Running a business in Britain
246 articles on what it actually takes to run a business in Britain: VAT, staff, rent, rates, tenants, stock and sites. From the studio that simulates it.
- You do not own the railway you run. The track is not yours, the trains are leased and most of the fares are set by a formula. What you own is a term of years and a punctuality figure.
- The fortnight when every price changed. Every ticket on every shelf had to be written again by hand, between customers, in a fortnight. The arithmetic was the easy part of it.
- Buying the path before you have the load. The path is committed in next year's timetable long before the customer commits to you. When one quarry closes, the wagons stand in a siding and the lease carries on.
- When diesel trebled and the rates did not. A haulier agrees rates in the spring and holds them all year. In the autumn of 1973 the fuel to run them more than trebled, and the work was still there.
- A railway laid in a road. A tram cannot divert, cannot grow its catchment and cannot set its own fare. The whole business comes down to one ratio that a council reads once a year.
- Choosing which three days to bake. Bread does not keep, and from 1 January 1974 the ovens only had power three days in seven. Which three days was the whole of a baker's winter.
- Fifty-six days' notice to stop a bus. Register a service and you run it whether anybody boards or not. Stopping takes fifty-six days, and the driver rota decides everything that happens in between.
- The week VAT nearly doubled. The Budget of 12 June 1979 nearly doubled the standard rate of VAT with six days' notice. In a clothes shop, a tax change is a window full of wrong tickets.
- The seat that stops existing at the gate. An empty seat is worth nothing the moment the door closes. And the authority can ground an airline for being short of cash, not merely short of maintenance.
- The shop that carried a village for a year. In a pit village the shop's turnover is the colliery's wage bill passing through a till. From March 1984 there was no wage bill, and everybody still had to eat.
- Every hour flown owes the workshop. You sell flying hours. Every hour sold pulls an expensive machine closer to an overhaul nobody invoices for until it arrives all at once.
- The morning anybody could register a route. From 26 October 1986 anybody with an operator's licence could register a bus route and charge what they liked. The fifty-six day notice period is what made it hurt.
- Twenty-five minutes on the stand. Ground handling is a service sold in minutes. Bid twenty-five and roster for thirty-five and you have priced a contract you cannot deliver.
- Seven and a half per cent, then fifteen. In January 1988 a Reading housebuilder could option a field and watch it gain value before the contract was signed. Base rate that May was seven and a half per cent.
- Lane metres, tides and the dry dock. A ferry sells metres of deck, and the sailing list is written round the tide and the dry dock rather than round demand. The ship sails either way.
- The year the water companies were floated. The ten water and sewerage companies in England and Wales were floated in December 1989. The customers could not leave, and the regulator had already written the prices.
- The rate is set before breakfast. A shipping line is a price taker on every voyage. The rate moves in months, the charters are fixed in years, and that gap is where lines are lost.
- What the tunnel did to the ferries. The tunnel opened in May 1994. It had no tide, no weather and no dry dock, and the ferries answered with lower fares, larger ships and five more years of duty free.