Member

I have tabled my Amendment 33 simply to try to find out the impact on different sizes of business, through three categories of turnover—£1 million, £5 million and £10 million. The £1 million aligns with the new Companies Act definition of a micro-business. According to the ONS analysis of businesses, as amplified by Department for Business and Trade data, businesses that have between one and nine employees have an average turnover of only £600,000, well below the Companies Act micro-business level. The next category, which is the 10 to 49 employees range, has an average turnover of £3.5 million, so all those plus some more would fall into my £5 million threshold. The £10 million threshold would include a fair chunk, but by no means all, of the larger categories of SMEs. That is really what we need to try to find beneath the analysis. I do not much mind whether we get analysis by number of employees or by turnover bands; the important thing is that the Government analyse and publish the effect on different sizes of business.