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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, how many small businesses have received financial assistance from (a) peer to peer lenders and (b) other sources in the last 12 months.

Recent figures from the peer-to-peer finance association show that their members had 225,000 loans outstanding in the third quarter of 2015 and that over half of these by value were to businesses. That is a 108,000 increase on the previous year. Other sources such as crowdfunding are growing equally fast, and lending to smaller businesses from the banks has been recovering strongly. 80% of loan and overdraft applications to SMEs were successful in the 18 months to Q3 2015 , up from 68% in Q4 2013 (SME Finance Monitor)