonard Just to make a narrower response to that. It is very important that we know what we are trying to achieve in rolling out policies, and then business support really should follow from that. If the media city next door is to achieve its highest objectives to being the primary media cluster and business cluster in Europe or the World, and if the UK economy is to maintain its position in the very top group of countries; it has to be very, very good. In that, every single source of talent that we have has to be found and it has to be able to apply itself commercially quickly, and as well as possible in a desperately competitive environment. That must be a concern for government and for business support. On the other hand if you look at some of our rural areas, if the objective is to maintain rural communities and if what we see there is an unlikelihood that agriculture is going to develop or agricultural processing is going to develop much more then the visitor economy industries and creative industries will become increasingly crucial. Now the fact that they are probably never, ever going to be competing internationally in this very high level is something which doesn’t mean they should be ignored, certainly not as far as DCMS is concerned. It just means that you have got to have a completely different approach and that the support you are giving to them is in order to maintain the community – the fabric – the way in which they are working in that. Indeed, of course, the superstars immerge from places like this and routes out of there; usually by higher or further education are important. We are also seeing some recycling (this sounds like a disparaging term) where people go to the cities and make a career and then they have had enough of it really and they go back into rural communities. There is a real test there, because in one sense they are the last kind of people you would need to provide business support and are they actually adding to the fabric of the community or are they just buying up the local vicarage and doing it up. I think what sits behind business support is some kind of strategic assessment of what is going on and an understanding of what the future might hold. Understanding of what the public policy objectives, which might not all be economic, in a sense of driving forward the UK economy and then an adaptation for that. I think the kinds of plans that are emerging out of the simplification programme are capable of allowing for that. That perspective, that completely different perspective between a village in Cumbria and Media City for example is a very important one to keep I think. Question 3 Joe Murray, runs two small engineering businesses, one in Liverpool and one in Oldham. My market is based in the UK, so if I was looking for business support to grow my business in the UK there is nothing in that consultation document, it is all overseas export. Which is irrelevant whether the business is rural or in Kirkby like mine. Answer Mark Gibson It is not the aim of government to provide business support to meet every single business need. There has to be some justification in a sense for public intervention. The reason why there is a concentration on international export help is that it is quite difficult to export to China or India. It is more difficult than it is to sell in the UK
because you are UK businesses. That doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be some level of help in the UK as I tried to explain earlier. The aim of government provided business support is actually to provide it for some specific reason around clear market failure. Why is that important? – Because you don’t want to crowd out the private sector. If there is a private sector market already making products available why should the public sector, why should tax payer’s money be used? Sometimes we get the example of why isn’t there more help for companies to get broadband connections? Well actually there are a lot of companies out there providing broadband for everyone, individuals as well as companies. There is an active market there. There is no justification for public support; except perhaps in rural Cumbria where the market may not operate. The other justifications are around equity. You might have some public policy reasons to invest around deprived communities or wherever. It is not the aim of public interventions to support in a sense every single business need. It might be a touch answer to give but it is an honest answer. Answer Simon Caunt From the business lobbying position. The point was well made and it was made in a couple of the seminars that I went to. I guess from our perspective that’s why we want it to be a demand-driven system. If that need from a business perspective is identified, then the role of the oversight and ongoing management of it is important. That is to say that if that a business need has been identified, is it something that then falls into an area that the government can then put into business support? That might be the gateway provider’s responsibility to signpost a private provision where that exists. It might be that it is based on geographic need or it might be it is based on growth potential. The reality, I realise for the government is there is a limited resource to spread across the UK, but our perspective it has to be a demand driver. The business support has to move with the business, otherwise we get a disconnect between the support services and where business actually is at the time. Answer Mark Gibson Can I just come back on that. I agree entirely. It is essential that what comes out of the simplification process is, in a sense, those interventions where there is good evidence that business really values and needs that support. It is absolutely the intention for this to be demand led. However, government cannot move to a situation in which, in effect, you respond to business saying it needs support in every single area. If you offer a company a grand it will always say thank you very much. You can’t run, in a sense, public intervention on that basis. You have to work from the position that you are trying to target business need and then inject, as you rightly say, some element of public policy on top of that. Answer Mark Hughes Just a couple of points really. I think a number of questions actually come back to fundamental questions around clarity about why we are intervening. As I said in my very short introduction, we need to be very clear about why we are intervening and actually recognise that sometimes we have different policy drivers; that may mean we have different answers in different places. On the demand led point of view, one of the answers to if businesses say this thing is working and this thing is really good is actually then go to the private sector and say look clearly there is a demand here for this type of service why isn’t the private sector actually providing that service. To go back to the original question. If you do look further in the document there are quite a lot of things that might be appropriate for you around innovation, around
