The Re-focusing of Small Business Services in Enterprise Agencies: the Influence of TECs and LECs

PROFESSOR ROBERTJ. BENNETT IS WITH THE Department of Geography, London School of Economics and Political Science, England. This paper assesses the change in focus of a form of British support services for small firms, enterprise agencies, as a result of their increased contracting arrangements with the government-backed Training and Enterprise Councils and Local Enterprise Companies. It is based chiefly on a representative matched postal survey of a sample of agencies which are compared in 1988 and 1992. The paper assesses the changing form of activities, services, client focus, finance and staff. It finds a substantial shift in services, finance and client focus to reflect TEC/LEC priorities both with the unemployed through business start-ups for self-employment, and with larger established businesses. The paper also demonstrates that changes stimulated by TECs towards a stronger output focus follow similar stimuli from private sector sponsors as evidenced particularly by the targetting of resources through secondments. The result has been a more concentrated, more highly focused structure of enterprise agencies and their resources which, under financial pressures, is likely to lead to concentration into a smaller number of agencies in the future, a process being accelerated by the development of another government initiative, Business Links.