Out of ‘BISness’
Civitas, 3 August 2010
Business Secretary Vince Cable must have the gift of omniscience, as this is the only way anyone could understand the online policies of his Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
For starters, the site is a behemoth of information: the deeper one delves, pages continue to offer more pages and acronyms describe other acronyms – like an internet-based fractal tree. If you don’t already know exactly what you are looking for or have the brain of a Vulcan, the site is a quagmire to wade through.
More perilously, the guidelines are frequently found to be out of date. The top of the page on ‘Regulating Small Business’ helpfully highlights at the top that ‘*INFORMATION ON THIS PAGE RELATES TO POLICIES OF THE PREVIOUS GOVERNMENT AND MAY NOT BE UP TO DATE*’ The evasive nature of this statement leaves huge room for speculation as to which parts are not ‘up to date’ and even allows for continued guidelines to be ignored on this basis.
This is merely one of 531 such pages according to the BIS’s own search engine.
There are also many pages stating the same thing but with different titles or subjects. For example, there are four ‘Better Regulation’ sections, all confusingly overlapping rather than complimenting each other. Overall winner of this category goes to the ‘Access to finance’ page, which offers both a ‘Capital for Enterprise Fund’ as well as ‘Enterprise Capital Funds,’ both redirecting to the same webpage.
This problem would not be so glaring, if it was not for Dr. Cable et al proclaiming how simple BIS regulations will now be under the Coalition, both in terms of understanding and quantity. In his own keynote speech on 3rd June, Cable claimed, ‘I will take a tougher line on regulation, because I believe that often the most useful thing governments can do is simply to get out of the way’. While legislation takes time and must wait out the parliamentarians’ summer holiday, the BIS website could be streamlined far quicker.
A cynic might say that the only real change to the BIS website is the post-election updated ‘Ministers’ section…
The key point is that while this may appear amusingly typical of governmental incompetence, the people who really need the information, the small and medium sized business owners, are being left in the dark. While large companies have specialists, or even departments dedicated to keeping up with regulatory changes and implementing them, smaller companies may rely on a single person doing this, perhaps juggling other responsibilities as well.
Many BIS related speeches and fact sheets cheerily tell us to hold out for the next White or Green Paper for further Coalition policies, the first of which on local and regional development is due this autumn. However, entrepreneurs and small businesses need such future funding and regulatory information now in order to plan ahead. In this, the BIS website is far more of a hindrance than a help as out-dated or ambiguous advice can be worse than none at all.