Small businesses account for 60 per cent of private sector jobs; growth and economic recovery begins with them.
For many people, Buy Now Pay Later is a useful and convenient solution, offering them flexibility with their purchases. But consumers need stronger protections.
Our market system should balance businesses’ needs and the rights and freedoms of workers.
The Liberal Democrats have announced their ambition to extend free school meals to all primary school children, beginning with all children in poverty across both primary and secondary schools.
When it comes to business and jobs, we believe the biggest gap lies in how small and medium sized businesses are treated. The secret to greater and sustained economic growth lies in giving these businesses more of a chance to succeed and thrive.
Do you know: that 6 out of 10 jobs in the private sector are within small businesses?
Across the country, locals talk about how much they value and wish to support small businesses and small business owners but their task is made that much harder by policies that have been designed to meet the needs of big business or tackle issues within the public sector; the result of a political system in which the two main parties are largely funded by those groups.
Small businesses struggle most in getting up and running and then staying profitable for long enough to stabilise. The Covid pandemic and loss of the European Union as a seamless trading partner has made things much harder in recent years for entrepreneurs.
It's not just small businesses that needs a government that works in their favour. The self-employed are rarely given proper consideration; likewise those who find themselves with skills that are in less demand, and those who have yet to find their way in the marketplace. The Liberal Democrats have clear, pragmatic solutions to help all these people who acts as fundamental drivers to economic growth and health.
We are not the only political party to identify the current business rates approach as a problem. In 2021, Labour's shadow chancellor said it would scrap business rates because it punishes entrepreneurs and business investment - the same points we made in a report published back in 2018. Labour has yet to produce a plan.
Business also agrees: in 2019, the British Retail Consortium pointed to problems in the current rates system. That sparked the government (Conservative party) to promise reform. But three years later, nothing has happened despite efforts at the party's own conference to push for change.
In 2023, the government announced its version of a Commercial Landowner Levy but it only applies to new development and has little connection to our proposal beyond having the same name. |
