Small and medium-sized business leaders should have something to look forward to in the pre-Budget report on December 2. Gordon Brown, the chancellor, makes the surprising promise to business that the report “will go further in removing all the old barriers holding the enterprising back”.
The chancellor who, in 2001, launched the inaugural Inner City 100*, the index of fast-growing companies that operates in deprived urban areas, saw these companies create more than 5,700 jobs over a five-year period (1999-2003), bucking the trend of unemployment in underprivileged areas from Sunderland to Tower Hamlets in London.
