The Mayor's radar

6 May 2008

While transport, education and the environment were the cornerstones of the London mayoral candidates’ campaigns, in last week’s election there seems to have been a greater level of understanding of what businesses want and need than in previous years.

In his manifesto, Boris Johnson had vowed to “fight to cut the red tape that is strangling aspiration and ambition, so that our small and medium enterprise (SME) sector can flourish”. He also pledged to “work to ensure that our infrastructure sets the right conditions for entrepreneurial success - efficient transport, rigorous policing, reasonable rent costs, and so on. SMEs add greatly to London's rich variety and they must be championed.” For his part, ousted Mayor Ken Livingstone had also professed to be helping all businesses by providing the right conditions “to turn London into a world class city”.

There’s no doubt that London has developed a thriving business sector in the last few years, and the influx of big multinational companies to the City and the Docklands has undoubtedly spurred the growth of a larger and healthier small business sector through the trickledown effect. And there have also been a number of developments aimed specifically at SMEs.

The London Development Agency (LDA), for example, started a pilot scheme with the British Library called the Business & Intellectual Property Centre. It’s a valuable resource for entrepreneurs, allowing them to search databases, find and examine patents, access market research and consult trade and industry directories. Some of the databases and market research have high subscription rates, but it’s all free to users. With over 25,000 people using the service in the first 12 months, it’s clearly proving to be popular, and the B&IPC is looking to extend and expand its resources with further funding.

Meanwhile, of the other London mayoral candidates, Green Party candidate Sian Berry had the support of the Federation of Small Business in the run-up to the election. “There is a strong case for saying that the Green candidate Siân Berry is most 'on message' with what we are saying,” the FSB said in a statement, “followed by Boris Johnson for the Conservatives, with Lib Dem Brian Paddick trailing in third place ahead of current Mayor Ken Livingstone.” Although we won’t see them put into action, The Green Party’s impressive range of policies included the requirement that new commercial developments in the capital offer 50% of their office, factory or workshop facilities as affordable space for SMEs.

Still, with Boris Johnson taking charge, we can rest assured that the small business sector is firmly on the Mayoral radar. Just be sure to keep a sense of perspective about the whole process and not expect too much change too soon. After all, as Ken Livingstone’s autobiography pointed out, “if voting changed anything, they’d abolish it”.

George Fletcher, Webster Buchanan Research