MOST business owners and managers in Scotland are not making plans at the moment to deal with future rises in UK base rates, a survey has found, even though 69 per cent predicted an increase before the end of next year.
The Close Brothers Business Barometer, a quarterly survey that canvasses the views of the owners and senior managers of small and medium-sized businesses, shows that only eight per cent of Scottish firms have at this stage considered taking precautionary measures on borrowing costs.
Mike Randall, chief executive of Close Brothers Asset Finance, said: "We would encourage businesses to put a contingency plan in place to cope with a UK base rate rise as it could have a dramatic impact on their operations, making borrowing more expensive, and impact cash flows as more is needed to service debt."
UK base rates have been at a record low of 0.5 per cent since March 2009.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article