Small Businesses: Loans

(asked on 22nd January 2020) - View Source

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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to address the regional disparities in small business lending, as reported in The Times on 21 January.


This question was answered on 3rd February 2020

The Government is committed to levelling up across the whole country so that businesses can access the funding they need to thrive wherever they are.

The British Business Bank (BBB) is a government-owned economic development bank which helps to drive economic growth by making finance markets work better for small businesses, enabling them to prosper and grow. Since BBB was established in 2014, it has supported over £7 billion of finance to over 91,000 SMEs across the UK (as at June 2019) and continues to grow. The stock of finance supported by the bank grew by 31% year on year (from June 2018 to June 2019).

BBB’s Start Up Loans programme has so far provided 69,201 loans worth over £558m to small businesses (at end-December 2019) and has delivered loans in every parliamentary constituency in the UK.

BBB has introduced specific funds and activities to help address regional disparities in access to finance, which are having an increasingly significant impact. These have equity and debt finance components, with the balance of debt to equity set according to the specific needs of the businesses in those regions.

The funds include:

  • The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF) which has invested over £140m of an overall £400m fund in over 500 ambitious SMEs across the Northern Powerhouse region, in deals that have attracted an additional £140m of investment from the private sector (as of Nov 2019). £80.6m of NPIF so far has been made in debt finance to 474 businesses;
  • The Midlands Engine Investment Fund (MEIF) which has invested over £48 million of an overall £250m fund in over 200 businesses, in deals that have attracted an additional £27m of investment from the private sector (as of Nov 2019). £23.9m of MEIF so far has been in debt finance to 177 businesses.

For equity investment, the BBB also has a £100m Regional Angels Programme, which is designed to help reduce regional imbalances in access to early stage equity finance for smaller businesses across the UK (launched in October 2018 by British Business Investments, a commercial subsidiary of the British Business Bank). In September 2019, the first £10m commitment through the programme was made to one of the largest business angel networks in the North of England which primarily operates in the North West, Yorkshire and the North East with more commitments to be announced in the coming year.

The UK Network, established in early 2019 by the British Business Bank is a UK-wide network of relationship managers which will continue to enhance and further build BBB’s relationships with key SME access to finance stakeholders across the UK and thereby help tackle regional imbalances in access to finance, including for smaller businesses seeking debt finance at all stages of their development.

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