Kenneth Williams wrote that in 1982. Austerity, form-filling, the all-hating world. He was an actor navigating an industry that simultaneously demanded everything from its participants and offered them very little structural support in return. The diary entry is worth reading again now — not because things have got worse, exactly, but because the specific texture of the complaint is so recognisable forty-four years later.
Plus ça change. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The forms have different names. The costs have different numbers. The underlying experience — of running something small in a system built for something larger — has a remarkable consistency across the decades.
Small but significant
The UK has approximately 5.5 million small and medium-sized businesses. They account for around 61% of total private sector employment and approximately half of private sector turnover. They are the businesses that start things, test things, grow into things. The large established organisations of the next decade are, largely, the small businesses of this one.
That contribution is worth stating clearly, because it tends to get obscured in the broader conversation about business conditions. Small businesses are not a footnote to the economy. They are a substantial part of its structure — and they operate, almost by definition, without the internal resources that larger organisations use to absorb overhead. No dedicated compliance team. No finance department. No economies of scale in administration. Just the business, and everything the business needs to do to remain operational.
The compliance picture
From February 2026, the digital fee to file a confirmation statement with Companies House rose from £34 to £50. The confirmation statement is the annual document in which a company confirms that the information on the register is still correct. If nothing has changed — no new directors, no share restructure, no change of address — you are paying £50 to confirm that nothing has changed.
The incorporation fee doubled in the same round of changes, from £50 to £100. Mandatory identity verification for directors and persons with significant control was introduced from November 2025, adding another step to the administrative process of running a company. Each of these changes is individually minor. Cumulatively, across a year of operating, they add up.
Making Tax Digital, arriving for self-employed individuals and landlords earning above £50,000 from April 2026, moves the annual self-assessment return to six separate submissions per year — four quarterly updates, an end of period statement and a final declaration. The administrative frequency increases significantly. The size of the business it applies to does not.
Commercial energy costs remain substantially higher than pre-2022 levels for businesses taking on commercial premises. The first set of annual accounts — arriving approximately a year after incorporation — brings a full numerical picture of what the year actually cost, often for the first time. These are not complaints unique to any particular moment. They are the consistent texture of running something small.
What changes and what does not
The argument here is not that small businesses should be exempt from regulation. Fraud prevention matters. Tax compliance matters. Data protection matters. The register of companies is a public resource of genuine value. These things are worth funding and worth taking seriously.
The observation is about proportion. A compliance system that applies the same administrative burden to a sole trader as to an organisation with a dedicated compliance function is applying the same weight to something that has no capacity to absorb it in the same way. The weight does not change. The capacity does.
This is not a new tension. It was there in 1982 when Kenneth Williams was writing about form-filling in his diary. It was there before that. The specific forms change. The specific costs change. The underlying experience of running something small alongside the administrative requirements of doing so has a remarkable continuity. This is not someone who has read Smith's Wealth of Nations but closer to someone who has just eaten too many packets of Smiths and can't concentrate anymore.
The tools available now
One thing that has genuinely changed is the range of tools available to small businesses — and the cost of accessing capabilities that, until recently, required either significant investment or significant headcount.
AI has narrowed the gap between what a small business can do and what a large one can do in meaningful ways. The ability to build a system fitted to how your specific business works, rather than paying for a general-purpose solution designed for a much larger organisation, is now accessible at a price point that was not previously available. This applies to customer management, to content production, to data analysis, to the operational tasks that used to require either a specialist or an expensive subscription.
This does not resolve the compliance burden. It does not reduce the confirmation statement fee or shorten the MTD submission schedule. But it does represent a genuine shift in what a small business can accomplish with limited resource — and that is worth acknowledging alongside the things that have not changed.
Plus ça change
Kenneth Williams wanted to get away from the form-filling and die peacefully reading Keats. The forms are different now — digital, quarterly, verified. The experience of navigating them alongside the actual work of running a business is recognisably the same.
Small businesses will keep starting, keep growing, keep contributing to the economy in ways that are disproportionate to their size. The conditions in which they do that have always been more demanding than the conditions faced by larger organisations. That has not changed either.
The more things change. You know the rest.