Here’s why we’re backing calls for a rethink on the PM’s Business Council

By Fred Hicks , Senior Policy and Communications Adviser

If you haven’t heard of the Prime Minister’s new ‘Business Council’, you may not be surprised to learn that it is attended by some of the UK’s biggest companies – Barclays, Aviva, NatWest and Shell, to name a few.

This is no bad thing; it gives the PM an opportunity to consult directly with firms responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of pounds in economic activity on the challenges they’re facing, potentially unlocking yet more jobs and investment.

But there’s something missing from this Business Council – the voices of the remaining 99 per cent of UK businesses.

The change we want to see

As reported in the Times on Monday, IPSE joined Family Business UK, Small Business Britain, the Federation of Small Businesses and the Employee Ownership Association as co-signatories of a letter to the Prime Minister.

In it, these organisations have appealed for Mr Sunak to ensure that “the voice of SMEs, family businesses, the self-employed and employee-owned organisations is properly represented” – either within or alongside the Business Council.

It’s not as if these organisations aren’t already representing their members before the many arms of government – so what makes this forum with the PM so important?

PM needs to know what’s really happening in the world of business

When the Business Council was launched in July of this year, its stated aim was to “discuss ways to boost investment, innovation, and access to skills and talent;” and to hear first-hand from business leaders about “how we can break down the barriers they face and unlock new opportunities for them to thrive.”

But the difficulty is that each model of business ownership has its own unique challenges; its own vulnerabilities; its own view on what it takes to help their business thrive. If the PM surrounds himself with just one type of voice, he’ll only receive one type of answer to the important questions.

This isn’t to dismiss the important network effects that new investment, research and development by our biggest businesses can have on supply chains – including the smaller suppliers they recruit to help deliver new projects.

But the real barriers to success in self-employment are a world away from those of a FTSE100 CEO. As freelancers know all too well, the chilling effect of IR35 and off-payroll legislation has scuppered contract opportunities in some of the UK’s most important economic sectors; many large firms continue to drag their feet on paying freelancers promptly; and now, freelancers are even being penalised for using accountancy firms that meet their needs.

For the self-employed, it can sometimes feel that there are as many barriers to prosperity as there are opportunities to achieve it – many of which, it feels, are counterintuitively put there by the same government that claimed to “hugely value” small businesses after news of this joint campaign broke on Sunday.

Do we always need to hear from 'small business'?

The point of this week’s appeal is not for us to have small and solo businesses gatecrashing every interaction government has with the UK’s biggest firms.

The PM has created a forum to rapidly consult with businesses on some of the very biggest issues affecting firms today – investment, innovation and access to talent. But these aren’t issues that large firms face alone – and neither are they issues which they’ll be able to overcome without co-ordinating with smaller partners.

In fact, freelancers are themselves a means of overcoming some the challenges the Business Council aims to address. They help larger firms to manage their own peaks and troughs, parachuting in to support or manage valuable projects when needed and leaving once the work is done; work which itself could lead to those firms growing and hiring more permanent staff.

The self-employed sector also offers a wealthy bank of individuals who possess expertise which just wouldn’t be practical – or possible – to retain on a permanent basis. There are thousands of highly skilled, highly specialised freelancers capable of helping big firms to spark innovation.

This is probably why, when asked by IPSE in 2022, three in four (76%) medium and large sized firms said freelancers are a “valuable resource” for their business, and 49% said they wouldn’t be able to achieve the same results without freelancers.

With this in mind, it would be understating things to say that the Business Council could benefit from having the voices of smaller operators in the room – it needs it.

The point of this week’s appeal, then, is that this forum must truly reflect the UK’s business population if it is to succeed – from the FTSE100 down to the very smallest solo enterprises.