I AM a Highlander, and have built a number of businesses in sectors ranging from financial publishing to recyling to online education while living in the Highlands, selling them for a total of £150 million. What most matters to me these days is helping people from up here to be able to live and thrive without moving away.

I visit schools and universities and talk about entrepreneurship. Scotland has an unusually large public sector and the students have little exposure to entrepreneurial role models…..yet it is the businesses of the future who will create employment and generate the taxes needed to run our expensive country.

The tax take in Scotland in 1917/18 was an estimated £13 billion less than our expenditure…..so we have a problem.

Andrew Wilson was commissioned by The Scottish Government to Chair the Growth Commission, which suggests we need economic growth of 2.5 per cent in Scotland and an aim to secure an “inter-generational economic renaissance’. Fat chance as things stand, I say... where are the budding entrepreneurs?

The fundamental problem is that there are sole traders, then a very few who make the substantial step up to employing, say 10 staff. It has to be a determined, well-financed and optimistic individual who will take the risk.

There are relatively few businesses employing in between one and 10 employees.

The reason is two fold, the first is VAT. Once you get to £85,000 of income you have to charge VAT on the whole lot…..what happens if you only exceeded it by £1?

You need to pay HMRC £14,000 of the £85,000 and have no chance of getting it from your customers... so sole traders work four-day weeks, not at all in the last month or two of the year or insist on cash payment.

If they had a trainee they would have say £130,000 income, their vat bill would be £26,000 and they would be 20% more expensive than their competitor sole trader.

The second reason is when you have an employee you have National Insurance, PAYE, NEST, employee liability insurance, holiday and sickness pay, paternity or maternity leave to worry about….you need to be an accountant and human resource expert to handle all of this. You cannot justify proper office back up unless you are a significant employer.

The net result is that skilled tradespeople avoid the hassle and work alone, there is becoming a huge shortage of homegrown tradesmen and we need to suck in plumbers, joiners etcetera from overseas.

The Scottish Government has a problem in that we remain one of the lowest company start up countries in the developed world and our tax take doesn’t grow.

In Switzerland/Germany etc a trade is as good as a degree, you take several years to get your ticket. We send too many of our young off to get useless degrees at second rate universities, but that opinion is for another day.

Angus MacDonald, OBE, was Spears UK Entrepreneur of the year 2017 and Entrepreneurial Scotland Scale up entrepreneur of the year 2017.