“STOP making me feel you want small business gone. Because at the moment, between paperwork, rules and regulations, bank charges, rates and fuel, there’s nothing left to employ staff.”

That’s the view of one small business owner weighed down by a mountain of red tape.

Here’s another: “We are a small company of five staff and two directors – complying with regulations represents a disproportionately high amount of time and money.”

Red tape. It’s burdensome and gets in the way of making small businesses profitable.

Last year, the Forum of Private Businesses (FPB) ‘Cost of Compliance’ survey found that red tape costs smaller employers £9.3 billion per year in internal costs – mainly the time spent on administration – and found they spend an average of 37 hours per month complying with the law. What a staggering waste of time!

Meanwhile, over at the 2010 British Chambers of Commerce ‘Burdens Barometer’, independently compiled by experts from the London Business School and the Manchester Business School, the cost to business of compliance has risen to £88.3 billion: a jump of over £11 billion since last year. As Francis Chittenden from the Manchester Business School commented: “Regulation is like taxation. It raises business costs and so reduces the amount of business activity conducted in the UK.”

So let’s hope the coalition government manages to pull off its stated aim of reducing the burden of regulation as a vital priority in helping to free up enterprise and nurture a growing economy.

However, the FPB’s chief executive Phil Orford has sounded a wise note of caution: “The government must ensure that, in administering the work of the Reducing Regulation committee, it does not create more bureaucracy to deal with red tape.”

That would be an irony we could do without.