Do you feel that all 'small' businesses get lumped into the category of SME and the terms small business and SME are thrown around by the media and government without a clear indication of their actual meaning. In fact, while the government talks about helping the UK's SMEs, it is in fact micro-enterprises (under 10 employees) that make up 95% of the UK's enterprises and a third of all UK employment. As almost all start ups are micro businesses any government assistance to new businesses clearly needs to be directed to these micro enterprises.

With SMEs accounting for 99.9% of enterprises it becomes clear that this term is fairly useless to reflect a certain type of enterprise, and when the government talks about helping SMEs it is by no means clear whether micro enterprises will benefit and in a great many cases they probably do not. Because of the power and influence of large corporations compared to micro businesses it's no surprise that achieving equality in regulations is so difficult.