Overheads are spiralling. Staff are in short supply. There’s a £4 billion emergency debt mountain to repay. And now worries about Omicron are hitting businesses who were pinning their hopes on a buoyant festive trading period.

The background against which Finance Secretary, Kate Forbes, will deliver the Scottish Government’s Budget on Thursday might be more In the Bleak Midwinter than Jingle Bells.

But, tough as the circumstances undeniably are, this budget is also an ideal opportunity to unveil measures specifically designed to help small firms turn the corner and drive economic recovery.

Let’s begin with overheads. Some of the factors pushing up costs are, of course, outwith the direct control of the Scottish Government.

But that does not render Holyrood Ministers powerless. They could, for example, give small businesses some breathing space by freezing or deferring the costs of licence and permit fees and other charges levied by the public sector.

On the thorny issue of business rates, continuation of the small business bonus is obviously essential. This has given the majority of premises-based small businesses in Scotland a full or partial rates discount for many years.

However, there’s a significant minority of businesses who remain liable for rates, because they operate from multiple properties or from higher value premises. Many of them are in the sectors hardest hit by Covid and have seen their means to generate income severely curtailed by Covid restrictions. So, it’s important that the budget includes provisions to extend the coronavirus rates relief for retail, hospitality and leisure beyond the end of this financial year, when it’s set to end. But budgets are also about investment – and nowhere will that be more important than in our efforts to become more environmentally sustainable.

Small businesses comprise the vast majority of the country’s business base. And the latest FSB figures show that 80 percent of them believe they have a responsibility to reduce their environmental impact. However, in their current situation, cost remains a significant barrier preventing small businesses from taking action.

While the responsibility for plugging this finance gap does not solely sit at the Scottish Government’s door, it does have options available. We have, for example, suggested to the Finance Secretary that the government launches a co-investment fund, which would allow small businesses to access grants to make green improvements, in return for making a smaller initial investment themselves.

Another area where co-investment has been shown to work is in helping firms maximise the opportunities offered by digital technologies.

Indeed, the DigitalBoost co-funded grant scheme proved so popular, every funding round has quickly become oversubscribed – much to many businesses’ frustration. Should there be any headroom in the funding available for the scheme, it would pay dividends to increase it to a level that more closely reflects demand.

Finally, if we are serious about transforming our economy, we need to increase our business birth rate – and we can’t do that without making self-employment a fairer, safer, more attractive option.

Perhaps unsurprisingly when you consider all that’s happened, 57 percent of small business owners feel the pandemic has made self-employment less attractive. Meanwhile, official figures show that, from last March to this, Scotland has lost over 19,000 of the smallest owner-operated businesses from the economy.

This budget, therefore, is the perfect time to begin forging a new deal for the self-employed. And a simple first step could be looking at establishing a collective insurance scheme that would cover them if they became too ill to earn.

Budgets will always be dominated by the big numbers and high-level plans around tax, spending and running our largest state institutions. But to many small businesses, it’s the practical, comparatively modest measures that might make the difference.

Colin Borland is director of devolved nations for the Federation of Small Businesses.