finance, around skills, support that may actually help you address the question you’ve raised. I am sure Peter Watson may come across to you later from Business Link and talk to you about having that conversation as well. Answer John Vaughan Wearing a broader DEFRA hat, I think you have uncovered an omission in the structure because actually there is money available for that sort of thing in the rural areas through the RDPE from Europe and that needs to be encapsulated in the overall structure so I think we need to take that one away and make sure it is. Question 4 Ahmed Ali, Tameside Equality and Diversity Centre One of the principal areas of work that we do is deal with equality and diversity issues. Whilst I welcome the business simplification programme, I would like to ask the panel firstly about the role of the third sector, in terms of procurement and commissioning. And secondly how does the panel feel in terms of the broadening of the programme to the BME business sector and also the women in business? I think it is one of the six themes in the simplification programme because there is a disparity in those sectors between the south and the north. I would like to have their view on this. Answer Mark Hughes If by your question about around the third sector what role do we envisage them maybe taking in delivery of support services. Clearly there is government thrust to open up the market and encourage the third sector to participate and we actually have (this is an interesting one) specific business support activity going to the third sector already within the region to improve their ability and capability to bid for activities that maybe tendered by any part of government. So there is actually some specific activity going on there. In terms of your second question about BME and women and particular community interest needs. I think it actually relates back to the earlier point. It is a different kind of slant on the spatial concentration of issues. We have a community based concentration of issues and therefore need to ensure that there are local solutions available and directed towards those communities that are set within the overall framework. Again, if you look at within the simplification framework there are proposed solutions around enterprise generation in disadvantaged communities and areas and again that should really talk to the community groups that you have just alluded to. I think they are quite well recognised within the framework that we are talking about and indeed there are solutions that should encompass them. There are obviously lots of issues in terms of how that is delivered and how do we actually get the right access channels in place but as an issue I would say it is definitely recognised. Answer David Higham Just to again reinforce Mark’s point. I would expect that would be an issue that Tameside would want to be bringing forward in context of the new local area agreement. If it is an issue in Tameside then Tameside ought to be coming forward with proposals for addressing it which we can then play into the discussions on business support simplification.
Question 5 Anthony Storey, Junction YK I was quite interested in your point that you can’t fund all businesses; clearly you can’t but in terms of the support, the support seems to be taking the shape that it is to do with giving handouts or advice of some sort or other. Now if you take the case of broadband then you are right you can’t give everyone the money to go off and create a broadband connection or pay for their broadband connection but there are probably most companies you can give the justification for them to take the decision that actually it is worth them spending their own money to do it because in very few cases will not make your money back from that investment. What I was wondering is that within this simplification agenda how much attention are you paying to not giving hand-out support but advice – much more to do with marketing I think, and providing information so that businesses are enabled, as in the case we had earlier on, they don’t need advice, they just need to know what do I do, where do I go to and also to create environments where you can get advice from each other (from the people you trust) which, as in today’s internet world, is very possible. I just wondered what shape does that play in your thinking. Answer Simon Caunt The SME consultation I referred to earlier this week suggested that there was a strong support for mentoring and support networks. These are not necessarily clear in the consultation. From a business growth perspective they value that informal support, informal advice, and informal encouragement as much as the formal advice, funding, grant, support and areas - so I would like to reinforce that one really. Answer Mark Gibson Yes, it is a very, very good question and one that we are, in a sense, have grappled with in the past and will continue in the future. Broadband is a good example because in the early days of the internet there were national government awareness and promotion campaigns – help-lines across the country, quite large of sums of central government money spent which are now no longer spent in a sense as the private sector market has developed. Your question is essentially will that scenario come up in the future and the answer is probably yes it will. You do get new developments in technology, new phases of growth whatever it might be in which there will be a national imperative that British Industry has to get ahead of the pack. The manufacturing advisory service is a bit of an example of that because the economic justification for the manufacturing advisory service is around the spread of lean manufacturing. A technique that came out of Toyota into a large number of small firms. There might well become a point in a few years time where, in a sense, it is spread so widely that there is no longer any justification for public support. I think it is some time off but the point that you are making is an absolutely valid one, and yes in the future, in my view, there will be occasions where, central government will see a need on public interest grounds to do more in terms of awareness. Answer Mark Hughes I think the ICT discussion was based on asymmetrical information in a market place. A lot of government initiatives got burned in the dotcom boom and oversold what ICT could do for them. So in a sense there maybe a resistance to engage in it; but we all know in this global world we need them to engage with it etc and obviously there is a great play in new media and diversion technology. At one level, again I will go back to the role of Business Link. Business Link does have a role in brokering to potential solutions and ICT would be one of those themes.
