Your Business

Promises, promises. It’s almost six months since Gordon Brown first promised British business that the Government would come up with a new investment fund to back growing firms. Today Alistair Darling will say that some progress has at last been made. I’ve been told that he has managed to sign up at least four major banks – including the two he owns on behalf of us – to create the fund, which will be known as either the Growth Capital Fund or the Small Business Growth Fund (depending on which Government source you talk to).

With the Government acting as an anchor investor, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds are stumping up around £100m each and Santander and Clydesdale have agreed… Read More

Lord Mandelson visits a Sunderland manufacturer, 2009 (Photo: PA)

Lots of people hate Lord Mandelson, but there’s one group of people who love him. Manufacturers, after years of neglect from Westminster, finally have a hero.

This may seem surprising because they have normally favoured the Tories, with their tax-cutting, low-regulation agenda. But a year after Mandelson’s new industrial strategy, the business secretary has today launched another raft of announcements promising that the Government will help create a new wave of private-sector investment in manufacturing.

In a co-ordinated attack, business department ministers have been dispatched across the country to talk up Labour’s efforts. Ian Luca… Read More

Ready those bayonets. The battle over the future funding of higher education has begun. Firing an early pre-General Election campaign volley are employers. The Association of Graduate Recruiters, representing the views of 750 major employers that hire 30,000 graduates a year, has called for parents to pay more.
It says lifting the fees cap – currently £3,240 a year – is needed if standards are to be maintained in the wake of planned cuts in university budgets.

Their members are on the receiving end of the university output, which is heading southwards. The experience has led the organisation to call for “quality not quantity.” The demand that parents pay more will not appeal to either the Government or students. Lord Drayson,… Read More

The official statistician has just declared that Britain emerged from recession at the end of last year. The growth was a measley 0.1pc and is likely to be revised. But it would seem appropriate to mark the moment with a celebratory brew.

Taking a minute to reflect on the madness of the last 18 months will prove worthwhile – those business owners still trading can look around them and feel proud of what they have preserved.

Whether 2010 will be any easier on the nerves remains to be seen. The economic consensus is for GDP growth of 1.5pc this year – but economists have not covered themselves in glory in the last two years.

Individual businesses and sectors will plot their own paths. The… Read More

MPs have cast a light into the murky world of taxpayer-funded adult training and found such appalling waste and mismanagement that serious questions have been raised over the future of the Government’s flagship adult training scheme.

The £900m a year “Train To Gain” was launched four years ago and aimed to tackle the seven million adults who cannot count and five million who cannot read properly by teaching them in the workplace.

Some 200,000 employers responded to those prime time TV ads showing a heavy goods vehicle hurtling down the motorway, accompanied by a voice over explaining that Train to Gain’s specialists could “work with you to decide what skills your staff need”.

Unfortunately, the driver hadn’t passed his test. The… Read More

Four shadowy figures meet today to decide the fate of the cheque, a form of payment familiar to the British for over three centuries.

The independent directors of the Payments Council have the unpleasant task of telling us that cheques are redundant and that instead of letting them die out slowly, we should make a clean break in 2018. Cue much heated debate between the naysayers and the so-called progressives, who include in this instance the banks.

Age Concern and the Federation of Small Businesses tell us that old people still rely on cheques as they haven’t worked out how to pay by plastic card yet. Small businesses also still gain a benefit by paying their bills by cheque – they can meet… Read More

The City’s great and good traipsed into the Treasury on Monday to be told by Alistair Darling and Lord Mandelson to invest tens of millions in a new ‘Bank of Britain’. The formal working title for this little project is the National Investment Corporation, and the idea is that it will oversee funds that will lend money to growing businesses and technology start-ups.

As grandees from the likes of Goldman Sachs and UBS left Whitehall, I understand they were none the wiser.

As I revealed in The Sunday Telegraph last weekend, the Government neither knows how it wants all this money to be invested nor what returns the investors can expect. And it is far from confident that it will be able to… Read More

Britain’s biggest energy supplier is inviting business owners to apply to join a new “listening panel”. The lucky hand-picked few will have “unprecedented access” to British Gas and its executives, we are told. They are to be flown to offshore gas fields, winched up gas-fired power stations and dazzled by energy trading rooms.

If they survive all that, they can tell managing director Phil Bentley and the senior leadership team exactly what they really think of British Gas.

For the “one or two business owners” chosen to join the 20-strong customer panel (the rest will be domestic customers) this is no doubt an opportunity to ask the company some tough questions.

They could start with asking why it makes switching from its service… Read More

No one seems to have noticed yet, but the evidence used to support Gordon Brown’s latest foray into the murky world of venture capital is flaky at best.

The Prime Minister has called for the creation of a Growth Capital Fund to tackle the failure of private capital to back young, fast growing companies. He’s confident that this all makes sense because a review by a former venture capitalist, Chris Rowlands, published this week, tells him so.

The review argues the case for a massive new venture fund that will channel public and private cash to companies. Rowlands and his team have concluded that there is now a permanent equity gap for companies seeking to raise between £2m and £10m.

Private sector venture… Read More

I always think that the best punishment for any organisation that abuses its position is for its customers to walk away. Complain first, yes. If they don’t change their behaviour, that’s it. I’ve done it with Ryanair (at least when it comes to taking the family on holiday) and, increasingly, businesses can do it with the Royal Mail.

The sequence of 24-hour walkouts across the country that began in June is really starting to disrupt normal trading. The national ballot today is the last straw.

And with union leaders apparently living in their own little world at the TUC conference in Liverpool, businesses should act where they can. Union staff at the Royal Mail need to know that a pay freeze when inflation… Read More