The Stage

DTI rules a burden on small agencies

Published Tuesday 25 May 2004 at 07:25

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Department of Trade and Industry’s new regulatory framework for employment agencies is going to mean the demise of many firms working in the showbusiness sector.

This need not be so bad a thing as it sounds. In some cases, companies’ extinction has been the result of a merger that has much to commend it for all involved. Yet that still leaves a lot which are likely to go to the wall.

The DTI appears to be maintaining a bullish stance towards opposition. Like farmers, agents are not slow to complain about encroaching red tape nor the headaches caused by business partners and clients. As such they are rarely the recipients of public sympathy. This makes it a great deal easier for Whitehall to adopt the classic bureaucratic response in the face of moans, to the effect that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from better regulation.

In the long run we might suppose this to be the case. Whatever their shortcomings, civil servants are not as a rule either venal or corrupt. If a firm under investigation is found to be blameless, the truth will out in the end. The problem, however, is not the end result but the time taken to arrive at it.

Central government bureaucracy is a vast, slow moving beast, as all too many of its trade creditors are aware. Businesses work at an altogether different pace. Few have an existence so fractured and frenetic as small companies working in the entertainment sector. If they stay still too long they soon wither and die.

Nothing is likely to hasten this end more than an extra mountain of paperwork. The smaller the operation, the greater the threat. Success depends more than anything on entrepreneurial ability and in a one-man firm this cannot be reconciled easily with the demands of administration.

Agencies’ lack of attention to paperwork has been often the bane of their clients’ lives. Whether firms like it or not - and most certainly do not - many of the old ways of doing business are no longer defensible. Yet it is asking much for individuals running firms single-handedly to suddenly leap forward decades in their working practices. A talent for securing bookings is not always complemented by a grasp of the finer points of accounting and form-filling. Those with most ground to cover in the latter respect are rarely those most proficient with the wonders of email and other labour-saving devices.

There will be no going back from the latest legislative changes, bar perhaps some amendments. This makes it inevitable that the number of small agencies will decline markedly in the coming years. One hopes that this will be the result more of mergers than of closures. But it might ease the process if the DTI did not try to suggest that those with something to fear would have to be out of step with the law rather merely out of step with the times.