Reporting and writing about recruitment inevitably lead to thinking about the economy. While high finance isn’t exactly my thing, high finance may not hold all of the answers to the economic problems that continue to plague the UK now.

Personally, I tend to agree with those who predict that small businesses will drive the recovery. I’d take that a step further and suggest that smaller cities, towns and villages must play a leading role in achieving a balanced economy and creating a business landscape where technological advances and innovations give individuals, communities and small businesses a platform for sustainable local growth.

Recently, I signed on to participate in my little city’s town centre forum, to strengthen the business/consumer heart of our community. The biggest issue for many other participants is the future of free car parking. My view is, if you don’t have something interesting-useful-unique to offer, who cares if there’s free parking or not? I’m willing to pay to park my car (once I’ve earned my UK driving licence!) if the trip is going to pay off with a good customer experience. On the other hand, if there’s nothing at a specific location that I want or the customer service experience is crap, I’m not going to use it.

So what does this have to do with fixing the UK’s economy? Here are my thoughts on grass roots local rejuvenation.

1) Give business and home owners tax incentives to improve their properties. Mortgages are hard to come by, so let consumers ‘improve instead of move’. This will help get the local construction sector working. They’ll need additional help to carry out the new jobs, adding to the local ‘in employment’ figures.

2)  Take VAT down to 10% on materials required in these small-scale construction projects.

3)  Allow local authorities to impose a bottle-and-can bill. This would see consumers paying a 5p returnable fee for metal cans, 10p for plastic bottles and 15p for glass bottoles at point of purchase. When returned to the store, the fees would be refunded to the consumers for the number of cans and bottles returned. How would this generate revenue? What this would do would create financial incentives to not litter, potentially saving local authorities’ street and pavement cleaning spend, which they are tightening up on anyway. Instead of pitching or ignoring empty cans and bottles on pavement and on grassy park lawns, everyone from vagrants to school children raising money for projects could come to see these vessels as sources of potential income. This might also require additional jobs to be created at local stores for dealing with the returns.

4) Tax incentives to encourage landlords to allow pop-up and start-up businesses to use their empty properties at radically reduced rents and rates. Capture the energy of the ‘recession economy’ by providing new entrepreneurs — the crafters, the cupcake makers, etc — a place to build their name and their businesses! 

5) Tax relief/incentives on commuter public transport fares for home-to-work distances over 30 miles. This would promote greater consumer spending, probably at the very local level, on an extra meal out, new clothing, and so forth.

6) Tax incentives to people who use their taxable redundancy money to retrain or earn a qualification. Encourage people to learn new skills!

7)  At the national level, government should reward local authorities who encourage entrepreneurship, local environmental pride and small-scale construction. Celebrate the UK’s glorious tradition of small business and ownership!  

The grey market exists because the tax structure is at times so onerous and punitive for the straight shooters, and at the same time, so filled with loopholes for the sophisticated rich. There is an opportunity to use tax relief as an enticement to the middle class to better their quality of life and their communities. What would be the worst that could happen?.