Many people with vastly greater experience in commercial business than I possess have spoken about how difficult it is to progress a business in this country, due to all the regulations involved. However, it is only when you actually have to negotiate the minefields yourself that you realise how complicated it all is - and every complication costs money!
I had been aware of the Government's initiative 'Better Regulation' which is theoretically addressing this issue. However, on checking out the website on this laudable initiative, it seemed to me that the work of that group was at a macro level, rather than on the practical level within which businesses work. So, there is lots of talk about capacity building at Oireachtas level, bringing in 'RIAs' (regulatory impact assessments!) to assess new regulations (hmmm, isnt that another form of regulatory process, or has Alice just fallen down the rabbit-hole?!), seeing how new Statutory Instruments (SIs to the informed senior public servant) affect business etc etc... None of the stuff that I read was in any way reassuring that the powers that be actually understand what they should be trying to achieve to assist in making us more competitive and reducing the capital and running costs of doing business in this country today.
From the perspective of our small Honest2Goodness venture, so far we have had to deal with:
The vagaries of the
Irish Planning System - going through an elaborate planning application process to change the allowed use of our two warehouses, so that we can run our market
Building regulations - lots of considerations here when doing any renovations
Fire Safety Regulations - safe egress for the public from buildings isnt easy to put in place when it is a building from an earlier era
Health and safety for employees, stallholders, customers - you name it!
Environmental Health Regulations - a myriad of requirements here that need a whole blog entry to themselves, but people would be boggly-eyed by page 2 on the level of detailed regulation involved! Suffice to say that the number of sinks required for the place has astounded me and we havent yet finished... initial meeting with EHO identified at least 30 areas where we needed to comply - each costing lots of money to put in place.
Alcohol Licencing - what and how can we sell our wines to the public...
Importation and Duty requirements - usual plethora of documentation and costs - with the added complication of dealing with how other countries do things as well
Disability and accessibility guidelines and regulations - has to be done of course, but again costs money
Compliance statements for food safety, food process maps, fire safety procedures, hygiene, etc etc.
We also have to deal with all the normal legal requirements for a business - the usual company law requirements, VAT returns, accounts, making payments, etc etc, which all take time and effort and know-how - and as we all know, time is money! All this leaves a small business with a huge overhead, before it can even start its services, sales and marketing and all the other activities that are meant to create the income to meet all these outgoings.
Is it any wonder that production costs and services costs are so high here? Do any of these organisations actually talk to each other to simplify things? Why has the Better Regulation initiative not actually produced anything that might be of assistance to SMEs, rather than a series of reports and recommendations for the civil service, none of which seem to have achieved anything practical (unless I skipped over the achievements inadvertantly)? Is anyone listening?
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Launch day photos!
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