Lord Sharkey
Main Page: Lord Sharkey (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the success of their initiatives to increase funding to small and medium-sized enterprises.
My Lords, the Government are helping more small and medium-sized businesses to access financial schemes including Funding for Lending, the enterprise finance guarantee and Enterprise Capital Funds. The enterprise finance guarantee scheme has enabled £1.2 billion of lending to 11,700 businesses, the Enterprise Capital Funds scheme has invested over £110 million in over 80 companies, and Funding for Lending has supported many more. The Government recognise that more can be done and are launching the business bank with £1 billion of new capital to bring the schemes together.
The fact is that net lending to SMEs is down again. That may not be surprising. Only a quarter of all SMEs are aware of the Funding for Lending scheme. The banks must know that you cannot sell a product if your customers do not know about it. Does not the figure of 25% of SMEs aware of the Funding for Lending scheme strongly suggest that the banks do not actually want to lend to SMEs?
My Lords, the Government’s own research shows that awareness of the access to finance schemes has fallen in recent years. This is why we are launching a tailored marketing communication campaign to increase the awareness of many government access to finance schemes available to small and medium-sized businesses. This activity usually results in a highly successful brand. The launching of the business bank next year will solve part of that problem.