IMPORTANT UPDATE, 27th June: the report 'Navigating the COVID-19 Regulatory Landscape' has been published and is available to read or download here.

The Small Enterprises in Covid Times: On Regulation (SECT:OR) project is a research project that aims to make sense of how small businesses have dealt with a rapidly shifting regulatory environment during the Covid-19 pandemic. All businesses are subject to regulations and guidance that govern how they conduct their affairs, and this regulatory landscape provides an ever-shifting range of requirements, opportunities, and costs to businesses. In particular, it is believed that small businesses may be more likely to struggle to navigate this environment, as they might lack the expert technical knowledge necessary to keep abreast of regulatory developments, new guidance, and best practice recommendations. The Covid-19 pandemic has seen new regulations introduced and rapidly evolve, extant regulations modified, and guidance frequently change as government and industry sought to adapt to the development of the crisis, creating a highly dynamic regulatory environment. 

Previous research on regulation has focused on the way that it can benefit or hinder business. The goal of this research project is different; rather than looking at regulation as a burden or benefit, we instead aim to investigate the ways in which small businesses receive, understand, and act on regulation, taking the pandemic crisis as the immediate backdrop. Through a large scale survey delivered to small businesses across the UK, and a series of follow-up interviews conducted with small business owners, we hope to better understand the means through which small businesses receive and interpret regulation and guidance, and whether and how they act on it. In so doing, we hope to better support those who formulate policy, regulation, and guidance to ensure that small businesses receive the right information, and know how to act on it. Regulatory bodies informed by these findings will have greater insight in how to not only produce regulation to support the UK's post-Covid economic recovery, but also ensure its accessibility to small businesses.

The SECT:OR project is being led by a research team at Newcastle University Business School, with support of staff at the University of Birmingham. In addition to this, the project has partnered with the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB)‎. The project is funded by the ESRC through the UKRI "rapid response" call for Covid-19 research.