Garage is an ideal place for business va va voom

I HAVE been struck by recent references to the mighty corporations Dell, eBay, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft as having all started in garages at home - in two cases the founder’s parental home garage, in the other two their own home garage. I wondered if this was no more than a sort of metaphor for small start-up locations, but it seems they did indeed start in the cramped and window-less annex where the car and a heap of domestic debris is normally found.

Of course, a garage may not be the best place to start a business, and my guess is that rather more creative "eureka" moments occur in the bath, though I cannot recall any corporate histories or autobiographies declaring that the moment of inspiration did occur there, either alone or with a friend.

There are no shortages of scientific biographies that confess crucial ideas emerged in positions of the utmost banality. Isaac Newton’s apple is apocryphal, but he was lost in the fastness of rural Lincolnshire, avoiding the plague. He attributed the isolation as enhancing his thinking. Einstein’s theory of relativity occurred to him in a flash as his tram approached a clock-tower in Berne.

My point is that, in Scotland, planners are hostile to people setting up projects or ventures in their garages, or even in garden sheds. Scotland froze land use in 1947, when it all ceased to be the matter of the owner or tenants and became municipalised. Amendments occur, but they cause much heartache to municipal man. Streets set aside as domestic do not permit commercial use.

The HPs and Microsofts are heroic stories of enterprises starting at the most humble level, but flourishing far beyond their imaginings. Yet my point may be more crucial to little ventures that may never employ more than a dozen people in roles of only a modest level. Scotland’s local authorities have a hatred of the unplanned, spontaneous or untidy.

They have their "structure plans" and love and admire them. I’ve seen them taken out of drawers and polished: "Here be bungalows, here be shops, here be a swimming pool and here be light industry." We may not deviate from the maps because it would offend the entire municipal imagination.

This can get comical. As the dreadful slothful bureaucracy of town planning got going in 1947, it atrophied around current usages: "Here be shipyards, here be coal mines, here be steel mills." The industries had long gone, but the designations lingered. This disordered thinking does not apply just to the brown lands of industrial Scotland, the rural economies across the country are also stultified.

It is amusing to hear gripes about the high price of rural homes. There is clearly no shortage of space. What is lacking is planning permission, yet every Scottish glen is denuded of employment opportunities because the men with blue pencils in the years after 1947 had no notion that farm steadings could make splendid little warehouses or offices for professional practice bases.

My sister and her husband run a successful "marketing services" company from their garage, but they do so illicitly. They festoon it with scruffy items so that from the outside it looks like an ordinary garage.

They live in fear of a neighbour detecting their swish office inside the carapace of their "planning" subterfuge. But are they not rascals? Should they not operate out of one of those new office suites so beloved of the "enterprise" companies that clutter Scotland?

They argue that there is absolutely nothing suitable locally, and if you add in the rent and rates of an authorised office, it would no longer be worth their efforts. I am writing this article in the dungeon of a 16th century building designed to keep cattle in and marauding English bandits out.

I can just about get by without the council’s consent or knowledge, but the moment I try to employ anyone at my home it has been made plain that I would be treated as a miscreant.

Every official voice purports to want more employment, but there are legions of officials suppressing jobs emerging. And then they add income tax and national insurance to double the cost of any employment. Is there any doubt why our employment opportunities are stunted or deformed?

I would like to see the town and country planning legislation deleted, but without any such victories it would be easy to cajole local authorities to be more relaxed.

They ought to applaud any little team starting a new enterprise. Instead, they fret about illusory problems of pollution or parking, or noise. Most modern commercial uses are entirely clean. The entire service sector is almost soundless - if you exclude the soothing Muzak from Radio 2 or Classic FM in the posher sort of ventures.

Would I be wrong in suggesting that this sort of thinking is entirely against the grain of the Scottish Executive as much as every local authority? They are very happy to erect little workshops or office blocks, but the reality of the higgeldy-piggeldy life of commerce is more haphazard.

The municipal imagination fancies factories employing preferably a few hundred people. The market is a messier cell structure of much smaller enterprises typified by something in the garage - that is to say virtually costless and highly accessible.

The arguments over planning are one of those areas where the intellectual victory of socialism remains complete and not even challenged. Patterns of land use ought to be spontaneous - the reverse of planned.

Price signals would say what uses are best. Zoning is brutal and usually wrong-headed. There is no way of computing how many Scottish enterprises have never flourished because there were no garages or railway arches or other tiny, scruffy locations to begin translating the spark of an idea into the fire of reality.

Our planners are infatuated with tidiness and established order , but the reality of markets is much more about chaos - out of which new orders emerge.

I do not dream of mega- corporations dominating cyber-empires from start-ups in Granton or Airdrie.

But I am clear that any such infant ventures would be likely to be strangled early as the sites were designated for something the market no longer wanted.

Planning is really ossification. True enterprise is a muddle that will surprise us all.