There is already a component of a service offering in there. I do think that there is actually a real question. We have moved our support away from enabling broadband take-ups; we have moved it away from providing infrastructure support. Is there, as Mark Gibson terms it, a public interest/need to do something around ICT to exploit those opportunities so the economy as a whole can move forward? Again, I think that is something that should be taken on board within the thinking of the product suite within business support. Answer Mark Gibson By the way I am a little bit of a sceptic in this area. I think government needs to be very, very careful at not preaching to business. All of us read the financial times, all of us listen to the news media. This country has just about the most developed media in the whole world and for government to rush into to lots of telling business that there has been some new development it just doesn’t carry too much credibility. My view is that, yes, there is a real justification but government just needs to be a little bit careful about over-preaching. Investors in people is a very good example of that, where, in effect the sales technique of investors in people was to get companies to sell it, in a sense, for the government. Question 6 June Smith, Oldham Council I am aware some of my question has been answered. Oldham, like many other places represented here today has got a very large SME community coupled with the largest part of manufacturing in Greater Manchester. That includes some very good quality, high value manufacturers. It also includes a lot of SMEs who have plateaued and I think, speaking to them on the ground there is a need to promote what is out there in terms of innovation and research and development. You may say it is not for us to preach to businesses but a lot of these very small businesses don’t live in our economic awareness world; they are just out there doing the business and it is a day to day living. I do think that, rather than preaching to businesses, we need to be proactive in going out there and telling our SMEs what is out there, what are the business benefits of product innovation, process innovation – because they are not aware of Simon’s list of things which are going to influence their business necessarily over the next 10 years. Answer Mark Gibson I agree with you 100%. I think there is a real need in many ways for more of this pot of money to be spent on awareness of the help than in devising new forms of help so I basically agree with your point. I would like to see much better marketing awareness of the help that is available including the mainstream help than I would in constantly inventing new products, new interventions that duplicate an overlap what is there in the market place already. Answer David Higham Just to make the rather obvious point that not all that help which is available is necessarily provided by the public sector.
Answer John Bourne I think there is quite an interesting debate about what support means and we certainly in our area have taken it to include the role of Business Link. If you are a private business and you go to Business Link, even if they then signpost you to a private sector provider you have had a small element of public support. The awareness raising on the environment front - you can do it a whole range of ways and it is very important and you will see we have written it down in our product descriptor that actually you have seen it happen in a big way nationally in the national newspapers over this last 12 months. Climate change used to be a page 10 issue; it is now a page 1 issue. That itself should stimulate demand. It is not the only way; there are lots of ways of doing it. I think we have to look outside the box if we are looking back at policy makers – how you stimulate that awareness. You can do it in a very wide range of ways, not all of them which are linked to this business support programme; there are wider policy issues there. Question 7 Laura Wolfe, Institute of Directors I would like to agree with what you said, there is a lot out there and it is about making the message clear and making everything accessible. I think the success of this whole process depends on the private and public sectors working together. The CBI, the IOD, the FSB all working with you to get the message across. Unfortunately there are not that many private individuals here today and that is disappointing. I am sure Simon, like the IOD, have invited their members here today and unfortunately when the private sector sees things like this they think it is not for me – what is in it for me and my business? – they don’t see the benefit that they are doing their business today and they don’t see the benefit of coming to something like this today. I really do feel it is important that we keep communicating with you and that we work together on this. Answer Mark Gibson The onus is also on us to listen to the points that you have made and to listen very, very carefully. Actually in terms of the early draft of the consultation document. I shouldn’t embarrass the CBI but they produced an absolutely tremendous piece of work which we took really careful notice of in producing the final version. Not least around simple things like ‘can you please use plain English’ and ‘avoid the jargon’ which I am personally obsessed about. It really helps to get this sort of feedback from business representative bodies which almost always are talking for their own membership as well. So if the CBI says that it is too full of jargon you can guarantee that a small firm in Oldham would think that ever more so. Answer Brian Leonard I was just going to say that another part of DCMS’s responsibility is public libraries and there is more than one senior successful business person from decades past who have found out what they wanted to know and needed to know by beginning to go to their public library and that seems rather quaint now, possibly. Certainly, because I know this from my presence in the department, there is a major variation in the use of public libraries between communities across the country. In some communities it is very high. It is so high that libraries are under intense stress because there are so many people using them. In other areas it is not too high at all and tends to be focussed on young children, for example. You would know better in Oldham, or wherever, whether a piece of infrastructure like a library is one means of getting to these businesses. It might not be at all, it might be quite a lot. You would
