UK Business Barometer

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The April UK Business Adviser Barometer survey questionnaire received 163 responses. The April survey was seeking views on the Budget, credit arrangements, red tape, savings on expenditure, Employment Tribunals, use of business advice, information websites, market demand, mature employees, average weekly hours, grants, and future questions.

Well over half (64%) of the respondents viewed this year's Budget as likely to have a neutral impact on their clients' businesses, but a third (33%) think it will have a negative impact. This was only a slightly more optimistic finding than that from the UK Business Barometer survey, where although 52% of the responding businesses themselves thought the impact would be neutral, 42% expect it to have a negative impact.

36% of respondents find that their clients mostly, or invariably offer more generous credit terms to customers than they themselves receive. 11% of responding Advisers believe that the credit terms offered by their clients are not at all more generous than they receive. 35% of businesses responding for themselves to the UKBB feel that they receive less generous credit term treatment from suppliers than they offer their own customers, while 19% say that their terms are less generous terms than those given by suppliers.

There was strong support that the level of complaints about 'red tape' is justified in practice, with 77% of respondents backing this highly or moderately highly, and no one opting for 'not at all'.

Recent announcements on UK growth rates have been disappointing and many businesses may be looking at their costs. When asked which area of expenditure they would look to first for savings, Business Advisers were asked which area their clients would look to first for savings, and 47% believe that business would cut training first, while 22% think Investment would be top of the list. In contrast, from respondents to the UKBB, 37% opted for savings on investment in plant and equipment, 25% would look to wages and salaries, while 19% indicated that their first choice would be to cut marketing costs.

With the latest changes in employment law and access to employment tribunals, and reports of large increases in the numbers of employees lodging cases against employers, especially those running smaller businesses, we asked whether our respondents had many clients who had involvement with employment tribunals recently. The overwhelming majority had less than 10% of clients who had been involved, and no one had over 50% of clients with recent involvement.

Business Advisers revealed that only 9% have a majority of clients who use advice on a regular basis, while 5% say the majority of their clients use advice as a measure of last resort. The UKBB result showed that 38% of respondents regard externally provided advice as a regular and useful addition to their own thinking although other respondents varied in the degree to which they regularly use external advice, down to those who only use it as a measure of last resort (10%).

When it comes to using business information websites, 27% of UKBAB respondents use them daily, 38% weekly and 25% monthly, but only 4% do not use them at all. Respondents to the Business Barometer use them less frequently and 18% do not use them.

Business Advisers clients are 6% more constrained by low market demand than business responding to the UKBB in its March Survey using a weighted average across responses. Although fewer Advisers than businesses feel highly constrained, the responses to the next two categories were much greater for Advisers than businesses. .

Looking at changes in attitude towards recruiting from an ageing working population, 58% of Advisers have seen no change over the last two years. However, 40% have noted a more positive attitude, including 3% with a significantly more positive attitude. .

In terms of choosing between cutting hours per employee or cutting numbers of employees, 63% of Advisers believe that their clients will opt for reducing numbers of employees. However, in marked contrast, when asked a similar question in the March UKBB Survey, 52% of businesses opted for reducing average hours per employee.

Most clients (93%) of responding Business Advisers are influenced in their investment plans by grants and subsidies, 50% highly or moderately highly, but when the UKBB addressed the question directly to businesses in February last year it revealed that 44% were not influenced by grants and subsidies.

80% of respondents would do some preparation for the following UK Business Advisers Barometer Survey if they were given some advance notice of the upcoming question areas. About one third (33%) would use these to a high or moderately high extent to prepare future responses.