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Small business must read the small print
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"Any commitment to helping small business is a good thing", said Godfrey Bloom MEP today, "but the suggestions being made by the Tories are meaningless unless they tackle the greatest threat to competitiveness, that is the huge raft of regulation that comes from Brussels".
"The Tories' ideas are re-releases, copies or meaningless," said Bloom, who runs his own tax advisory business. They call for National Insurance & Income Tax to be merged, something that the UK Independence Party has been demanding. Currently the system penalises small business. The British Chamber of Commerce recently estimated that payroll costs to SMEs are 57 times greater than for larger companies.
"NI is burdensome because it uses a different base to income tax: Income tax is paid on all income over the year, NI is paid on each job and for each pay period. PAYE uses a single table and common Tax Code, but NI uses a complicated array of at least nine tables", he said.
"We call for every new regulation that effects business, either in Brussels or the gold plating efforts of Whitehall to have a Regulatory Impact Assessment instituted and written by the industries affected themselves", he went on, "we would like to see a “one-in-one-out” policy; every regulation subject to an independent RIA. Before new regulations can be enacted, regulations of the same cost must be repealed. This will cap the total regulatory burden on business and make the costs of regulation more transparent. Of course the smallest firms should be exempted from most regulation".
"When it comes to involving employers in education, well the Tories seem to have lifted this straight from our education policy, so we are naturally delighted that they are seeing sense".
Notes to editors
http://www.fsb.org.uk/data/default.asp?id=64&loc;=policy
There are 4.3m small businesses in the UK, employing 12m people [58% of the private sector workforce]. Small firms are responsible for 64% of commercial innovations and 95% employ less than 5 people.
http://www.civitas.org.uk/press/prcs41.php
http://www.chamberonline.co.uk/policy/issues/budget-tax/newtaxhorizon.pdf
Between 1997-04 the UK fell from 4th to 11th place in the World Economic Forum competitiveness league; from 13th to 30th on regulation; and from 11th to 26th on bureaucracy. The CBI has estimated that around a quarter of regulations and half the regulatory cost is EU related; A recent DTI survey suggested that cutting the burden of employment red tape could create 200,000 small-business jobs
For further information
Godfrey Bloom MEP 01757 630 778
Gawain Towler 0032 496 510 711
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