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UK/Ireland Small Business News Round-up - 07/03/2008

Here is this week’s news round-up for home business, micro business, sole-traders, freelancers, self-employed and any one who is interested in small business news from the United Kingdom and Ireland:

2008 Budget will be bad for small businesses, warns FPB:The FPB is warning that the 2008 Budget is likely to heap an unfair tax burden on to many smaller firms. The FPB is concerned that its members will pay for the tax breaks the Government plans to hand big businesses.
Five years of services growth ends: Ireland’s services sector shrank for the first time in almost five years last month as new business contracted both at home and abroad, the NCB/NTC Purchasing Managers’ Index survey showed this morning.
Ofcom set to ban ‘unfair’ charges: Telecom and internet firms will soon have to stop levying extra charges that are unfair, the regulator Ofcom says.
Small business owners are not immigration officers, says FSB: The Federation of Small Businesses has criticised new legislation on employing foreign workers that will impose unrealistic expectations and draconian fines on employers.
Going it alone: A clothing range is born: or most women, starting up a new business venture wouldn’t be high on the list of priorities when they’d recently given birth to twins - particularly if they had no previous experience of the business world and were very keen to stay at home with their babies. But Ruth Peters’ twins - now a little over a year old - provided her with the inspiration to set up a new name in organic maternity and nursing wear.
Business link told to stop backing bad ideas: Government-backed SME support bodies like Business Link spend too much time and money backing people with poor business ideas, a successful entrepreneur has claimed.
FSB satisfied with in-line inflation move in National Minimum Wage: The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) is today happier with the announcement on the latest move in the National Minimum Wage which does not replicate past above-inflation increases.
SME’s face fines over illegal employment: The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has hit out at the government over the complexity of the legislation on employing foreign workers in the UK.
League table of late paying PLCs: The Institute of credit management have today unveiled a league table that charts how long it takes for every UK PLC to pay suppliers. For SMEs, this is great news as late payment by large companies is often damaging to the smaller business that relies on regular cash flow. The government talked a lot of hot air as usual when they promised to ‘do something’ about late payers, several years back.

As always this list is not exhaustive, but I hope it will give you a little overview. — ST.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under SME News Round-up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.