Janet Finch-Saunders
It’s always a pleasure to speak on small business here, especially as, as has been referred to, we have Small Business Saturday coming up, and I do hope we all actually go out there and support our local businesses—not just now but all the time.
Small and medium-sized enterprises in Wales account for 99.9 per cent of private sector business, three quarters of employment and 59 per cent of turnover. Recent stats have shown encouraging growth in the number of Welsh enterprises, although growth rates still lag far behind the UK average. This growth indicates a strengthening economy, and whilst confidence is increasing, it is disappointing to note that the likelihood, still, of Welsh businesses reaching the three-year survival mark stands at 58.8 per cent—well below the UK average.
It is essential that we reward the confidence of our entrepreneurs and business owners by putting in place an effective support package to ensure that more and more Welsh businesses hit the three and five-year—and beyond—survival rate. UK Government initiatives have assisted thousands of small start-up businesses here in Wales, such as the increased employment allowance, enabling businesses to open up job opportunities, taking on skilled staff; the British Business Bank, which has guaranteed more than 1,100 loans to support small businesses in Wales; and the new enterprise allowance that has helped thousands of people across Wales to start their own businesses.
However, the Welsh Government’s inward investment policies and objectives have been labelled ‘generic and mimetic’ in a recent Federation of Small Businesses report. The Finance Wales initiative remains unfit for purpose, and the impact of enterprise zones on SMEs is not even being recorded, so how on earth do we expect to monitor progress?
Furthermore, the FSB have highlighted the need to increase the social ask of larger organisations to ensure that inward investment has a positive effect on all aspects of our economy. One way in which this could be done is by ensuring that large supermarkets sign up to promote our local Welsh produce—red meat and dairy products to name just two—with dedicated aisle space and thorough signing up to our red meat charter.
Small businesses are often significant players in the creation and protection of local identities and communities, and can be key to promoting their unique culture and heritage. The FSB have highlighted the importance of small businesses in terms of local job creation, which then, in turn, drives the local economy and wealth creation—it keeps that wheel going around. Innovative initiatives such as Small Business Saturday help to showcase local businesses and talent, and certainly encourage people to shop local. However, we need to build on the success of Small Business Saturday all year round. Local and community-led regeneration is key to delivering jobs and growth in our towns and our high streets. The First Minister, in 2012, stated:
‘We will never go back to the days when the high streets were full of shops’.
Well, I ask him why not? The Welsh Conservatives want to overturn this attitude. We have faith in our local communities, we have faith in our SMEs and we have faith in our entrepreneurs. Through simple measures and engagement—for example, introducing free parking schemes, encouraging local procurement by our councils, ensuring reliable and effective transport and communications infrastructure and effectively managing our own town centres—I truly believe that we will see busy bustling high streets again. Whilst we all pooh-pooh the idea of online trading, I actually do quite a bit of online shopping, but a lot of my stuff actually comes from businesses that have opened up in the high street actually now running very successful passing-trade businesses and online shopping.
It is crucial that we put our SMEs at the heart of our economic policy, improving access to finance, extending business rate relief and establishing an independent arm’s-length body to deliver fair and efficient infrastructure developments. We, the Welsh Conservatives, have these policies in place, and come 6 May next year, I hope that we have the chance to actually help our small businesses and actually give them greater initiatives. I am pleased that the Small Business Saturday initiative has enabled us to bring these issues to the Chamber once again, and I hope once more that we see a real change in response from the Welsh Government. It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. It’s time to start helping our SMEs: the lifeblood of our economy, and the backbone of our communities.