Big plans for small business

OFFICIALS will be knocking on the doors of thousands of small, laggard companies in an attempt to stir them into action, according to Michael Heseltine.

In the wake of last week's White Paper on competitiveness - widely criticised as a damp squib - the President of the Board of Trade told the Independent on Sunday that his celebrated promise 'to intervene before breakfast, lunch and dinner' will be fulfilled at least at a local level.

The White Paper acknowledged that British industry lagged behind the competition, but Mr Heseltine said: 'The problem is not with the best, but with the average and how to raise it by improving the standards of those at the bottom end.'

Many companies remain immune from attempts by the DTI and other organisations to improve standards, Mr Heseltine said, because only a 'self-selecting elite' bothered to take advantage of their services. 'Up to now, we have never had a way of getting to the bulk of companies who don't come to conferences, who are not members of the CBI or chambers of commerce.'

Business Links - local one-stop shops for companies - will in future be expected to contact these firms. 'We will have a database, and there will be people in Business Links whose job is to knock on doors,' Mr Heseltine said. 'It is no use having regional DTI offices 60 miles away.'

There are now 20 Business Links, with plans for 200 by the end of 1995. They are run by local bodies such as chambers of commerce and Training and Enterprise Councils, though they will be funded initially by the Government. They are designed as a first point of contact for businesses wanting help from the Government, from local organisations, or from other companies in the area. Existing consultants working for them will be boosted under White Paper proposals by at least 90 export and technology specialists from the private sector.

Mr Heseltine said he also wants to spread best management practices to small companies. The DTI pays for second- tier suppliers - smaller subcontractors - to visit Japan to learn how the best factories work, especially in the motor sector. 'The quality of management has been transformed, but we have a way to go down the supplier chain,' he said. The minister said he believed a base of medium-sized companies - the equivalent of the German Mittelstand - will be built up during the 1990s.

'There are 600,000 more businesses now than in 1979, despite the deepest and longest recession,' he said. 'If we had had that rate of economic generation through the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, it would have had a dramatic effect.'

Mr Heseltine denied that he would have liked more direct subsidies to have been included in the recent White Paper. 'The worst decision we could have taken would have been to say we were going spend more money,' he said.

(Photograph omitted)