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Small and Medium-sized Businesses

Fortunately, my Lords, I have to hand an example of why that is not the case. Europe is doing something about waste reduction, pollution and many of the serious issues on the environmental agenda. If Europe addresses those issues, it often allows a national government to pursue things it might have found politically difficult at home in the first instance. However, how the national government implement those regulations is critical. I draw the Minister’s attention to one regulation which is causing an awful lot of trouble for small businesses. I refer to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive, which is causing trouble because of the Government’s delay. Some 50,000 small businesses will be affected by this directive, but UK implementation has been delayed four times. The Environmental Industries Commission cites the DTI reasoning of continuing concerns from business, but in fact none of its members has apparently been consulted. The real concern of small business is not that nothing should be done about waste electrical goods—it is about the uncertainty of how to make investment decisions in such an unsure regulatory situation. The Government really must make these decisions more quickly. When a directive comes in, they need to give the business sector some certainty. With regard to the decision of the Office of Fair Trading to refer the supermarket and grocery sector to the Competition Commission, I agreed with the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Fyfe of Fairfield, about supermarkets and planning gain—what are commonly known as 106 agreements. The larger supermarket can offer a community all sorts of gains such as a new roundabout or the solution to highway issues. That makes it much cheaper for the local authority in the short term because the supermarket can pay for all those things. But if the cost in the long term is either what the New Economics Foundation aptly called ““clone town Britain”” or, even worse, a very dead high street because all the business has gone to the out-of-town superstore, it is not planning gain but planning loss. It just looked like gain in the very short term. The entry of supermarkets into the local format is particularly concerning. I do not need to rehearse that because we have debated it in your Lordships’ House previously. But it concerns me that a supermarket chain can have a supermarket in one town and then take over the convenience store, particularly in a small market town where anything else is a bus ride away. There is now a four-week consultation period; should the decision be supported, I believe the Competition Commission is likely to investigate this for up to two years. Is there any chance that that could be done slightly more quickly? As we have heard, we are losing 2,000 shops a year. That is serious, and the longer this situation continues, the worse it will get. It is a mark of the times that there is a very entertaining television programme based on whether people are truly entrepreneurial and have backed up their entrepreneurial ideas with facts. I refer, of course, to ““Dragon’s Den””. I do not think that even five years ago we would have seen that as a television programme to capture the imagination. It has, and I regard that as a sign of optimism.