Brussels and the False Economy
On 31 July, the Brussels Region suspended, as of 12 August, several forms of business support — advice, training, recruitment, coworking — for lack of budget. The cut is defensible; its method, in twelve days and without consultation, far less so. A position piece on the penny-wise economy of cutting the cheapest and most useful lever.
On 31 July, the Brussels Region announced the suspension, as of 12 August, of several forms of business support: advice and consultancy, external training, recruitment aid, coworking. The reason: the coffers are empty. Of an annual envelope of around thirty million euros devoted to these schemes, barely six percent remained by mid-July. The decision falls to the Minister for the Economy and Employment, Laurent Hublet (Les Engagés).
Let us say it plainly: the constraint is real. When a budget line is almost exhausted by July and hundreds of applications risk going unanswered by year’s end, calling a halt is not absurd. A government that lets spending run to breaking point does no one a service. Budgetary discipline is not the enemy.
That is not the problem. The problem lies in the manner. To announce on 31 July a measure that takes effect on 12 August is to leave twelve days — in the heart of summer, when businesses run at half speed — to those who were due to file an application. It is also, as Unizo pointed out, to dispense with any consultation. A decision can be budgetarily sound and still be politically clumsy: this one ticks both boxes.
There is something more troubling. Of everything a regional budget funds, support and training for entrepreneurs are among the cheapest and most useful expenditures: a few thousand euros that help a small structure organise itself, recruit, get over a hump. To cut there is to trim precisely the high-yield lever — the kind of spending that, a year or two later, returns in activity and jobs what it cost. You do not fill a hole by burning the seed corn.
Then there is the signal. Brussels dreams of itself as an entrepreneurial capital, an ecosystem of SMEs and start-ups. Yet what the entrepreneur perceives, on this August morning, is not an adjusted budget line: it is a Region that cuts without warning, without explanation, and without saying what will happen in 2027. Uncertainty has a cost, one rarely entered in the spreadsheets. By managing the emergency piecemeal, one ends up damaging what cannot be repaired with a stroke of the pen: trust.
The question, then, is not only whether Brussels had the means to maintain these schemes. It is whether it could afford to withdraw them in this way. The answer, to my mind, is no. A cut can be defended; an improvised cut, in twelve days and with no horizon, is paid for — later, and more dearly.