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Join for freePosted: Thu 16th Jul 2026
One year ago, the government set out its Small Business Plan. Watch this session to hear what's changed since, and what it means for your business.
Enterprise Nation's chief operating officer Polly Dhaliwal is joined by Blair McDougall MP, Minister for Small Business and Economic Transformation.
The Minister reflects on progress so far, from access to finance and high streets to digital, AI and exports, and where the focus turns next.
The session closes with a small business Q&A.
The Small Business Plan one year on: What's been delivered so far
The support available to you now and how to access it
Where the government's focus turns next for small firms
Your questions answered
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Polly: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. I'm Polly Dhaliwal, COO of Enterprise Nation, and we have an incredibly exciting session for you all today.
One year ago, the government published its small business plan. Today, we take stock of what has been delivered and where the focus turns next.
Enterprise Nation has been on the journey. We've been part of the delivery. We run the Backing Your Business campaign with the Department for Business and Trade, and we help small firms grow on high streets across the country.
We're in Brighton today, opening our new pop-up store, through to connecting small businesses to big buyers through our Supply Connect procurement programme, and not forgetting upskilling across AI as well.
As an organisation, we sit on the minister's Small Business Growth Forum, talking on topics such as youth entrepreneurship and high street support, and also the Regulatory Taskforce, all working towards how we can best serve small firms.
We see first-hand the tireless work of the department to achieve the goals set out in that small business plan last year.
The year ahead matters just as much. Our StartUp Ambition report found that 41% of UK adults are planning, starting or considering starting a business this year, with young people leading the way, which is always music to our ears.
And Andy Burnham, expected to be our next prime minister, has named public procurement and business rates reform as two of his priorities for small business as well.
Whoever is in charge, small firms will always sit at the top of our agenda. So let's get started.
I am delighted to welcome Blair McDougall MP, minister for small business and economic transformation.
Minister, firstly, thank you so much for taking time for our members so close to recess.
Blair: Thanks for having me. I have to confess that the R-word that's on my mind isn't recess. It's more reshuffle, but yes.
Polly: Start light, minister. I love that.
Let's start at the beginning. It's been a year since the small business plan was published. What are you proudest of, and what has it changed for small businesses on the ground?
Blair: I would have said the thing I get most excited about, because it comes out of personal experience, is the fact that we now have legislation going through Parliament to deal with late payments.
We'll perhaps come to that later in the conversation.
But the timing of this conversation is fortuitous because it comes the morning after we announced a huge expansion to the support government gives for small business lending through something called the Growth Guarantee Scheme. We underwrite the risk for businesses and unlock lending.
That is important to me because the thing I enjoy so much about this job is meeting entrepreneurs who have had that spark of an idea or that moment of creativity. But that has to come together with money to be something more than just a dream or an idea.
The doubling of that support last night will mean about £4 billion of support. It will unlock lending to about 12,000 more businesses a year, and that is just so exciting.
I'm already meeting with banks this morning who are talking about opening the taps on their lending. So it's a moment where entrepreneurs who perhaps have not been successful in the past can take the opportunity to try again.
Polly: That is incredible, minister.
What we see first-hand is that 60% of our members are always looking for funding and cash flow support. So this type of announcement is incredibly powerful, especially for our micro SMEs, particularly those with nought to 10 employees.
Now, on the flip side of that, there is payment. You mentioned late payments there.
I would say late payments has been one of the biggest moves this year, from the crackdown in March to the legislation now before Parliament. What will the reforms mean for a small firm waiting to be paid?
Blair: The legislation will flip the whole power relationship between small companies and their big customers.
I have been the small entrepreneur hitting refresh on the business bank account, desperately hoping that the big invoice you've been waiting for months has been paid.
It's very difficult to take an aggressive approach to one of your customers, right?
So this sets the expectation in law that you'll be paid quickly. It creates a situation where interest is mandatory, rather than something you have to ask for.
One of the things I want to see happen, as we're taking the legislation through Parliament at the moment, is that we use it to signal to the economy: get ready for this. Don't wait for the law to come in. Start getting your payment practices in shape now, because you're going to have to do it anyway.
As a government, we're not going to tolerate any longer the situation where big companies use small companies as a source of free credit and, as a result, dozens of businesses go out of existence every day because of it.
Polly: Minister, I was with two small businesses yesterday who said exactly what you just said at the beginning there, that they were too afraid to reach out to these corporate partners because they've just got them on their books, and they didn't want to annoy them.
So I think putting responsibility onto the bigger corporates is key in this topic.
