While households brace themselves for soaring energy bills in October, businesses of all sizes also face huge price increases that are not protected by an energy price cap, with energy intensive industries, such as ceramics and glass, particularly affected.
Emma Bridgewater, founder and creative director of her renowned, eponymous pottery company, based in Stoke-on-Trent, and Annette Dolan, owner of Bath Aqua Glass, an independent glass production company and retailer specialising in gifts, jewellery, baubles and glassware decorations, told yesterday’s Radio 4 Today programme (August 30), that the government must step in to help SME businesses.
Speaking to Today presenter Martha Carney, Emma stated: “This comes on the tail of such a lot of buffeting and change, and I think the worst problem for all sizes of business, and households too, is the uncertainty. It feels as if something vertiginous is happening, and nobody knows where it’s going to end, and that’s the worst feeling of all. It makes it very hard for people to plan, to budget with certainty, and to have any confidence in their own and their business’s future.”
Continued Emma: “The raft of uncertainties we face really are anxious making, and that means that we function badly, with many other factors within that anxiety. But the huge and future unpredictable energy rises are extraordinary.”
Annette Dolan explained that she was facing a huge increase in energy charges at the end of next month. “On September 30, my energy bill will go from £14,000 a year to £131,000 a year. It is untenable, unimaginable. Therefore I’m having to turn the furnace off and by a Minimelt furnace so that we can get through. Hopefully the government will step in and do something, because if we go down, along with a lot of other SMEs up and down the country, the government will then lose their best tax collectors, and what will happen to the economy?”
Added Annette: “With the Minimelt furnace we can still do bauble blowing with members of the public, but we can’t make high end products, such as vases, which is one of the main things that we do.” (As well as handmade glass baubles, the company specialises in handmade fused glass jewellery, gifts and glassware decorations as well as art glass). “I’m therefore doing drastic planning every night when I go to sleep to think how I can get through, because I am responsible for 17 staff, and I’m anxious for them as well as for myself. I really don’t know what’s going to happen. My landlord recently asked me if I was going to renew my lease in four years time. I said to him, ‘have you got a crystal ball?’ The uncertainty is the terrible thing. Then there’s the uncertainty for the country. If you had said to me during covid, and after covid, you’re going to have an energy bill that’s over £100,000 more than you’re paying now, I would have said ‘don’t be silly, that will never happen.’ I don’t understand it, and I can’t explain it to my staff. I’m finding it really, really stressful.”
On the question of staff, where SME’s have a strong relationships and a responsibility for their jobs and pay rises, Emma Bridgewater said that her staff were “absolutely central to the business. Our head count, as it stands, is 480 people, and that feels like an enormous responsibility, and also represents so much experience and training. There’s also the aspect of having to let people go. I’ve been trading for over 35 years and this isn’t my first recession. One knows that it is possible to make changes when you need to, but you do it so reluctantly because you lose that experience that you’ve built up so painstakingly in your team.”
Asked what would make a difference in the short term, beyond energy prices, Emma said that the country needs good leadership. “The lockdown period was astonishing. We’ve been through a lot, and we really need to feel that someone with a lot of commonsense and compassion has a sustainable plan for this country. It feels as if decisions are being pushed forward and pushed forward, which feels unnecessarily extra stress making.”
Annette said that she would like to see energy companies nationalised. “I’ve been researching it, and it is possible for the government to do that. I think it would be the cheaper route, rather than losing all the independent SMEs, and losing the taxes that we collect. Therefore I think it’s time that the government nationalised the energy companies and pulled the country back.”
Top: Energy bills are sky rocketing for business as well as households.
