Anderson Review - Government Regulatory Guidance for SMEs

The 2008 Enterprise Paper asked Sarah Anderson to undertake an independent Review of how to improve the regulatory guidance that the Government gives to business.

As part of this Review, Sarah and the Anderson Review Secretariat met over 90 SMEs, at a number of group discussions and one-to-one interviews, between March and July 2008. These SMEs represented a range of different sectors and sizes, from sole traders to medium sized businesses with over 200 employees.

The primary aim of these meetings was for the Review to gain a better understanding of how businesses felt about guidance and how they went about achieving regulatory compliance. Specifically, these meetings looked to establish:

· how SMEs felt about government guidance in general;
· to what extent businesses felt they were able confidently to comply with regulation using government guidance;
· if there existed specific regulatory areas where businesses found guidance particularly difficult or complicated;
· to what extent businesses felt current government guidance provisions were effective.

Findings:

Businesses had positive views of some areas of government guidance.

· guidance available from regulators websites attracted positive comments.
· the telephone and web support available from HMRC was considered to be very good.
· comments from businesses which used the businesslink.gov.uk website varied from useful to very good.
· the guidance relating to the smoking ban was felt to have been very effective.

Businesses had concerns around certain areas of government guidance and
regulation. Businesses:
· found that the volume of, and regular changes to, regulation and guidance made it more difficult for them to run their business effectively.
· highlighted employment and health and safety regulations as areas where they found compliance most difficult.
· found that even when guidance was available it was difficult to be certain that following it would mean they were complying with the law.
· had concerns about where and how to access guidance.
· found that guidance was often not written clearly, in plain English, and that this complexity made compliance problematic.
· said regulatory change was not communicated to them effectively and that inspectors focused on enforcement rather than on helping SMEs comply.

The full summary is available here: http://www.ukba.co.uk/file49882.pdf

The full report is available here: http://www.ukba.co.uk/file49881.pdf


http://www.ukba.co.uk