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Dotcom Millionaire Darren Richards and Lee Bramzell have called on Lord Peter Mandelson to do more for small businesses in the UK as the primary way of kick starting the housing market - which suffered it’s worst slump in 31 years this week.

Richards, who recently sold his business DatingDirect.com for nearly £30million says "Give local bank managers the freedom to help break the lending bottleneck. Stop the ’Computer says No. The relationship between banks and small business customers has broken down. The personal relationship is the only way to restore that. Going back is the only way of going forward."

Richards and Bramzell support the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) who argue that the relationship between banks and small businesses is broken. The pair are behind PropertyIndex.com, the fast growing challenger in the competitive online property search market. Darren Richards sold DatingDirect.com for £27.7m to French Company Meetic in January 2007. Lee Bramzell’s Chemistry was bought out by DatingDirect.com. Bramzell pioneered online retail in the UK developing the first commercial online offerings for electrical giant Currys and Thomson Holidays at the beginning of the decade.

Richards and Bramzell believe the woes of the Housing market are a direct knock on effect of the lending logjam for small businesses.

"Forget the debate about whether there should be 100% mortgages or not," says Bramzell, CEO of PropertyIndex.com. "If 99.2% of businesses in the UK are small businesses with less than 49 staff and the banks aren’t lending to them, then these companies are going to be laying off staff. Unemployed people are going to have big problems getting mortgages!"

Lord Mandelson unveiled a multi-billion pound loan scheme to help small businesses in January 2009 whereby the government will guarantee £10billion of £20billion in loans to companies with turnovers up to £500million. "Banks historically sit tightin times of recession and they are not doing anything other than that at the moment," says Richards. "Banks need to decentralize more and divulge control to the managers as they did in the past when there was less defaulting on loans."