In her column for the Caerphilly Observer, businesswoman and Welsh ICE director Mandy Weston looks at the significance of Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn statement for local businesses.
It’s been an exciting month for me, both as a new business owner and a director at the Welsh Innovation Centre for Enterprise.
Work on the way Wize Consulting benchmarks its services and how it is marketed has been facilitated through collaborative thinking with fellow ICE entrepreneurs and various business experts I met at ICE’s most recent Traders’ Evening in November.
Indeed, to experience ‘ICE in action’ was truly uplifting, but it also emphasised just how important the autumn statement George Osborne made this month is to areas earmarked for investment like Caerphilly.
As Caerphilly is a Convergence area, businesses are constantly creating much-needed revenue for the local economy, and also for the wider community through the creation of jobs for others.
For several this has been made possible by the Welsh Government’s Jobs Growth Wales scheme – it has enabled Welsh ICE and three of the businesses based here to take on extra staff and, I’m sure, other companies in Caerphilly too.
With this in mind, George Osborne had no choice but to support further business growth and some might say the outcome was a relatively positive one.
As small-scale, local employers possible cuts, particularly any with the potential to affect schemes like Jobs Growth Wales, could have put the brakes on at a time when Caerphilly is in a very positive place otherwise.
But now there is opportunity to claim 100% tax relief on capital spending for vital components including computers, furniture and machinery, and for start-up entrepreneurs to earn up to £9,440 a year without paying income tax.
At the moment Caerphilly is still a focus area for start-ups and is getting a lot of attention as a centre for entrepreneurship and ongoing business growth.
I’d like to think the local business community can now look forward to expanding on this reputation in 2013 – and hopefully a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.