Opinion: Backing Northampton's small businesses to thrive

This Saturday just gone was Small Business Saturday and, walking about town, it was brilliant to see so many people taking advantage of the free parking and supporting some of Northampton’s brilliant small businesses by shopping local and spending local.

We’ve got so many incredible small businesses in Northampton and I was proud to highlight a couple of them myself on Saturday: Phipps NBC (via the Albion Brewery Bar in the old Phipps Brewery Building) and the family-run Lasaan restaurant in Kingsthorpe.

The reality of course is that our small businesses are the beating heart of our economy: breathing life into our high streets; delivering necessary goods and services – often with a richness that bigger stores don’t; providing jobs and livelihoods; and offering that sense of community and place. For the country’s economy as a whole, SMEs employ 16.7 million people and boost our economy by £2.4 trillion.

In Northampton in particular, where we’ve seen the town centre struggle over the years with a higher proportion of empty shops and decreased footfall, it’s absolutely critical that local small businesses are backed to start up life here and then to flourish. I’ve knocked on tens of thousands of doors right across the town in the last year alone and if there’s one thing that unites people it’s a desire for our town centre to be what it was – and more.

People want to see a dynamic, vibrant, accessible and safe town centre with local shops that provide the goods and services we need. That doesn’t have to be about nostalgia, it’s about embracing the future and it’s about having the right strategy in place to ensure that Northampton can be an even better place to live, work and raise a family.

Core to that strategy is the lifeblood of our local economy: our small businesses. So we need to do a number of things to remove the hurdles to growth that our small businesses face.

First, we need to legislate to tackle late payments with tough new laws to make sure small businesses get paid on time.

Second, we need to scrap business rates and replace them with a fairer system to reduce the burden on high street premises and not stand in the way of firms who want to expand.

Third, we need to tackle anti-social behaviour by introducing new town centre police patrols.

Fourth, we need to boost small business exports by publishing a trade strategy and working alongside the Federation of Small Business on a Small Business Export Taskforce.

Fifth, we need to give a new direction for skills and addressing skills shortages by creating a new body, Skills England, and working with local industry to ensure local people have the skills they want including new Technical Excellence Colleges.

Sixth, we need to get Britain building again by reforming the planning system to build homes in some areas of the country (with the right infrastructure) and removing the planning barriers holding business back including grid connections.

Seventh, we need to make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower, which will allow us to cut energy bills for small business and create good job opportunities.

Eighth, we need to make the UK the best place to start-up and scale-up by unlocking the supply of patient capital for technology-intensive businesses.

And lastly, we need to provide small and medium-sized businesses with a fair chance of obtaining public contracts to give fairer opportunities to benefit from public contract bidding.

That’s Labour’s 9 point plan to back small businesses and these measures would provide our local small businesses with the backing they need to grow. Over the next few months, I’m going to be speaking to as many local small businesses as I can, to get their views on how these measures will help them and what further Labour could do. If you’re a local SME and you’d like to get in touch, you can contact me at [email protected].