The Keep It Local campaign launched by Nemo Office Club is calling on all SMEs to get behind the drive towards buying local following a series of letters that have been sent to PM Boris Johnson and then minister for the cabinet office, Michael Gove
The campaign has updated its website at www.keep-it-local.co.uk to include a link to a template letter for sending to MPs and, to make it easy to get involved, a link to find contact details for your local MP. Since launching the letter has been downloaded over 50 times with site visitors also encouraged to share the message over social media.
“It is important that we take the message to as wide an audience as possible,” explains groups MD Tim Beaumont. “I shared a letter we wrote to Boris Johnson on LinkedIn and it very quickly received over 2,000 views. Not surprisingly we did not get a response from Boris Johnson, something to do with Brexit, Afghanistan and the pandemic, but we are passionate about the cause so chose to follow-up with a second letter to Michael Gove.
“At the time Mr Gove was minister for cabinet office, the position held by Matt Hancock when he declared government’s intention for £1 in every £3 of their procurement expenditure to be with SMEs by 2022 – It seemed appropriate that we enquired about an update to this and offered our help as a representative of over 300 SMEs within our group.”
Despite the lack of response from Johnson or Gove, the campaign has successfully engaged with several MPs who have relayed the message that the campaign is being heard and the best thing to do is keep going and get more and more businesses involved, hence the move now to include all SMEs from across all industries.
“With over 16m people employed by SMEs in the UK, the potential is there to make a huge amount of noise to raise the awareness of the benefits of buying local and to put pressure on the government to give the smaller, independent businesses, a fair chance when competing against their larger, multi-national, competitors,” says Beaumont.
If buying local is important to you, you can get involved with writing to your MP and sharing on social media by visiting the website at www.keep-it-local.co.uk.
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