Blair: The other thing that I should have mentioned as well within the bill is the new powers that we're giving to the Small Business Commissioner to go out there, investigate and fine companies really substantially if they have terrible payment practices.
So again, it isn't incumbent on a small company to complain and report against their own customers.
Polly: For those of you who are on the call or listening back to this session, with all the topics we talk about today, we'll point you towards the relevant sections on Business Growth Service as well, because there's important information for small businesses to access there.
Turning the conversation slightly, I mentioned at the start of the call that we're in Brighton today, launching our high street store in The Lanes. It's called Powering the High Street.
A lot of the plan set out last year puts the high street at the heart of the everyday economy, and April brought business rate cuts for smaller retail, hospitality and leisure firms.
What is your vision for how high streets evolve, and what is the role of small businesses in that vision?
Blair: I know The Lanes well. What a great example of local businesses they are there.
The high street, as you say, has to evolve and reinvent itself, and it's entrepreneurs that will do that, not government. But we've got to make it easier for that to happen.
You mentioned business rates. We've tried to structurally rebalance business rates away from small high street businesses and towards the big online warehouses.
You mentioned a new prime minister coming in. He's indicated he wants to go further on that and lower the business rates costs even more, which I think is really important.
As well as the small business strategy that we published a year ago, we're also working across government on a specific high street strategy that will build on that.
We're looking at things like continuing the crackdown on bogus shops. If you're an independent retailer struggling with your business, you're competing with businesses that are not paying tax, that are folding and disappearing and restarting and all the rest of it.
That's unfair competition, but it also impacts the character of the high street and whether people want to go and shop there. So we'll be focusing on things like that within the strategy.
We're also looking at how we can make it easier to do pop-up activity, where you're bringing new life to the high streets.
That means looking at the regulatory landscape, about how difficult it sometimes is to get a business up and running, to get the relevant licences and all the rest of it, and to make things possible.
All of that is obviously backed up by the Pride in Place funding that we're putting into hundreds of areas around the country.
That's funding things like converting the low-quality rented properties above shops, which are often not a terribly desirable place to live, into more attractive townhouse-style apartments, so that you transform high streets into places that people want to live.
I should mention one last thing as well, because I'm also the minister for the Post Office. They are doing some really exciting things around creating a new model where post offices will become hubs for the delivery of services by online providers that want some sort of high street presence, or government services.
Driving that footfall into high streets is incredibly important.
Polly: Thank you for that, minister.
We spoke to the Post Office team a few months ago, actually, and the plans they have are really exciting for regions across the UK, which is nice to hear.
It's fascinating. We see it from a small business lens and how to get more entrepreneurs onto the high street. But as you spoke there, it's not just about small businesses.
It's about local community, public spaces, car parks, reducing crime, and there are so many different departments involved in this topic.
It's a huge topic, but I definitely see a future roadmap where we see more innovative, exciting entrepreneurs on the high street.
Blair: Absolutely. That's the future.
Polly: Moving on to finance, and looking at how we spoke about getting more funding into the hands of entrepreneurs through the new scheme announced yesterday, the Growth Guarantee Scheme.
Research we published with CFIT this spring found that helping firms get finance-ready before they apply could unlock an estimated £5 billion in extra lending a year.
How is government thinking about that readiness, not just the supply of funding? How do we make sure that a small business knows when they're ready to access funding, rather than maybe applying too early, getting declined and then not applying again?
Blair: We've got to invest in the support that's available and, where we can, combine the availability of finance with the advice and support that goes alongside that.
You see support through the Business Growth Service, that single portal we've created for government advice.
Again, I've been the small entrepreneur with 20 tabs open in your browser, as you desperately try to find the right government support. Bringing all that together means people can get the advice they need.
But there's also more intense support, like the Business Academy, where you can learn how to get these types of business propositions together.
We're also investing in organisations like CDFIs, community finance organisations. We need a better name for them than CDFIs, I think. All suggestions welcome.
That's where banking and advice go hand in hand, which used to feel like the norm.
So I think you're right. Supply is only one side of it. It's really important, the work we're doing to unlock supply. Readiness is really important.
The other thing is demand. It's been such a tough decade for small businesses.
It's made small businesses resilient, but it's also made them risk-averse. I think we need to speak a language that recognises that.
For example, the advice and financing we're giving to small businesses to get into exporting. That's not just a way to grow your business and find new customers. It's also a way to make yourself more resilient if you spread yourself across different markets.
So it's supply, it's readiness, and it's also thinking about demand and recognising the real experience of entrepreneurs and the pretty tough environment they've been operating in.
Polly: Thanks, minister. I want to turn to some community questions. We'll go back to one topic, then jump back to our questions.