know better whether the answer is for these businesses to form some kind of business club which can collectively consider the issues and then disseminate information between themselves. In the creative industries, that is one of the ways to get in. They actually get into the network and encourage the networks to strengthen at small, medium enterprise level rather than to try and invent something and ask them to come along to it. It is actually to encourage greater institutionalisation but that is a rather grand word, club-like activity and then use those networks to provide information such as ‘have you thought about innovating’. The solution can’t be topped down, you can’t say that one solution is the right one, which is why, it seems to be that your view from a place like Oldham is absolutely vital. Question 8 from Steve Bennett, (Chair) A question I know I overheard and I would to take the opportunity to raise on this theme is: Where do you see the future involvement of saying organisations like the Inland Revenue and the Customs and Excise who are very often the first port of call for people who are looking to set up businesses and provide very good advice, where do they fit in within this Simplification programme? Answer Mark Gibson Well they fit in two ways. First of all they are on the Cross Whitehall Programme Board; which is actually meeting this morning and they will be there. So they are involved, in the sense of being required to think themselves as to how they’re own support for business, their advice and guidance fits in. They are also the lead department on Business Link.gov. So they are the main funder of Business Link.gov which is a cross government website. The reason they are is basically for the obvious reason that what is guaranteed in businesses that they have some contact with HMRC. Companies House Insolvency Service and HMRC are the sort of guaranteed contacts. Yes they are fully involved. They’re certainly critical to the future development of Business Link.gov because they are the main funding stream. We are involved as well and we work very closely with them and their advice services to business; which need to be part of the overall picture. I would expect them to work very, very closely in the region with Business Link Northwest. I don’t know if they are or not but in the future we would expect that sort of detailed engagement. Question 9 Holly Bonfield, Federation of Small Business Linking to one or two of the comments recently about raising awareness in small business about what is out there. Also going back to the fact that any provision must be demand driven, I think one of the issues often is that small businesses don’t necessarily know what it is they are looking for. If, as brokers or advisers, we just simply point them to something that is in a list of whatever is already there then we are in danger of bypassing the problem and if we don’t actually look at the problem with the small business then we don’t necessarily get anywhere near the solution. So I think one of the gaps in the model at the moment is a mentoring or coaching role to help small businesses find out what it is they need. It is much more powerful for any person or any organisation to work out its own needs for somebody else to come along and say here is what you need and I’ve got one that is just right for you. Answer Mark Hughes Just on the particular question about understanding businesses needs, Business Link does not go with a shopping list of products to accompany that. That is the complete antithesis of the nature of the service. Business Link goes very much into
understanding what the symptom may be but actually trying to get behind the symptom. Business Link has actually been doing some very intensive work around how businesses and individuals present themselves to Business Link, and actually what is the root or fundamental issues that the business is trying to address. I would actually say that the Business Link service is adopting the approach that you suggested. Clearly we have got time to embed that and we have got time to communicate that more with SMEs in the region. I would put mentoring and networks very close together in terms of what they can do. They are organic, they are of the group, they flourish, there are lots of them already out there and I think one of the things that we need to do is actually make them more known. There are many such mentoring facilities out there. Enterprising Agencies have a mentoring facility, even Prince’s Trust have a mentoring facility. There are lots of mentoring activities out there in the region in different localities and again we just come back to this question. It is about making sure that information is available to all and again I would go back to Business Link role – to actually make that available and not only available to businesses but actually available to all other business support organisations in the region. So the information directory is actually available to all of you as well as to businesses. I think Business Link is doing what you’ve said it should do and I would support your question around networks and mentoring but I think there are many out there that exist, very informal, very organic and may be we just need to make a bit more effort about connecting people to them. Question 10 Paul Davidson, Bolton Business Ventures I just wanted to ask the panel what their view of the success of the business simplification