Entrepreneurs need help to deliver tomorrow’s brands

THERE is a desperate need to encourage entrepreneurs to start up new businesses if the West Midlands is to play a role in creating the brands of tomorrow, the region’s finance professionals have warned.
 
The sale of Cadbury to Kraft Foods in a £11.9bn deal has focused attention once again on the many fears over the region’s manufacturing base, said chartered accountants’ leader Barry Matthews.
 
Mr Matthews, chairman of the Institute of Chartered Accounts in England and Wales’s West Midlands regional strategy board, warned the region faced a long haul out of recession.
 
But he believed the need to encourage new businesses was fundamental to the future success of the region, a concern thrown into sharp relief by uncertainty over the long-term future of manufacturing in Bournville.
 
Mr Matthews said 138,000 manufacturing jobs had been lost in the region in the past decade compared with an increase of 84,000 in the number of people working in the public sector.
 
“We are worried about what the big brand names of tomorrow will be and how many of them will be based in the West Midlands,” he said.

“We need many more wealth-creating jobs. In 1971, half of all the people working in the West Midlands were in manufacturing. Today it’s less than 11%,” he said.
 
The ICAEW needed the Government, Advantage West Midlands, local authorities and the various educational bodies in the West Midlands to do everything they could to tackle this, he added.

“Britain has to remain competitive which means better education and training,” said Mr Matthews.
 
To help speed up the process, barriers to growth such as extensive bureaucracy had to be removed.

“We must make it simpler, quicker and cheaper for employers to deal with the masses of rules on health and safety, employment law and tax.  Also, meeting innovative enterprises’ business and finance needs is essential to commercialise innovation.

“We must make sure the money is available to allow businesses to flourish. The banking crisis has led to tougher terms for small and medium-sized businesses – assuming they can borrow money at all,” he said
 
Nothing could be done about all the factories that had closed over the years, he added, but all efforts to encourage new SMEs to get established had to be adopted.
 
“Everyone wants a fast recovery but I don’t think that will happen. It’s going to be a long haul back. We have to be patient,” said Mr Matthews.