Piers Daniell

Unlike the rest of the population I am not a fan of the government’s recent tax on banks. I feel it is too needy and will, like most taxes, reduce the tax take rather than increase it. I am especially against the EU’s attempts to put a cap on bankers bonuses and feel that any business should be concerned about such legislation.

As a business owner it is my prerogative to decide how to reward staff and should have nothing to do with government policy. Appreciate it is just the finance sector at the moment but it could very well be any other industry in the future. The fact is if I decide to pay staff using a generous commission structure, even if the industry as a whole doesn’t, then that shouldn’t be anyone else’s business. My thought process is a well incentivised sales person offers our clients better service and help to ensure the success of the company. If the banks feel the same then it shouldn’t be down to government to decide best practice.

Instead government, and more importantly the busy bodies in Europe, should be concentrating on putting restrictions in place on the industry as a whole. I believe that by requiring banks to hold a certain amount of their trades as deposits (or by increasing that threshold) they will be less likely to fail as there would be something to fall back on during a recession. Also by reducing the amount of readily available cash in the business, less will be likely to go to staff in the form of bonuses.

This kind of regulation is very much a low touch policy which still instils entrepreneurship and the desire to grow but should fix big problems in our society. It is, for example, a travesty that parts of the country are already suffering from a hosepipe ban when the water companies should have been investing for the last two years in more capacity. Again regulation stipulating the amount of water to have in reservoirs for each citizen would ensure supply during times of drought.

So my message to government is no need to tax or mess with individual businesses, just provide clearly defined regulations which protect the wider economy.

I had a meeting last week with our Health & Safety advisors in respect to Fluidata’s new environmental commitments and working towards our ISO 14001 standard. This accreditation is a relatively new one to come out of BSI and provides businesses with the guidelines necessary to measure their impact on the environment and measures to take to reduce pollution.

As a young company I felt it was better to go for such accreditations early on than wait until the inevitable legislation when it would be harder to implement. As it is, we seem to be doing a lot right in recycling over 50% of our daily office waste, minimising electricity usage and ensuring everyone uses public transport where possible when commuting. Further advances in high definition video conferencing and a new modern office will help us reduce this impact even further. Hopefully we will become a beacon of light for other businesses to follow and a demonstrator in how embracing the green revolution can deliver long-term cost savings.

Apparently in all the waste currently generated in the UK only 9% is recycled, the majority of which is met by households. Businesses currently have it far too easy and unless you are producing something like a washing machine or a car can remain under the radar of our EU mentalist masters. One of the big issues is actually in a services economy such as ours, where it is very easy to show no local issues but instead outsource all the pollution problems to a third party. In much the same way manufacturers can outsource to China and hence produce very little pollution in the UK; our industry relies on datacentres consuming vast quantities of fossil driven electricity away from our offices.

Over 1% of all global datacentre consumption comes from datacentres which just goes to show how power hungry the information age is. Our addition of a new datacentre last year in Hemel not only met all the economic needs in terms of scalability but also meant we could offer our clients even more efficient hosting. By building a new site from a blank sheet of paper savings could be made in the thermal efficiencies of the site to ensure a reduction in power consumption. And I am sure further advances will be made in the coming years as electricity becomes even more expensive and IT progressively more powerful.