I was privileged to attend both the Labour and the Conservative Party Conferences, and took the chance to meet Isabel Oakeshott, co-author of the explosive "Call Me Dave" with Lord Ashcroft, which was making headlines at about the time I was there, for (if you’re a staunch Conservative) all the wrong reasons, writes Adam Tyler.
Perhaps more importantly, I also briefly met Anna Soubry, the Tories’ small business minister tasked with looking after the needs of the small and medium sized firms that employ 15.2 million people with combined turnover of £1.6 trillion. As you’d expect, I took the opportunity to reissue the two clear messages of the NACFB; the availability of funding, and the accessibility of the online lead generation scheme findSMEfinance.co.uk.
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It was a message that went down really well with both parties, because while bad news sells newspapers, good news wins friends and influences people. And in the world of Leasing, it’s mostly good news.
For instance, look at the headline figure of £4 billion written by our Leasing & Asset Finance brokers in the twelve months preceding 1st July 2015. It looks impressive, but it’s even more impressive when you add some context.
In mid-2011, a year before the Association made the big move to the banks of the Thames, those same respondents broke through the £1billion barrier. We’ve come a long way very fast, so fast that the figures can look distorted with the speed. For example, when we report total figures, they’re affected by three things: a) the average number of deals per broker, b) the average value of each deal, and c) the total number of brokers in the NACFB. So some of the reported growth can be explained by the fact that we’ve drawn on a larger pool of respondents this time around.
Membership growth would not, however, have had an effect on the number of deals average or the average deal size. So those movements are a little harder to explain. Put simply, it looks like there are more businesses requesting finance, but they are asking for less – and that’s a consistent trend across the past four years.
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By GlobalDataWhy would the average deal size have declined? We checked against our other data set – the leasing deals on our findSMEfinance website. Looking at the past two years (because records don’t go back as far as 2012) and breaking them down into two equivalent twelve-month periods, we can again see a decline in the average values: from £88k down to £41k.
NACFB statistics treat invoice finance as entirely separate from what we term leasing and asset finance, whereas bodies such as ABFA treat invoice finance as a large subset of asset finance. This means that you can’t always make straight comparisons.
But what we know for a fact is that this is the third year running when I have reported brokers are having to work harder to satisfy demand. They do get breaks though – there is always a drop in demand from SMEs in August, and we saw a similar fall in interest in the run-up to the general election. Evidence, at last, for politicians indirectly making life easier for the overworked broker.
