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By Jo Best, 3 February 2004 17:45

NEWS The government's scheme to encourage firms to give staff cheap PCs to use at home has come under attack from small and medium-sized businesses, who claim computer suppliers involved in the recently relaunched Home Computing Initiative (HCI) are ignoring them in favour of more lucrative deals from large companies.

The scheme aims to get low-cost PCs into the hands of staff who don't normally use them in the course of a working day, the theory goes, to boost productivity and computer literacy across Britain.

The Royal Mail, for example, has implemented the initiative and now 12,500 postal workers have new computers, while Siemens has seen over 8,000 staff take up the offer. When you have that many employees clamouring for PCs, suppliers are bound to fall over themselves to get your HCI business. If you're an SME with a handful of staff, no-one seems to be that interested – as one silicon.com reader testified.

Kam Mistry, a PR consultant for SME Firehoop, found that when he contacted one of the partners listed on the DTI's website, they were only targeting the top 1,000 firms and weren't looking to supply SMEs. "From the point of view of small companies, if you can't access the scheme, there's no real benefit," he said.

It's not an isolated incident either – several of the partners that silicon.com contacted weren't supplying to SME companies, or had yet to set up the infrastructure to deal with small businesses. Dixons, for example, was trialling a scheme for SMEs but had yet to make a decision about whether or not it would ever see the light of day on a national scale.

Others were open about not targeting the SME market. A salesman from Booost said that the company isn't looking at supplying the "lower end stuff" and that smaller companies "didn't get all the benefits that the big boys did", namely "to take part in the scheme". He added that SMEs often found implementing the initiative too much admin and found that the work involved outweighed the benefits.

Booost will be trialling a self-administered scheme for SMEs this month.

Some HCI partners, such as Microsoft, didn't reply to queries, while several suppliers clearly hadn't briefed their staff about the scheme's existence.

It's not all bad news for SMEs, however. PC heavyweight Dell has been dealing with small companies wanting to set up their own HCI schemes since the initiative's inception two years ago and is keen to target the smaller players.

"We've seen interest across the board," Dell's VP of UK public sector, Peter Hubbard, told silicon.com. Interest from SMEs "has been enough to keep [Dell's] people for two years".

The SME question didn't seem to be worrying Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt at the relaunch of the scheme. When questioned over whether SMEs would suffer because they wouldn't be able to wield the same buying power as larger companies, Hewitt said that she didn't expect it to be the case. She also attributed the previously slow take-up of the initiative to a lack of SMEs adopting the scheme.

While the government might fancy itself to be simplifying the implementation of schemes for all companies, including small businesses, Mistry disagrees. He believes the government literature is targeting big business. "The site is utterly meaningless," he told silicon.com. "I couldn't make head nor tail of it... What we need is some clear communication – they've wasted all our time."

The Office of the e-Envoy defended its treatment of SMEs. A government spokesman said that the initiative has received "a lot of positive feedback" and one of the case studies published by the government was devoted to an SME company. "The benefits are open to all," the spokesman told silicon.com. "This is an opportunity [for suppliers] to target small companies – they're not going to miss out on targeting 90 per cent of British businesses."

Not all the HCI suppliers believe big is beautiful, however. Companies such as Time, Dell and Centreprise were more than happy to keep the SMEs onside and will accept small orders. It's also worth remembering that the suppliers on the DTI's website aren't the only companies to sell PCs for HCI schemes – indeed, the government describes the suppliers as "a list of organisations that responded to the consultation on the policy proposals" – so SMEs could do well to look around.

Despite all the hassle, Dell's Hubbard says that HCI schemes are worth persevering with for the small and medium-sized business. "[Two years ago] I would have agreed that in the way the scheme was implemented, with the tax and national insurance implications, you'd have to have been an expert to pull it all together... Now, there's a set of simpler guidelines and you're not on your own anymore," he said.

"HCI schemes are a cost-effective way for employers to add benefits for an employee – not just he or she, but for their whole family... and it helps address the work-life balance question for employees, as well as raising their overall skill level."