Oral Answers to Questions

Esther McVey Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey (Wirral West) (Con)]

8. What assessment he has made of the effect of the regional growth fund on private sector investment.

[The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable)]

In April we announced that the regional growth fund would conditionally support 50 projects, amounting to £450 million of Government investment and leveraging an estimated £2.7 billion of private sector investment. In October we announced that 126 projects would receive conditional funding of £950 million, leveraging an estimated £6 billion of private sector investment.

[Esther McVey]

I welcome the regional growth fund, in rounds 1 and 2 of which, companies on Merseyside, including Stobart, Pilkington, Liverpool Vision and Trinity Mirror, have done very well. Wirral Investment Network, a business network for smaller companies, wants to know by what routes it can apply to the regional growth fund.

[Vince Cable]

Our estimate is that roughly a third of all regional growth fund money is going to SMEs, and there are several routes through which it goes. First, there are packets of SME loans, one of which was in Liverpool, while another is in Plymouth. Indeed, I saw that one a couple of weeks ago, and it is going extraordinarily well. There are specifically tailored schemes—for example, the RBS-HSBC scheme linked to asset finance—and programme bids, as in Manchester, all of which are targeted at SMEs.