Hansard

This Saturday marks the annual small business Saturday. Small business Saturday UK is a grass-roots, non-commercial campaign that brings attention to and encourages consumers to support local small businesses in their own communities. First, I thank all members across the chamber who will support the motion by speaking about small business today. From my Scottish National Party colleagues, Gillian Martin will speak about the importance of local support networks to small businesses, and Ivan McKee will speak about how to promote and grow small businesses. I will speak about my connection to small businesses through some of the small businesses that my family have run.

As the small business Saturday UK campaign also offers workshops to help inspire and support newer start-ups as well as existing small businesses, it can provide business skills to local communities to help them develop. Participating in small business Saturday is completely free to all small businesses that wish to get involved, and the evidence suggests that doing so would be worth while. Indeed, the Federation of Small Businesses supports small business Saturday’s aim of celebrating and supporting small businesses and local communities. The event originated in the United States in 2010 but, since the campaign began in the United Kingdom in 2013, there has been an increase in support for small businesses across the country as a result. In 2015, customers spent £623 million on small business Saturday, and 16.5 million adults went out to support small businesses.

Why do we need to encourage people to support the small businesses near them? They are a very important part of our economy. Ninety-eight per cent of businesses in Scotland are small; they employ more than 880,000 people and, in turn, generate more than £75 million for the Scottish economy each year. Small businesses account for 42 per cent of private sector employment and 27 per cent of private sector turnover. Moreover, they are growing: since 2010, they have created an additional 85,000 jobs.

Because of the expertise and culture that small business owners can bring to their communities, it is not a surprise that many local economies are being led by smaller businesses. The top four areas in Scotland with the highest percentages of small firms are Aberdeenshire, on 96 per cent; Orkney, on 95 per cent; and the Borders and Shetland, which are tied on 94 per cent.

After last year’s small business Saturday, many small businesses saw major increases in their sales and publicity. Alice Malcolm Green, the founder of Wick & Tallow, which is a scented candle company, said that her takings on that Saturday were about £1,000, which is double what that company normally makes on a Saturday. The campaign director, Michelle Ovens, said:

“The British public has a great affection for small businesses and we continue to see that grow year on year ... Although the campaign focuses on one day, the goal is to have a lasting impact on small businesses by changing mind-sets, so that people make it their mission to support small businesses all year round.”

I am planning a visit to a popular gift shop called Two Sisters in Portobello, which is a small business in my constituency. I am sure that many MSPs are planning to visit small businesses in their local areas.

My interest in and recognition of small businesses and the people who work to make them successful lie in the fact that some of my family members have run small businesses and that I worked in several small businesses that were run by others when I was at school and was a student. In fact, my first ever real job was in a small business—the Boathouse cafe in Instow, where I learned to take lunch orders from the customers and make creditable cups of coffee, I hope, when I was 14 years old. A few years after that, I worked for a small independent food store in Barnstaple.

Small businesses are in my blood. In the early 1980s, my father ran a video shop in Biggar. One side of the shop was for VHS videos and the other side of it was for Betamax videos. That makes me seem quite old. I think that that shop is to blame for the fact that I have a lifelong fear of sharks, as I snuck out a copy of the movie “Jaws” when I was probably much too young to watch it.

Around the same time, my parents had a kilt shop in Glasgow. My sister and I, who were quite young at the time, would spend our Saturdays in it. Sometimes, we were fed ice creams to keep us busy, and we watched people picking out kilts and accessories. That is the only explanation that I can think of for what happened a while later, when we moved down to England. My mother bizarrely decided to send me—a girl with red hair and a Scottish accent at that time—to my first day at my new school in Devon dressed in a kilt. I did not blend in quite as much as I had hoped to.

My mother finished up her working life running a small horticulture business with her husband. His horticulture skills and her design skills won them a Royal Horticultural Society gold medal, and they toured round the UK and France selling clematis at shows such as the Hampton Court flower show.

My grandparents also ran a successful small business for many years at the latter end of their careers. Anne’s sweet shop in Cumbernauld was a popular destination for many Cumbernauld kids and adults in the 1980s and 1990s. As a young teenager, it was absolutely great to have a granny with a sweet shop. I sometimes worked there in the holidays serving customers. Sometimes, I went to the cash-and-carry to buy stock. I occasionally ate the profits.

Those experiences meant that I saw at first hand how much hard work, self-belief and determination are often involved in running a business, but also how much satisfaction and what a sense of achievement small business owners derive from their businesses.

We should all try to shop local as much as we can. We should try to support the businesses in our local communities, because the money that is spent on a locally owned business is much more likely to stay in the community. We know that independent shops and other small businesses can struggle to compete in a market that is increasingly dominated by the big players, such as the larger supermarkets and Amazon in the online marketplace. If we do not support our local businesses, we will lose them.

I urge anybody who is listening to go along to a small business this Saturday and have a look. They might well be surprised.