Businesses - Your Regulators Need You!

Posted by kathryn Preece on 2 February 2012 | 2 Comments

Tags: business support, regulation, business advice

Businesses - Your Regulators Need You!

Businesses in Leicester and Leicestershire are being offered the opportunity to help provide frontline regulatory officers with a better understanding of the pressures faced by local small businesses.  This innovative approach to helping regulatory officers, such as Environmental Health and Trading Standards Officers, gain experience of how businesses within Leicester and Leicestershire operate will improve the ability of those officers to interact more effectively with businesses and provide the support local businesses need.

The Local Enterprise Partnerships’ Better Business for All programme has been established to create a new relationship between businesses and those who regulate them.  This new relationship will seek to support business growth through removing the real and perceived regulatory barriers to growth.

The lack of understanding that officers have regarding the pressures faced by small businesses is considered to be a barrier to a more effective and supportive relationship between businesses and regulators.  The introduction of a Business Awareness scheme is aimed at removing this barrier.

To really make a difference and provide an opportunity to gain this valuable business insight local businesses are needed.  A small group of regulators will visit the host business to have discussions and otherwise see the world from the business perspective.  The visit will take no longer than 2 hours and the regulators will be focusing on the following questions:

• What are the most significant business challenges that the host business face?
• How is the operating/economic context changing for the host business?
• What are the host businesses’ positive and less positive experiences of being regulated?
• What could be done, by individual regulators and by the Local Enterprise Partnership, for the business in question, to make regulation less burdensome and for regulators to add more value to the business?

The regulators are not visiting in a regulatory capacity and therefore will not be undertaking an inspection of any kind.

The first Business Awareness sessions are planned for 20^th, 21^st, 23^rd, 24^th, 27^th and 28^th February 2012.  The visits will take place either between 11am – 1pm or 1pm-3pm. If your business would like to take part or you would like to find out more details please contact Kathryn Preece on 07833 469520 kathryn.preece@llep.org.uk. or Tom Ipgrave 0871 384 3185 tom.ipgrave@llep.org.uk

Further information on Better Business for All can be found at www.llep.org.uk/betterbusinessforall