Clearly business is seen as something which is inanimate, an ethereal being rather than run by people who actually have families.

I refer to the proposals to extend maternity and paternity leave in the Work and Families Bill last month.

These would extend the right of fathers to have an additional six months unpaid paternity leave and will leave most small businesses with major operational problems.

Since 1999, when we had the initial parental leave regulations, these have been added to again in 2003, and now again for 2007.

While it is all well and good to be "family friendly", a line has to be drawn at some point when these regulations begin to adversely affect the ability of a business to work effectively. We are already suffering from a lack of skilled employees across many trades and sectors of industry. The proposals as they stand will work in a singularly unfriendly way towards business owners and managers. There are simply not the skilled employees available to cover for all this leave, and they will be the ones who will have to work extra hours to try and make up for those employees on short-term leave. This is definitely not family friendly to their own families, and it is probably in breach of their own human rights - it would be almost impossible for them to take this sort of time off away from their own businesses themselves.

There will also be the inevitable problem within the existing workforce as this will create division and resentment.

Those without children will not be entitled to this type of benefit, which of course still comes from the taxation "pot".

The possibility that employers may also have to share information on which partner has already taken some of the leave, and which has not, will be a bureaucratic nightmare in the extreme.

Business was "consulted". Yet why bother asking businesses to comment if the genuine concerns and issues that they then raise are simply ignored?

As I said at the beginning, it is as if businesses are inanimate objects on which you can just pile more and more rules, regulations, policies "et al".

However, underneath there are thousands of families affected by all of this, and these are the business owners and their own families who have no rights.

Most business organisations have recognised the totally disproportionate and adverse effect this will have on small businesses - why is it then that our politicians and civil servants so blindly refuse to listen or to see what the true impact will be of their family unfriendly policies?

* Mike Cherry is West Midlands Policy Unit Chairman for the federation of Small Businesses