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Posted: Thu 16th Jul 2026
10 min read
Ask a small business owner what "regulation" means to them, and you'll get a different answer every time.
For a café owner, it's food hygiene and licensing. For a consultant, it's IR35 and data protection. For a manufacturer, it's product safety, environmental compliance and export paperwork. For anyone with a single employee, it's now the Employment Rights Act too.
We talk about "regulation" like it's one topic. It isn't. It's dozens of overlapping systems, built by different regulators at different times for different reasons, all landing on the same desk.
And increasingly, that desk belongs to someone with no compliance team, no legal department and no HR function. Just them.
That's exactly the problem the government's new Small Business Regulatory Taskforce has been set up to solve, and it's a genuinely encouraging sign of intent.
I've been sitting on it since it launched in June, leading the workstream on SME-friendly regulatory guidance. Here's what it is, where we've got to, and why I think this is one of the most exciting pieces of work Enterprise Nation is involved in right now.
A big business absorbs a new regulation by assigning it to someone. A compliance officer reads the guidance, updates a policy, briefs the team, and moves on.
A small business absorbs it by the owner staying up an extra two hours after closing, trying to work out if the new rule applies to them, what it costs, and whether they've got it right, because getting it wrong isn't an admin headache, it's a fine, a claim, or a reputational hit they can't recover from.
The UK's business population is over 5.7 million private sector businesses, and the overwhelming majority are small or micro. That's an enormous amount of ambition, ingenuity and grit, and it's exactly why getting this right matters so much.
Get the guidance and the system right, and you free up millions of hours currently lost to working things out, and put them back into growth.
41% of small businesses say regulatory guidance is hard to understand
40% say it's hard to locate in the first place
Only 14% say they get a quick response when they need help from a regulator
Only 10% say it's easy to resolve a complaint
When they do need help, 64% ask their accountant first and 56% just Google it. Only 22% go to gov.uk
That last stat is actually good news in disguise. This isn't a small business problem; it's a findability and design problem, and those are solvable.
The guidance often exists. It just isn't written for the people who need it, or sitting where they'd think to look, which means the fix is well within reach.
The cost is real, too. FSB research (March 2026) puts the collective cost of compliance to UK SMEs at £36 billion and 379 million hours a year, roughly £7,100 per business.
That's precisely the kind of number a government-backed, industry-led taskforce with a hard 25% reduction target exists to bring down, and unlike previous attempts, this one has small business voices in the room from day one.
The Small Business Regulatory Taskforce was launched by the Department for Business and Trade and HM Treasury in June 2026.
It's a joint government-industry group with a clear, ambitious mandate: help deliver the government's target of a 25% reduction in the administrative burden on SMEs, in line with the Plan for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses.
You can read the full terms of reference and taskforce membership here.
Its terms of reference are refreshingly specific about what "good regulation" should look like: proportionate to firm size, clear enough to act on without a lawyer, and protective of the things that matter, for workers, consumers, the environment and the public.
This isn't a deregulation taskforce. It's a better regulation taskforce, and that's a genuinely welcome shift in how government is approaching this.
Modernising regulatory submissions: Making the process of complying less manual, less repetitive, less paper-based
Embedding SME-friendly approaches to regulatory guidance: This is my workstream: how guidance actually reaches a small business, in language they can use
Regulatory passporting: Exploring how a business that's already proven compliance in one context shouldn't have to prove it from scratch everywhere else
SME impact from enforcement: Looking at how regulators and local authorities apply rules consistently, or don't
Building SME capability and technology: What government can do to help small firms get compliance right, rather than just telling them the rules
It will also look at "blue tape": the layer of guidance, standards and informal expectations that sits on top of the actual law and often makes it feel more restrictive than it legally is.
Anyone who's tried to interpret a regulator's guidance note versus the underlying statute will recognise this immediately.
The taskforce kicked off in June at the Old Admiralty Building, and has been meeting through the summer, working primarily through thematic sub-groups rather than one big room.
