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As we enter the public sector recession, we need to ‘make do and mend' in enterprise support, rather than launch yet more initiatives, says David Richardson. I don't know if I am alone in this, but I have noticed that the current climate of economic insecurity and anxiety has engendered a mini wave of wartime nostalgia – a sort of spirit of the economic blitz. The theme for my comments is a wartime motto, beloved of my mother, who grew up in the 1940s... ‘Make do and Mend'. For, as we enter a period of austerity in public services, I would suggest that we cannot afford more initiatives in economic development and enterprise support. Rather, we must make the existing infrastructures do what we need them to, discard what we cannot afford, and mend those things which are dysfunctional – to serve the needs of local economies. In localising economic development support and investment, what we should not do is invent a raft of new schemes. When Serco became a service partner to the Small Business Service in 2005, I recall the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) identifying some 3,000 business support schemes operating across the UK. Localism must not take us back to that tangled and chaotic situation. Consistency and localism are not irreconcilable. Consider Businesslink.gov – the national business information portal – where, under our management contract with HM Revenue and Customs, we have syndicated content across the UK, enabling every local Business Link and many local authorities to reskin national content, combining local tailoring of advice with national consistency. Take a look at Blackpoolunlimited.com for an example of this – or, indeed, at the Alliance and Leicester website, which also uses Business Link-syndicated content to support a business advice offering. The older I get, working around and for public services, the more I realise that waste, and underachievement are mostly driven by failures in shaping, managing or distributing information. I refer not to technology – although that is an enabler – but what you might call ‘design'. As we implement local measures to deliver resurgent economies, I would plead with local government leaders to start with a plan for managing the distribution and sharing of knowledge – between support providers, yes – but more importantly, with and between businesses. I have given an example of vertical integration – joining national, regional and local tiers – in Businesslink.gov. But good things are happening in horizontal integration too, as clusters of districts share investment and infrastructure. Serco funded some expert support to the Black Country Innovation Network, a sub-regional partnership, bringing together Wolverhampton, Sandwell, Dudley and Walsall. The approach, developed in response, illustrates my theme well – linking and integrating 16 existing schemes so that they become interactive and collaborative against a set of shared economic development goals. So, let us use what we have, invest in integration, but above all, listen to business. Through the local Business Link services we provide in the South West, South East and London regions, we give face-to-face advice to more than one-and-a-quarter million English businesses. Again, this provides large data-sets from which to analyse the needs and behaviours of business. In London, we have been carrying out a quarterly business confidence survey since last year, polling 3,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. Listening to business in this way allows us to develop some principles, which we apply when working with our public sector clients to plan economic development and enterprise services. The first is to pay attention to customer segmentation, applying the aforementioned lifecycle model of business growth and maturity. The second is to optimise what we call, the customer journey. Again, this is a question of intelligent design – to increase motivation of target customers to engage, remove friction by making services more usable and seamless, and to reduce transaction cost by eliminating duplication. So, let us build on the best of what we have, invest in more integration and knowledge distribution, but above all, listen to local businesses. For they comprise the engine that will deliver renewed economic success. David Richardson is responsible for building Serco's service portfolio in local services, regeneration, education and skills

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Time to 'make do and mend' on supporting local business

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