Erikka Askeland: Entrepreneurs may well be put off by web page mugshots

DO YOU want to start a business? Apparently, half of us do but a much smaller number - 5 per cent - actually stick their necks out. Surely these figures could be improved.

This week there was a loud huzzah for the launch of Start-Up Britain, a website with a host of inspiring entrepreneurial stories, useful links and special discounts for would-be entrepreneurs on businessy-stuff like computers and legal advice.

But alongside the cheers were also jeers. There were some bugs with the launch - an ill-advised link to a San Franciso-based website to get logos designed cheaply caused outrage among UK design firms and the link was pulled.

And some of a more sensitive disposition could be in danger of losing their breakfast due to the pictures which greet anyone who visits the front web page - if the giant melon of the hard-staring, purse-lipped prime minister doesn't get you, then the gurning, DayGlo tanned Richard Branson with his thumbs held aloft just might.

But I digress. Start-Up Britain is about the serious business of dragging the UK economy back from the brink of terminal collapse. What else are all those newly-unemployed civil servants going to do this year, if not take their severance package and start up their own business?

Overall, the project's heart is in the right place but I have my doubts about Start-Up Britain's alliance with David Cameron and the coalition.

The website is the brainchild of a series of real people - not politicians - who are entrepreneurs in their own right. Many in Scotland will remember the unflagging enthusiasm of Richard O'Connor, who ran a tight little networking outfit for owner managers, Wee Entrepreneurs, and who now sells ethical luxury chocolate online. There is also Emma Jones, author and entrepreneur, who has single-handedly created an industry in supporting business start-ups based from the home.

But like a company that sponsors either Celtic or Rangers, Cameron's enthusiastic support for the project will alienate roughly half of its target audience. Start-Up Britain is in danger of being too closely allied to the coalition's job cuts, not to mention the flame thrower the government is taking to the enterprise support system in England.

Down south it's carnage - the regional development agencies are abolished and Business Link is being fundamentally restructured. You could argue that a clear out of the dense under-bracken of government business support was overdue, but it is impossible not to feel a little smug in Scotland having kept Scottish Enterprise.

Although Start-Up Britain, with its gung-ho, do-it-yourself attitude, seems quite happy to pull the notion of the Big Society to its eagerly heaving bosom, it is not a replacement for Business Link (the southern equivalent of Business Gateway). For one, unlike the form-filling tedium of the Business Link, the entrepreneur-led project aims to inspire greater ambition.

This is important because there are serious questions about whether the economy can withstand a deluge of new entrepreneurs in the form of self-employed business consultants, NLP practitioners and professional cup cake bakers.

Yesterday I spoke to Craig McKenna, who works with other business owners through his firm The Growth Academy. We mused about how there was a real sense of scrabbling around going on among what appears to be an increasing host of ex-bankers and journalists starting up their own little one-man-bands, as if the economy was like a game of musical chairs and people were getting desperate to find their seat. "The number of consultants out there because they can't get jobs is frightening," he noted.

What the economy needs is real rainmakers who create jobs - that might usefully employ ex-bankers, journalists and civil servants alike - and who preferably look to export markets because the domestic one is still gasping from having all the money sucked out of it.

So are you one of those rare ambitious types, with a killer idea that you can sell in both the UK and abroad? If so, there is a host of business consultants to there to support you.

Want to boost sales? Market your product? Write a press release? Find funding? Buy cupcakes for your staff?

It will cost you however. And it could just be that they need your business more than you need theirs.