process would like in one or two years time, both from the supply and the demand side. One of the measurements we have heard this morning was reducing the number of schemes. I think it was 3000 to 100. Will there be other tangible measurements that we can judge the success of this by in years to come. Will it be less money going into business support from the public Exchequer? Will it more money. Will it be more businesses coming in to use the network? Will it be more businesses using private sector offers? What will success look like? Answer Mark Gibson Well I shall try and distinguish between the shorter run and the longer run. Where do we hope to get to in six months/twelve months time? Well we want to try and get clarity around, what I tried to describe in my talk; the new world and that includes not just the support that will be available but the branding/marketing delivery. If we haven’t got that clarity in twelve months time well I will personally in trouble. Also clarity around what isn’t going to continue what I term the ‘legacy’; that which doesn’t fit with the new world. In terms of the longer run this is not about reducing the overall amount of money spent on business support at all. It is around reducing the amount of money spent on administration of business support and the Business Support Simplification document has some indicative numbers. We do want it basically to reach more businesses, so Business Link itself has to have targets around market penetration so we do want more awareness, more penetration. We don’t want to reduce the overall level. We do want better value for money in terms of delivering and we obviously want businesses to actually say it is simpler which is pretty easily measured, you ask them. You go on asking them. Over the longer run there will be monitoring evaluation put in place for the whole portfolio. There is clearly some good monitoring and evaluation for some of the individual schemes. We can’t compare as well as we would like between one intervention and another. We will get to that point and so government can make more informed choices.
Answer Simon Caunt I think it boils down to something quite simple really - that the gateway or the provider will ask the businesses and say it is working, does it do what it says on the tin and has it evolved has it changed? I am pleased to note the fact that we had it said here that it isn’t about less money being spent on business support it is about better value for the money that is spent and that effectively is the key thing. Is the pound that the government is spending having a return on its investment from a business perspective? It is relatively simple it is those two things back to this demand driven thing. Are we doing what we say on the tin?
Final Question It has already been said that the Business Link will be the gateway for business support through this new scheme. We have already discussed that part of this role of Business Link is not just about funding and grants but about signposting to the private sector. With that in mind, how does the panel believe that this scheme can ensure that Business Link will be fair and equitable in the way that they do that signposting to the private sector?
Answer Mark Hughes Business Link has been in operation now for three or four months. It has been undertaking quite an extensive outreach programme to private sector organisations to encourage them to register as a service provider within the Business Link offering. If you haven’t, then I would encourage you to do so. Business Link has built within its principles that it offers a range of options to the client. There is not a necessarily preferred to supplier of a particular solution. It offers a range and effectively the client has to make the decision over which of those it needs to involve. For the private sector it the need to engage with Business Link and become part of the offering. The client ultimately makes the choice. The one thing that Business Link is also working on is how to obtain feedback from both the client and the provider because they can have different perspectives on their engagement. It is still working on the system of how to build that kind of information back into the referral mechanism but again I would refer you back to Peter Watson in Business Link and engage with him and go through the detail with him. Answer Mark Gibson It is an absolutely fundamental principle of the whole information diagnosis and brokerage model that there should be equity and fairness of treatment between different providers of business support. We would be worried nationally if there was any indication that this was not happening because basically it would run against the whole model that is being set up. The private sector must be involved in providing business support. Answer John Bourne I think there are some quite interesting issues around this issue of opening up the private sector. In the environmental space it is quite a complex delivery landscape with Carbon Trust and WRAP and others which were partly set up with public money. They were set up at one particular stage in, if you like, in the development of the
Environmental Agenda. We have moved onto a new stage now and we will be on another new stage in five years time. What we are looking at in DEFRA is challenging ourselves – does that sort of delivery landscape, with that type of public intervention still make sense now, several years after it was set up or are we actually hindering, if you like, the development of a private sector solution to those problems. It is quite difficult and I think all one can say that we should and must continue to challenge ourselves as to whether we have got the right answer. Hopefully we will see evolution that will eventually, if you look somewhere down the road, lead to a much more, if not wholly, private sector response which is taking it a stage beyond the Business Link aspect but onto the more complex delivery landscape that sits behind it.
Thanks to the panel.