[Silhouette]

Starting a business here is easy.

Growing a business here is harder.

You want an office? Welcome to the wonderful world of business rates, commercial lettings, site security, ever-changing transportation and infrastructure arrangements that will be largely out of your control, etc.

Hiring your first employee? Welcome to employment contracts, documenting policies for things like grievances and disciplinary actions that you hope you'll never need, arranging pension plans, H&S regulations, statutory leave, benefits rules, and all the other HR fun and games.

Providing a service online, where your customers might come from abroad? Welcome to international tax regulations that you can barely keep up with, never mind properly comply.

Don't want to have users steal back all the revenue you ever took from them based on a legal technicality? Better have a good lawyer to write all your documents.

Don't want an intervention by the data protection regulator? Better make sure all your GDPR compliance processes and documentation are up to standard.

Remember to file your real-time payroll data and VAT returns and confirmation statements and annual financials on time. Don't forget you'll need to use suitable online systems for a lot of this stuff now, since HMRC insist on it, and you'll need to get anything else you're using for financial management integrated with them.

Don't forget your public liability insurance. And employer's liability insurance. And professional indemnity insurance. And property insurance. And...

Now, you can outsource a lot of this work. For some legal and accounting matters, you will have little choice, unless that happens to be your field of expertise. But of course the services offering to do it for you will charge you, and even if it's just a thousand pounds here or 3% of your revenue there, it will soon add up. Until you're big enough to have in-house people for things like HR, facilities management, IT, legal and financial, that's how it goes.

Now, run along and make sure your designated H&S officer has checked that all your employees currently working from home have suitably ergonomic workspaces set up, recent sight tests done and glasses/contacts provided if they're working with computers, and proper reporting in place for all the extra expenses they'll be claiming due to the sudden home-working this year, because you could be on the hook for a big bill if you get any of that wrong.

[mercer]

While I can't tell how you feel about these things, most of it sounds pretty good, from an employee perspective.

Sure, there's stuff that is infuriatingly misguided, but all in all I rather like living in a place that puts the onus on the employer when it comes to all sorts of financial and practical issues that an employee might deal with.

I definitely don't want things to be more like the US, much as it complicates things for myself as an entrepreneur and employer.

[Silhouette]

It is good from an employee perspective. For example, in a country where a lot of people aren't saving enough for retirement, there is logic in saying that employers must make pensions available to their staff as part of their compensation package.

The problem, as always with these things, is that this only helps you if you're employed in the first place. If the burdens of taking on a new employee, particularly the first one, are too high, then that lifestyle business run by its founders will remain a lifestyle business run by its founders, possibly for years or even forever.

Similarly, if you're a customer shopping for clothes online at the moment, it's great that UK consumer protection law requires vendors to give you 14 days after delivery to change your mind and cancel the purchase, and the vendor must accept the return without charge if you do. You can buy multiple sizes or colours to try things on, or just try a few different styles to see what you like, and then send the rest back, and all it costs you is a bit of postage.

It's less good as a merchant, when the reality is that a significant fraction of your returned items will come back unfit for resale and unless you can prove they didn't reach the customer already in that state you'll still be on the hook for the refund. Even for goods that do come back in as-new condition, you'll still have to go through the whole restocking process and you'll be missing that stock for as much as 28 days. Generous return policies didn't matter quite as much a few years ago when the law was introduced, as most people were still shopping for their clothes in bricks and mortar stores and would try things on in-store before buying. Right now, with fashion retailers going bust all over anyway, this surely isn't helping.