Wonderful Wefinda weekly news- (Week ended 22 October 2010)

Spending review
All the speculation, leaks and informal briefings were finally over as the spending review was announced on Wednesday. Could have been better/ could have been worse was the overall response depending on which side of the political fence the reviewer sat.

People per hour.com ran a survey of 1,000 small businesses, 60% of which were now pessimistic about winning work from the Public sector. Meanwhile a survey by YouGov revealed that 58% of the British Public saw the cuts as having been inevitable. The CBI was largely supportive and welcomed additional spending on capital projects as well as the 75,000 additional apprentices to be created.

Meanwhile the EU bucks cost saving trend
Whilst the EU countries are cutting budgets, MEPs have just voted the EU an increase in their budget of €7.3 billion to €129 billion. This increase which was passed by a sizeable majority of MEPs has been condemned by EU states including the UK.

Lending to business continues to fall
Quarterly figures released by the Bank of England show that the level of lending to businesses continues to fall. Gross lending for Quarter 3 at £24.4billion was down £1.3billion on the previous quarter. Part of this seems to be as a result in a drop in demand. On the positive side, the quarterly Deloitte survey had more repliers reporting that credit was available as opposed to being hard to get.

How to avoid being hacked
According to KPMG, hacking has affected over 250million people in the last 3 years. For those anxious to avoid being caught, here are their ten tips to avoid data loss.
http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/13211/top-10-tips-to-avoid-data-loss/

So, what do we have to look forward to?
For a start there is the CBI annual conference. With speeches by various ministers, it will be interesting to gauge the overall business confidence levels following the spending review last week.
Parliament is sitting with most interest for SMEs in Select committees on Business, Innovation & Skills on Tuesday and the effects associated with changing Summer Time on Thursday.

And finally
If you catch your employees asleep at work, perhaps you could recoup some income by entering them for the Spanish Siesta competition. The competition won last week by a security guard, earned him the equivalent of £890. The competition took place in a shopping centre and points were awarded for volume of snoring, speed of falling asleep and innovative sleeping position.