Jill Poet has asked: "Late payment is clearly a big issue, and the new legislation is very welcome. But there is still a 60-day payment option, which is still too long. Is there a desire to move that to 30 days?"
Blair: For public sector contracts, we've gone for 30 days. In the next legislation, we're seeing 60 days.
We're really keen that that is not a floor. It is a ceiling, so people don't feel that is something they are aiming towards.
We said as we announced this legislation that we are going to keep this under review and look at the option of going down to 45 days as well.
We're also looking at how we can, through electronic invoicing, remove some of the excuses for late payment as well, and just make the whole system a little more fluid.
We're certainly open to looking at this. But I think even that 60 days within legislation will be a huge leap forward for a lot of people.
And if you combine that with the measures that we're taking to deal with frivolous disputes, where people wait until the end of the payment terms period and then say there was a problem with the invoice, we're trying to deal with that problem as well.
Polly: Great. Thank you, minister. A question on youth entrepreneurship. Hello, Simon, who is one of our advisers.
What is being done to support young entrepreneurs starting businesses and starting a business earlier in their life?
Blair: Youth entrepreneurship feels like such a hot topic at the moment.
I've lost count of the number of events I've been at. I was at another one last night in the Foreign Office, where we were discussing how best to support people.
That's an example of it, bringing together universities and training organisations with young entrepreneurs to discuss how we can better support them.
One of the most important interventions we've made so far is start-up loans. We've really increased the number of loans that we give, which are combined, as I mentioned earlier on, with advice.
A huge proportion of those are going to young entrepreneurs, which I think is really encouraging.
People will be aware of something called the Melbourne Review that Alan Melbourne is undertaking at the moment, which is looking at the number of young people in the country who are not in education or employment.
We're really keen that part of the answer to that should be helping young people start their own business as a route to making sure they come out of economic inactivity as well.
There's a huge amount of work going on around that, and we'll see something about that later on in the summer. But I'll have to keep my powder dry on that for now.
Suffice to say, it's an area where there's a huge amount of energy and activity at the moment.
Polly: Great. That's really good to hear, minister. Thank you.
Let's switch gears to AI, a topic that we never hear about at the moment. I'm only joking.
Our research found only one in five small firms are using AI regularly.
What would you say to a founder who knows they probably should be doing more with technology, or selling overseas by leveraging technology, for example, but just has no idea where to start?
Blair: I would say: we hear you. There has been a huge increase in small firms using AI. I was meeting with Google last week, who said they thought it had doubled in the last year.
I have a worry, though, that it's quite shallow. It's people using it for small everyday tasks rather than integrating it into how they monitor their supplies or cut costs, or into more substantial things.
We recognise that this feels like quite a big leap for a lot of people.
It feels like they're being expected to become experts in something that changes every two months. The models that are out there change every few weeks, and by the time you think you've got your head around it, even as a minister, things have changed.
So we've been gathering together all the big tech providers at roundtables that I've been chairing in Number 10 over the last couple of months.
Where we're aiming to get to is, by the end of the summer, to have something that feels like a curated set of support, because there is a lot of support out there.
You can go to eBay or Amazon or whoever for different types of support about how to build an agent into your website, your sales and things like that.
But at the moment, as I say, it feels too much like you have to learn how to do it.
Actually, like other technical things that we do as small business people, your accounts or your legal advice, you don't have to learn it yourself. What you have to do is find the right person to support you.
We've got to make finding that support easier and a little less daunting, so that people can go a bit deeper and unlock the transformational change that's there.
An example I heard last week was of a small seller who had added AI agents to her website, which allowed her to behave as if she was a much bigger company than she actually was.
It brought in more customers, and as a result, she was able to hire more people.
Sometimes people think of AI and worry about its impact on employment. But actually, there's the potential for it to be something that allows businesses to grow, expand and create new opportunities for people.
Polly: Thank you, minister. It's a really interesting point.
We hear a lot of small businesses talk about how they go from simple prompts answering questions and speeding up their day to day, to actually implementing processes that a human was doing before.
That then frees up that human to work on the floral set-up in the flower shop, for example.
There's a staggering stat that shows that across the world at the moment, it's still less than 1% of users using AI in the way it was actually created for, which was around improving processes across small businesses and bigger businesses as well.
Back to some Q&A. We've only got a short bit of time left. Someone has asked: how can small businesses best influence future government policy and ensure their voices are heard?
Blair: I know sometimes it feels like when you come up against a barrier, whether it's a regulation that doesn't work or something that's unnecessarily costly, that those are acts of God rather than something that can be changed.
