Business boost

However, the deal is limited to those companies that employ fewer than 10 people – or have an annual turnover of less than £434,000, the equivalent of 500,000 euros.

This edict, though important, will do little to help those family-run businesses, and others, that fail to meet this rigid criteria. They will still have to comply with the form-filling – and the costs, both in time and money, that this entails.

There will, of course, be those people who say that the European Union has no business setting employment law and financial rules, and that Westminster has already conceded too much control to Brussels.

That may be so, and the time has certainly come for a re-appraisal of the decision-making process, across the EU, to ensure that any decisions taken by Brussels have the best interests of consumers at heart rather than those of the career bureaucrats.

Yet, despite the growing pressure on David Cameron’s government to do far more to encourage private enterprise across Yorkshire, and other areas that have become too dependent on the public sector, it should be noted that employees have far greater health and safety protection, and so forth, than they did a decade or so ago.

Many of the rules introduced by Westminster and Brussels have been driven by the best of reasons. The problem is that the accompanying bureaucracy exacerbates the prevailing belief that not enough is being done to create the economic backdrop for small and medium-sized businesses to prosper – and spark the decade of growth that the entire Eurozone requires.