Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)

We are not really talking about regulation here but about the administrative procedures for small businesses to get the funding they need to develop online platforms, to become more sustainable and to meet their objectives. What we want to do is to make that process easier. This is not a significant risk to the taxpayer. Many of these grants are particularly small and many genuine enterprises just do not have time because time is their scarcest resource. We are working through the process with Enterprise Ireland. We have made significant progress on our LEOs and the users should now be seeing the benefits of that. On design and policy, our SME test has now been brought to our State agencies. We are really looking at thinking small first. How do changes, whether a statutory instrument or the design of a scheme, impact on the smallest businesses that do not have the resource base to go through very significant administrative processes? We are doing a huge amount of work on that. That is on the policy side. That is how you change how the scope is determined across government.

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