UK Small Businesses’ Experience of COVID Regulation: Interviews With Business Owners, 2021-2022

The research design of the project needed to take into account the ‘general’ nature of small businesses in terms of their likely constrained resources to monitor and comply with regulations, while accounting for the heterogeneity of the UK small business population in terms of sector, size, age, regulatory environment and geography. 84% of survey respondents and 19 of the 23 interview respondents were micro businesses (up to ten employees). Regulations affected all small businesses regardless of size, sector, or market, but regulatory compliance for those businesses which come into close contact with the public was more complex. During the pandemic, the complexity of the UK’s regulatory landscape was laid bare, with the Devolved Administrations each utilising their specific powers to vary the regulatory response to COVID-19 in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland from that in England. It was therefore necessary to capture a representative picture of the impact and implications across as wide and representative a sample of this diverse population as possible. Hence, we conducted a large-scale online survey of small businesses across the UK, with follow up semi-structured interviews with individual businesses to provide added depth and explanation to the patterns revealed by the survey.
The survey was open between 3 and 18 August 2021 and administered by the research agency Verve on behalf of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). This timing was significant, as it enabled us to capture data from small businesses who had experienced more than 12 months of adapting their strategy and operations as a result of understanding and responding to regulation, new and pre-existing, under pandemic conditions. The final sample comprised 991 responses with the vast majority of those respondents being FSB members. This research has sought to focus on eliciting information about the impacts that particular regulations, or regulatory changes, had on small businesses. Rather than asking about broad regulatory categories, the survey sought to provide a novel and valuable level of granular detail by focusing as far as possible on specific regulations which were new or amended to deal with the pandemic, as well as pre-existing regulations that may have taken on more significance during a pandemic.
The survey provided a sampling frame from which to identify businesses for the semi-structured interviews, which enabled us to understand more about the experiences and reasoning which led businesses to take actions in response to regulations and guidance. The sample of businesses interviewed has achieved a good spread in terms of business size, location, sector, and regulatory experience.
Interview participants were recruited through the survey, which asked respondents if they would be prepared to have their individual survey responses identified by the Newcastle University research team, as well as to be contacted for a 45–60-minute interview. Of the 991 valid responses to the survey, there were around 350 small business owners who indicated that they were happy to be contacted for interview, of which 23 were finally interviewed between December 2021 and January 2022. All interviews were conducted using Zoom, with an average duration of one hour. All interviews were recorded and fully transcribed. The full interview protocol is attached to this data submission, as are the project information sheet and the interviewee consent form. For anonymisation purposes, we gave interviewees participant codes (P1 to P23) in lieu of pseudonyms.

The Data Collection is available for download to users registered with the UK Data Service.