Startup Britain www.startupbritain.org is a new web site “designed to celebrate, inspire and accelerate enterprise in the UK” that launched on the 28th of March 2011. It has fulsome praise from the government – including the PRIME Minister in attendance at the launch and a press release distributed direct from No 10, but little or no government money behind it. The site itself seems to offer mainly links to other existing support web sites, with its own original content currently consisting mainly of discount offers from established businesses.
Startup Britain - valuable resource or just platform for self-promotion?
That’s not to knock discount offers – we run them ourselves on PRIME Business Club, in the belief that they can be useful to cash-strapped new entrepreneurs trying to keep spending under control. So a new offers site is to be welcomed. But it’s not really business help – more a form of advertising.
It’s hard not to see Startup Britain as evidence of a decline in the quality of the support and encouragement available to new enterprises. It’s simply not in the same league as some of the things that are closing down at the moment. We have just lost Enterprise UK – which for all its obsession with youth did still attempt to beat the drum loudly for those starting up new small businesses. A much more substantial loss is the closure of the Business Link local advice service, which has shut down already in some places and is scheduled to disappear everywhere by November 2011 – leaving just a web site and call centre.
So the lavish praise heaped on the meagre resources offered by Startup Britain are not very convincing. Business support in Britain, certainly for small self-employed businesses, looks to be in serious decline.
PM David Cameron talking at the launch event
Still, in the absence of serious government investment this is the kind of thing we shall have to get used to. Maybe Startup Britain or some other private initiative will eventually amount to something. So we wish them luck.
What Startup Britain says about itself
StartUp Britain is a new campaign by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs [...]
This is a response from the private sector to the Government’s call for an ‘enterprise-led’ recovery. We believe that many of the important functions and services necessary to foster and champion new enterprise can be open-sourced, instead of provided by government directly. We aim to do this by creating a living market-place online for the wide range of enterprise support that is already available.
As a private sector organisation we aim to shoulder some of this responsibility for enterprise promotion with the government, re-modelling existing cost centres, and reducing the cost to the taxpayer.
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I also had concerns about this organisation. They had the Business Link logo on their homepage – but not hotlinked to the website; they didn’t list the Business Start Up Show as one of the key events etc. I wrote to them and pointed out what I thought were ‘errors’ and, although I never got a reply, reading your note today prompted me to have a look again and they have now included a hotlink to Business Link and also added the Business Start Up Show.
I worked for five years on Business Link South East programme working with people from disadvantaged communities looking to set up their own businesses. I know from their reaction to news that our programme was being closed down how much they welcomed the face-to-face support we were able to give.
The move to web and call centre support only from Business Link will mean that many people, like the ones I worked with in the past, will no longer consider this option to improving their economic circumstances.
Regards
Paul Griffiths