Doug Richard: “Get rid of Business Link”

* We must increase economic freedom for new businesses. We must cut the time it takes to start a new business. We must radically streamline the effort of complying with government regulation and exempt the smallest businesses from many of the regulations entirely.  

* We must sweep clean the entire government-funded industry of business support.

* We must free up the savings of our families, friends and communities so that they may give, invest or lend their own small capital into nascent businesses.

* We must stop paying people to be unemployed and begin to share the cost of them being taught to be employed.

* We must recognise that the largest customer in the UK is the government itself. The government must adopt a requirement that a specific percentage of all of its procurement will be through small and medium businesses.

* We must broaden the scope for social entrepreneurs by creating new legal frameworks that explicitly encourage a broad range of social businesses. 

* Just as our roads and trains are a public service and a natural monopoly; so too is true broadband. True broadband is not 1MB of information trickling down to some of our homes. It is 100MB to every doorstep in this country. It is the key infrastructure that will kindle a wave of creative destruction and increased wealth that will match the industrial revolution. And it is achievable now.  

Add Richard’s recommendations (read his full manifesto here) to our ten points on Saving Britain’s Future, and you’ve got a pretty decent landscape for the country’s entrepreneurs to survive and thrive. Let’s hope Gordon Brown is reading this…

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