I’m looking out my office window, watching at least several thousand skilled workers turning an otherwise normal Glasgow city centre street into a futuristic dystopian film set (insert your own joke here about that being the council’s job).
If you’ve had a walk through the city’s commercial district in the last week or so, you’ll not have failed to be impressed by the sheer scale of the operation and the attention to detail – from the plywood subway entrance, to the big gold hand pointing skyward, to the ornaments in the windows of what I assume are going to be bars and shops.
No wonder this sort of filming can bring in the thick end of £60 million a year to the city. And, hopefully, a decent chunk of that is spent in local cafes and pubs by those of us visiting the area to catch a glimpse of how the Hollywood magic is made. There are, after all, few greater pleasures than sitting in comfort with a coffee, tea, pint or pastry and watching other people working.
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Alas, here, on my side of the glass, there’s not quite the same level of A-list glitz. But the principle of a million details adding up to one overarching successful project equally applies.
I speak, of course, of the national mission to get our economy growing and the revenues flowing.
As the implications of the Chancellor’s recent spending review filter down, the need for economic growth is ever more pronounced. And, while events like spending reviews naturally focus on big-picture objectives and long-term capital infrastructure projects, the money to deliver any of this will need to come from revenues generated by literally millions of individual decisions taken by small and medium-sized businesses across the country.
So it was a major bright spot that the spending review pledged to increase resources for the British Business Bank to £25.6 billion.
This is something for which we in the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) campaigned and will, if translated into an extension of the Start-up Loan and Growth Guarantee schemes, help get more affordable credit to where it’s needed in the market. At a time when 45% of Scotland’s small firms are harbouring ambitions to grow in the coming year, you can see the potential of financing those plans.
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Beyond that, though, it’s fair to say there was a lack of concrete business focus in the review, which caused disappointment in some quarters.
Absolutely understandably, if you’re running a small firm today, you’re more interested in what your cash position will look like in 30 days than whether you’ll have a new nuclear power station in 30 years.
But just because the review was silent on some of the more day-to-day, detailed points we were making in the run-up to its publication, it doesn’t mean these debates are dead. They can – indeed must – be addressed elsewhere.
For example, three quarters of small employers are concerned about being able to afford the extra cost associated with the expansion of statutory sick pay (SSP) from next April. An SSP rebate for small employers would mitigate the threat the move poses to smaller firms’ enviable record of employing those further from the labour market by virtue of living with a health condition – and the time to introduce this will be in the Autumn Budget.
Similarly, the upcoming, if not imminent, UK industrial strategy will be the place to implement our calls for action on late payments – making sure big businesses who pay their small suppliers when they feel like it aren’t rewarded with government largesse.
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More than three-fifths of Scottish small businesses tell us they’ve experienced problems with late payment in the last year, with a third of those affected saying the problem’s getting worse. That’s why we’re calling for the industrial strategy to ban companies that don’t pay at least 95% of invoices within 60 days, or keep their average payment time to 55 days or less, from winning government grants.
Just as it will doubtless take years for the movie being filmed in Glasgow to hit the big screen, big-budget, infrastructure-heavy, long-term economic strategies will take time to come to fruition.
The difference is that, while we can wait for a movie premiere, we can’t hang on much longer without the economy bouncing back. Practical choices to boost growth now are vital if we don’t want the sequel to be higher taxes and more borrowing.
Colin Borland is director of devolved nations for the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB)
