My Lords, I ask my noble friend to take very seriously the issues which are raised here. I look at it in a rather different way from the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn—that is, from the point of view of a small business itself. As my declaration of interest shows, I chair a number of small businesses. I have been recategorising them while reading through the amendments, so I also chair a medium-sized business. On the basis of this discussion, I am hoping that it will become a large business. I look forward to that. I do quite a bit of mentoring of people starting businesses. It is very hard for them to start a business. However, we know that innovation comes more from small businesses than anywhere else and that the bigger a business becomes, the less innovation there is. It is a crucial part of improving employment and the economy. We have to recognise that.
How do people start small businesses? Very often, they do not start it as a small business but as a person or customer. You begin something and realise that you have a kind of business, and then you try to make it into a business. It is a much more haphazard operation than those who have never started a business sometimes think. I hope that the civil servants present will not mind my saying it but one of the problems with all this is that nobody who writes this stuff has ever run a business or understands how a business is run. Having done the job as a Minister, I recognise that I was pretty unusual because I came from the business community. Most Ministers had not done that. We have here a Minister who is very well equipped, because she has played a major part in what can only be called a megabusiness, in the circumstances.
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I want to look at it from the psychology of a person who is running a small business. He or she sees themselves as a customer of other people. They soon discover that one problem with being a customer of other people is the same as we all have as customers: they are bigger than you, so it is difficult to deal with them and you therefore need protection. That is why we have consumer protection laws—I see that one is going through the other place at this very moment. I find it hard to understand why it is not automatic that small businesses should be treated as customers to a point at which they are genuinely in the same league as the people from whom they normally purchase. There are arguments against that, such as saying that you are buying from other small businesses in the same position, but that happens with customers, too. This is not a difficulty to overcome.
Why is that important? We must recognise that the big difference between a small business and a big business is that in the small business, every individual working there does about five different jobs, if not 10. Often, when a new job comes along, you have nobody
who has any idea of how to do it, so you scrabble about and try to do it yourself and then find someone who might do it rather better. That is how it works, whereas the big business has somebody to do each thing. As long as you are small enough not to have somebody to do each thing, you need the protection that any individual has when dealing with bigger firms as a consumer.
My noble friend may wonder why I bothered to spend time talking about that. There is a much more fundamental reason that I now want to express. I believe that we are losing the battle for the free enterprise system. I do not mean that in a party-political way. I mean the system which we all share of having a free society where people create wealth because they start things and find ways to satisfy people’s needs. We are losing that because so often the spokesmen for the free enterprise system are not actually speaking for free enterprise; they are speaking for oligopolies and monopolies. I have just been reading Naomi Klein’s book. It is pretty concerted nonsense most of the way through, because what she thinks of as free enterprise is actually the Koch brothers or the great oligopolies. We have allowed her to think like that because we have not presented properly what a free enterprise system within a free society is. To do that, we have to be a society where we discriminate against monopoly and bigness in favour of smallness and innovation.
That is why what the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, has been talking about is crucial. That is the thought behind the whole Bill and why, in general, it has support on every side. I worry that we have not grasped this nettle hard enough to recognise what a tough world it is. If you are a small business, who are you dealing with? The oligopoly of the energy companies. It is no good kidding ourselves: this is not the same as dealing with the garage down the road but a different concept. You are dealing with the monopoly of many of the state services. I am concerned that we are not clever enough to talk about the problems of the National Health Service, for example, in the same way as we talk about the problems of monopolies generally. In a sense, it does not matter who runs them: monopolies have effects on the consumer which are unacceptable. We cannot talk about that because we have got ourselves into all sorts of silos. Therefore let us start where we can talk, which is to say that smallness and innovation present certain difficulties, which are manifest, and the biggest of those difficulties is: how do you deal with things that are much bigger than yourself, over which you have no control?
I do not know whether my noble friend has ever tried, as a normal consumer, to get something out of, for example, her electricity supplier. I can tell noble Lords that the time you spend on the end of the telephone, trying to find the person to have the conversation with, is not just a statistic as provided by Which? but a horrible fact of life. The only parallel is trying to do the same in the National Health Service: being told by your local doctor, for example, that although he has the closed shop of a pharmacy, and although the prescription was written by him and his dispenser has only to take the bottle from the shelf and give it to you, that it will take three days before
you can have that prescription, because that is what he does. Why? Because he is the monopoly provider, and he knows that. That is no criticism of our National Health Service but a criticism of a system that means that people are in a position to say to people who, even when they are small, are smaller than they are.
I feel very strongly that this is not just a probing amendment. It is not just a reminder of how important the small business is and how it needs the kind of protection which we give to individual consumers. It is one of the elements which reach much further than that, because it is just a tiny example of what is deeply wrong with the society that we have created. Unfortunately, we characterise it as if it is an argument about capitalism. It is not; it is an argument about how individuals can cope with bigness, and how bigness can be made to be able properly to provide the services that individuals want.
I take this as a very serious amendment, not of course to be accepted because it has no doubt been written in the wrong way, and there will be this, that and the other reason not to accept it—I was a Minister for a long time, so I know exactly what can be said. However, I hope that my noble friend will recognise that this is a very important element and not something put forward because the Opposition want to find something wrong with the Bill. It seems that they want to improve it. This is not a contrary amendment. If it is not the answer, perhaps my noble friend will be able to provide us with an answer, because I am sure we will all be very happy to have it.