For my part, I'm constantly asking the question: what does this mean for small businesses?
I'm constantly out there meeting with small businesses. To take one example, at the moment, I'm chairing a review of how regulation and red tape impact smaller businesses.
As well as being small business minister, I'm minister for regulation. I tend to find that whenever we go out there and ask, "Tell us about red tape, tell us about regulatory costs", we tend to hear from the big companies who are better able to manage that cost.
Small companies have great organisations like you speaking up for them, but they don't have their own public affairs teams and lawyers making the case.
So we have a very important taskforce looking at regulation right now. I would say, do take the opportunity to input into that type of work.
You will tend to find out about that through organisations like Enterprise Nation.
There is such an appetite for that type of feedback at the centre of government. If we get things right for small businesses, that's 98% of businesses and two-thirds of employment.
If we can grow small businesses by just 1% over the course of this Parliament, £320 billion of economic growth would be added.
So we are desperate to hear that feedback from small business and find those things.
Polly: Thank you, minister. For those who are listening who do have pain points when it comes to regulation, you can send anything through to hello@enterprisenation.com.
We sit on the Regulatory Taskforce, and we're doing a lot of work with our community to showcase that back to government as well.
I think we've got time for two more questions, so let's jump into them.
Our StartUp Ambition research found that 41% of UK adults plan to start, or are considering starting, a business this year, yet two-thirds are unaware of government-backed support.
How do you and the department want to close that gap, and how can partners like Enterprise Nation and other support organisations help?
Blair: You can help by ringing the bells on all the things I'm about to talk about and making sure people are aware of them.
As well as what we've already spoken about, about increasing the finance so that those good ideas can become reality through things like the expansion of start-up loans, so people can take that first step, we're also really trying to improve the advice and support that's there for new companies.
Through the Business Growth Service at business.gov.uk, we're better signposting people to that advice so they can just get going in the first place.
I know it's daunting and it is tough. Often in this country, we are a little bit down on ourselves and can be a bit negative sometimes.
But if you look at the markets that we've opened up through trade deals, if you look at the extra funding we've put in to make sure you've got the money, if you look at the advice, even the changes to procurement, the opportunity is there. It's wide open.
So my message to people is, if you're thinking about it, as so many people are, this is the time to do it.
Don't be afraid of failure is the other thing. I think we've got to be better in this country at celebrating those who take risks when it doesn't work, as much as we do when it is a win.
We've got to be a nation of risk-takers again.
Polly: I love that. I couldn't agree more.
When someone starts a business, we should be celebrating them. They should have more cards that say congratulations on starting your business, because it's a real commitment to do that.
Blair: 100%.
Polly: We've got time for one last question, and I know there are a few more questions in the chat. What we can do is maybe forward those on to the department and get a response to individual members of the community as well.
Looking forward, what is the one thing you most want to have delivered by the time we mark two years of the plan next July? What's one thing you want to have delivered?
Blair: I have three things in my head, Polly.
One of them is cash flow. In advance of the legislation coming in, I want us to begin to see that culture change already happening over the course of the next year.
As I said, there are people getting their house in order rather than waiting for the law to change.
I want us to do more to cut costs, partly as the potentially incoming prime minister has said around business rates, but also around regulation and energy costs for small businesses as well.
The final thing is exactly what you just said, Polly: creating more of a sense as a nation that we are people who celebrate entrepreneurship.
The Prime Minister will stand up at Prime Minister's Questions and congratulate the England football team, for example.
I want to still live in a country where it's not remarked on as being something unusual when, in moments like that, we stand up and say congratulations to business person X on having launched product Y or having done a funding round, or whatever it is.
I want us to feel like a country that values the extraordinary risks people take, the creativity and all the hard work of entrepreneurs.
Polly: I could not agree more, minister.
Firstly, thank you for taking the time during a busy period. I know that it is busy within the department.
Thank you for setting out what the small business plan has achieved over the last year, but also looking forward to what small businesses can get involved in, give their voice and opinions on, and where you're looking to go with those three Cs by next July as well.
We look forward to it. We hope there aren't too many changes. Enterprise Nation has enjoyed working with the department over the last year. There have been some incredible changes, but I know there's more work to be done.
So thank you. Thank you to everyone at Enterprise Nation. These sessions are short and snappy for a reason, because you're all running small businesses, as are we.
Enjoy the rest of your day. Hopefully, you can enjoy the sunshine, and hopefully we see an England win tonight as well.
Thank you, everyone, and thank you, minister, for joining us today.
Blair: Thanks so much, Polly. Thanks, everyone.
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