Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to support job creation schemes in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry and (c) the West Midlands.

The focus of Government intervention is to create the conditions for businesses to thrive, grow and create jobs. Local Enterprise Partnerships lead from the Government perspective on supporting businesses to innovate, improve, make progress and create jobs.

For the financial year 2021/22 BEIS has provided £542,000 in core funding to the Coventry and Warwickshire LEP to support its Growth Hub. Between 1 April 2020 and 30 September 2021, the Coventry & Warwickshire Growth Hub self-reported that it reached over 52,000 business individuals (including via digital channels). This included supporting 3,303 businesses, including face-to-face support, of which 402 received high intensity support of 12 hours or more and helped 227 individuals start a business.

In addition, Coventry and Warwickshire LEP has been provided with capital funding for a suite of infrastructure projects aimed at providing the right conditions for businesses to grow.

£131.84 million of Growth Deal funding has been spent on projects that have improved transport infrastructure, improved broadband infrastructure, and provided new R&D business support facilities, and are on track to enable businesses to create up to 4,000 jobs alongside other benefits to the local economy. This has also included building new apprenticeship training facilities at Warwick Manufacturing Group, a new skills hub at Coventry City College, and delivering employment support programmes to ensure local people are able to take advantage of the jobs created by these interventions.

A further £123.8m has been awarded to the regions LEPs and the West Midlands Combined Authority as part of the Getting Building Fund. This funding is now delivering a set of projects predicted to enable businesses to create over 7,910 new jobs and over 2000 construction jobs in the region. In Coventry, this has seen direct investment in the Very Light Rail project.