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Pre-election poll results

THE Tories have vowed to make things easier for small businesses, Labour says it will cut administrative and regulatory costs for SMEs while the Lib Dems have promised to make things fairer for all.

As the uncertainty over the nation’s future moves closer to being resolved this week, small business leaders, entrepreneurs and sole traders across the region are no doubt frantically scanning the three main manifestos to see where their loyalties should lie.

We asked bdaily readers which party they thought had the policies that best fit the ambitions of the self-employed. Perhaps surprisingly – given the outcome of most nation polls which suggest Gordon Brown has some ground to make up - almost half (45.3%) of our respondents voted for Labour, 34.4% chose the Tories, 18.8% Lib Dems and 1.6% opting for ‘other’.

Charlotte Nichols (pictured), who runs her own Darlington-based PR company called Harvey & Hugo, said: “I think the Tories have better policies for small businesses. They seem to reward people more for working hard and I don’t agree with all the incentives for people who are unemployed and have no intention of getting a job. There should be more rewards for smaller businesses who are recruiting and helping to get people back into work, but it seems like the better your business does as it grows and recruits staff it is simply penalised more by having to contribute more towards taxes. If I didn’t have to pay as much tax, I could probably take on another member of staff right now and I’d much rather be paying another salary than knowing a proportion of my tax goes towards rewarding people who don’t want to work.”

Peter Watson, who runs Newcastle-based consultancy Sherpa, said: “The polls suggest that the conservatives have a good shout at moving into power. So will be interesting to see what happens with regional infrastructure. In terms of the dynamics of the region we have spun out Sherpa business consulting to focus on growth markets in innovation. Due to the shift to venture capital investment in the form of North East finance.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .