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Help for the small operator
Page 43
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The wind of the Transport Act 1968 and the gale of the recession which followed soon after have between them blown away many small firms in the haulage industry. Some of them were probably offering as good a service as the survivors, but their business acumen — and especially their financial skill — was not so well developed. This lack of commercial knowledge, training or facilities is one of the great disadvantages suffered by small operators, compared with bigger companies, and it is a lack which increasingly offsets the small man's operational skills, flexibility and keenness to serve.
Membership of a trade association, and readership of the trade Press, can go a long way to filling the gap, but the Government-sponsored advisory centres for small businesses, of which the first was opened in Newcastle on Monday, look like offering a valuable new aid for the small man. As Environment Secretary Peter Walker put it when he opened the Newcastle centre, the aim is to shift the odds in favour of small firms, because for too long the advantages have been going to the bigger companies.
The Minister could almost have been talking about the haulier and small bus or coach operator when he asserted that Britain needs the small firms who are close to their customers and employees, flexible and responsive, and who provide "a seed-bed of innovation".
It is good to know that the new centres will provide (on a free phone) information on all aspects of business and guidance on obtaining specialist advice, but at least of equal value to the small operator would be a wider realization that he is not equipped like his bigger compeUtors to deal with shoals of paper or to cope with legislation which seems too often framed without regard to his slender resources. If he is regarded as so vital a cog in the nationaI wheel — and he should be — then he deserves more consideration than he often gets.