Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what steps his Department is taking to improve access to scale-up finance for employee-owned businesses.

We are improving access to scale-up finance for UK businesses, including the growing number of employee-owned businesses, through the British Business Bank (BBB). In November, we agreed the BBB’s five-year plan, which sets out how it will focus on scale-up finance, investing in more growth-stage funds, making more direct investments into strategically important scale-ups, and taking more risk by providing the first capital in deals supporting emerging technologies. We have also placed the Growth Guarantee Scheme on a longer-term footing, which will help more smaller businesses, including employee-owned businesses, to scale and grow.