When is help not helpful?
Answer: when it is not the help you need.
Over the past 15 years, I have come across all too many cases of well-intentioned national schemes, earnestly designed to help people do one thing or another. Alas, they frequently turn out to be more trouble than they are worth.
Form filling is part of the problem. By the time you have filled out five or six different forms, each requesting information that doesn’t seem to be in any way relevant to the task in hand, you are already reduced to something awfully like a quivering wreck.
But sometimes there is worse to come. The bureaucratic nightmare, once begun, can multiply rather than recede as you progress through the various stages of obtaining and “benefiting” from the help available.
And, even when the bureaucracy is tolerable, the help sometimes just doesn’t seem to be very well aligned with the needs of the person seeking it.
I am sorry to have to report that national schemes to help people start up their own businesses sometimes fit into exactly this category. It is disheartening to find a number of my constituents agreeing with one another that, in retrospect, they wish they really hadn’t bothered to seek the help in the first place. The reputation of the scheme known as ‘Business Link’, for example, is very low amongst West Dorset entrepreneurs.
But I don’t think any of this should make us unduly gloomy about the prospects of providing genuine help for people who are doing things like setting up businesses. If the help can be provided in a way that isn’t bureaucratic – and if sensible and experienced people are really available to lend the right kind of helping hand when it is needed – remarkable results can be achieved.
I had long suspected that this was more likely to be the pattern if the help was organised locally. But now we don’t have to speculate any more – because right here in Dorset there is living proof.
A few days ago, I met some of the remarkable people who constitute what is know as Dorset Mentoring (or Dormen for short).
As its name suggests, this is a home-grown Dorset-based organisation that makes use of the fact that some very distinguished businessmen and businesswomen have retired here and are more than willing to offer considerable chunks of their time for free to help people who are trying to make their way in new businesses. The fact that the whole thing is voluntary, enables it to operate in a flexible way.
It is just a question of two people – one the helper, the other the helped – being put in touch with one another and then, hey presto, amazing businesses come to life.
I was shown examples of local companies that have established themselves as market-leaders in double-quick time — making things that people really want, and making profits for their originators. The secret is putting the energy and inspiration of the entrepreneur together with the battle-scarred experience of the mentor.
It’s another example of how we can take advantage of changes in society that might otherwise seem to pose problems. In this case, long periods of retirement for some can become a boost to the prosperity of others — but only if we apply flexible, local commonsense instead of the rigidity and form-filling of bureaucratic national schemes.