Enterprise Nation’s workstream on SME-friendly guidance has been gathering member evidence, mapping where the current system fails, and building out recommendations for what "good" should look like in practice, from plain-language guidance delivered where small firms already go, through to a proportionate compliance track for micro-businesses and consistent procurement criteria across local authorities, rather than over 300 different council interpretations of the same national rule.
Findings and recommendations go to the Business Secretary and Treasury Ministers, with publication expected by Autumn 2026.
The government will then respond formally. Tax policy is explicitly out of scope; this is about regulatory and administrative burden, not the tax system itself.
It's co-chaired by Blair McDougall MP, Minister for Small Business and Economic Transformation, and Tina McKenzie MBE, chair of policy and advocacy at the FSB. Alongside them:
Michelle Ovens CBE, founder of Small Business Britain
Polly Dhaliwal, COO of Enterprise Nation (that's me)
Neil Davy, CEO of Family Business UK
Charlotte Keenan, managing director at Goldman Sachs
Dr Roni Savage, CEO of Jomas Associates and DBT non-executive director
Joshua Toovey, head of policy and research at IPSE
Kate Shoesmith, director of policy and insight at the British Chambers of Commerce
Iain Wright, chief policy and communications officer at ICAEW
Ed Woodall, CEO of the Association of Convenience Stores
James Carroll, No.10 special advisor
Katie Martin, business advisor to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury
It's a genuinely broad table, sector bodies, professional bodies, big finance, and small business advocates in the same room. Which is exactly the point.
Regulation touches every one of those constituencies differently, and a recommendation that works for accountancy practices might not work for convenience stores.
There's no shortage of people willing to have opinions about small business regulation. What's harder to bring is evidence, at scale, from the businesses actually living with it.
That's what our over 180,000-member community gives us, real experiences of what breaks down when a new rule lands on a two-person business with no compliance function.
Being in that room means we're not just responding to a consultation after the fact. We're helping shape what "SME-friendly" means before it's written down.
And a big part of my job on this workstream is translation, taking what our members tell us and turning it into recommendations a minister can actually act on.
Part of the brief has been to look outward, and this is the part that gets me genuinely excited. No one is starting this from scratch, and there's real inspiration in what other countries have already built.
Singapore's GoBusiness portal is the clearest example of what's possible.
One login, one dashboard, over 220 business licences across 29 government agencies accessible through a single application gateway, with built-in guided journeys so a new food business, for instance, is told exactly what it needs rather than having to work it out from scratch.
It didn't happen overnight, but it shows what's achievable when guidance is designed around the business rather than the regulator's org chart.
The Netherlands has done something similar with Ondernemersplein / Business.gov.nl.
It is a single government hub where the Tax Administration, the Chamber of Commerce (KVK) and other agencies collaborate to answer business questions in one place, in plain language, with step-by-step guides for exactly the kind of situations our members tell us they struggle with here (hiring your first employee, meeting product safety requirements, and so on).
Neither is perfect, and neither happened overnight. But both prove the model works: simpler doesn't mean less protection, it means better design.
The OECD's own research backs this up: in its 2026 Digital for SMEs survey, 35% of SMEs globally said simpler compliance processes would be the single thing that helped their business most, ahead of finance, ahead of skills. That's an enormous opportunity sitting in plain sight.
An ideal world isn't zero regulation.
It's regulation that's proportionate to the size of the business applying it, guidance that's written in plain English and sits where small business owners actually look for help, and a system that tells you what a new rule will cost businesses to comply with before it's introduced, not after.
Right now, we regulate first and count the cost later, if we count it at all. That should be the wrong way round.
The taskforce's recommendations are due by Autumn 2026, and I'll keep sharing and updating this piece on what we're finding as the guidance workstream develops.
What gives me real optimism is that this isn't a taskforce built to produce a report that sits on a shelf. It's got small business voices in the room, a hard target attached to it, and models from around the world showing exactly what "better" looks like.
If you run a small business and have a story about regulation that made no sense for your size, or guidance you couldn't find when you needed it, I want to hear it. That's exactly the evidence this Taskforce needs, and exactly what Enterprise Nation exists to carry into the room.
If you've got thoughts, email me directly: polly@enterprisenation.com
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