Ex-Dragon breathes fire over UK enterprise support

Former Dragons' Den panelist Doug Richard has called for a major overhaul of the way the government supports small businesses with ineffective schemes ditched in favour of incentives for investors.

In a damning document, the California-born businessman says the UK is plagued by "Kafkaeseque bureaucracy" so it is time for the government to step back, sweep away the burden of regulation and let entrepreneurs, the UK's "wealth creators", thrive.

Writing in 'The Entrepreneurs' Manifesto', Richard, founder of Cambridge Angels and Schools for Startups, says: "To the smallest degree that the State aspires to deliver more than it can afford; it has no choice at all: it must recluse itself from the monolithic delivery of all services and create playing fields upon which entrepreneurs can be unleashed.

"Harness the collective creative self-interest of our entrepreneurial output for the benefit of meeting our social objectives and we can ensure that they will improve at the fastest possible pace."

To achieve his vision, Richard calls for a redistribution of all government support from ineffective business support activities to direct credits for business angel and family investment in small companies. "We must sweep clean the entire government funded industry of business support and leave behind solely an institution whose remit is to expedite and simplify the effort of small business to manage the burden that government places upon it," he demands.

It must be made easier, he adds, for individuals to start new businesses (the current average is 13 days in the UK compared to 6 in the US and 7 in France) through a sharp reduction in regulation with the smallest companies exempt from most rules.

In addition, the benefits system needs to be reformed, the entrepreneur claims, by "stopping paying people to be unemployed", while social entrepreneurs should be encouraged through new legal frameworks "that explicitly encourage a broad range of social businesses from co-ownership models such as John Lewis to for-profit businesses that seek to achieve a social bottom line as well as a traditional profit".

Finally, the entrepreneur’s calls for major investments in providing super high speed broadband to every citizen "to catapult the UK out of the slow lane".

In a powerful conclusion to the manifesto, Richard writes: "We must understand that we do not understand. People are not empowered to step out on their own, take risk, hope for reward, and move on from failure.

"The corrosive impact of an overprotective State is not merely the loss of our sense of responsibility to a civil society; it is the even more profound loss of our sense of capacity to change society, to have an impact, to be, in short, an entrepreneur.

"Entrepreneurship can be taught and must be learned."

Doug Richard will officially launch his manifesto at a social enterprise event at the Royal Institution in London on 19 January.

www.businesszone.co.uk

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