Asked by: John Spellar (Labour - Warley)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to encourage the manufacture of e-bikes in the UK.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
We want the UK to be the best place to start and grow a business and to be a world leader in the way people, goods, and services move. As part of our planning for the future UK economy, we will be policies that will move us towards a stronger, fairer, greener economy that builds on UK strengths, such as science and entrepreneurship.
We have invested £350 million in the seven High Value Manufacturing Catapult centres across the UK, which are supporting manufacturers to bring new technologies to market, and we will be investing an additional £600 million by the end of 2023.
As part of the Future of Transport Grand Challenge, we are working with the Department for Transport to ensure firms, including e-bike manufacturers, have access to the right supply of talented labour and the right business support, including access to finance. The Department for Transport is also working to create a flexible regulatory framework for micromobility vehicles and, through funding to support the uptake of e-bikes and e-cargo bikes, is helping us to create domestic demand, which is essential to growing the UK e-bike manufacturing base.
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to promote entrepreneurship programmes for 2020 graduates at higher education establishments during the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Michelle Donelan - Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
The UK is home to leading universities that generate many of the skills that our economy needs.
The higher education sector plays an important role in teaching a broad range of skills in undergraduate and postgraduate study (for example, in relation to problem solving, analytical thinking, collaboration, teamwork, management and entrepreneurship), which enables millions of people to fulfil their potential. Responsibility for entrepreneurship programme falls to universities as autonomous institutions that set their own curriculum in line with wider regulatory steers and it is for them to determine the support and skills that their graduates need.
There are a range of master’s courses available to students that have entrepreneurship on their curriculum. Postgraduate loans are available to eligible students studying for designated master's courses on a part-time or full-time basis.
Asked by: Baroness Mone (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, following The Alison Rose review of female entrepreneurship, published on 8 March 2019, what progress they have made in increasing the number of female entrepreneurs.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
In response to the Alison Rose Review, the government has set out an ambition to increase the number of female entrepreneurs by 50% by 2030, equivalent to nearly 600,000 additional female entrepreneurs.
In order to help realise this ambition, over the past year the Government has worked closely with industry to implement the eight recommendations of the Rose Review. The Rose Review Board, which is co-chaired by BEIS and HM Treasury Ministers, has been established to oversee progress, which includes:
Asked by: Bill Esterson (Labour - Sefton Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment she has made of the implications for her policies of the findings of the global perception poll conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the UK has fallen from third to 13th place since 2016 in the list of the best places to be a social entrepreneur.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
The Government welcomes the contribution which social enterprises make to local growth and prosperity in our communities up and down the country. The UK’s company law framework allows for a variety of business forms, in part to suit those adopting social or environmental purposes, and we will continue to look at what more can be done to support social entrepreneurship in the UK.
Asked by: Bill Esterson (Labour - Sefton Central)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps she has taken to support (a) women and (b) people from ethnic minorities that want to set up businesses.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
The UK is one of the best places in the world to start and grow a business. Government is committed to supporting all entrepreneurs, whatever their background, to have the opportunity to make their business ideas a reality.
We provide support to all entrepreneurs to set up businesses through our online services on GOV.UK, the Business Support Helpline, and the network of 38 local Growth Hubs across England. In 2018, 47% of the Business Support Helpline’s callers were women.
We have been working closely with HM Treasury and industry to implement the eight initiatives from the Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, to tackle the barriers faced by women when starting and scaling a business. We have set an ambition to increase the number of female entrepreneurs by half by 2030 – equivalent to an additional 600,000 female entrepreneurs.
The British Business Bank’s Start-Up Loans Programme provides funding and intensive support to new entrepreneurs, and has delivered over 67,000 loans, worth over £534m since it began in 2012 (as at end-September 2019). 40% of Start Up Loans have gone to women – worth over £198m. 20% of Start Up Loans have gone to BAME entrepreneurs – worth over £100m.
BEIS has also launched an independent review into Young Entrepreneurship, led by the Prince’s Trust, that seeks to better understand young entrepreneurs, including young female and ethnic minority entrepreneurs, the specific barriers and opportunities they face – such as access to finance, and networks - and what more can be done to support them to start and grow a business.
Asked by: Harriett Baldwin (Conservative - West Worcestershire)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent assessment he has made of the reasons for the national gender gap among entrepreneurs.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, published in March, identified key barriers that lead to lower rates of entrepreneurship among women, including low access to finance, and lack of mentoring and networks.
In response, Government has set the goal to increase the number of female entrepreneurs by half by 2030, equivalent to nearly 600,000 new entrepreneurs.
Asked by: Lord Taylor of Warwick (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of reports that there has been a fall in the number of UK business start-ups due to Brexit uncertainty.
Answered by Lord Duncan of Springbank
The number of businesses start-ups varies from year to year, and are affected by a number of factors, including consumer demand and competition, as well as the international economic context.
Fundamentally, the UK has a strong business environment and the Government is committed to making the UK the best place in the world to work and to start a business. There are currently around 5.7 million SMEs employing 16.3 million people. We are ranked in the top 10 in the world for ease of doing business by the World Bank. 1,000 businesses start here every day. We are now home to three of the top 10 fastest growing companies in Europe and are the number one destination in Europe for inward investment projects.
But we are not complacent. We are backing Britain’s entrepreneurs in a number of ways. The Government backed British Business Bank’s programmes are currently supporting over £6.6 billion of finance to over 89,000 SMEs (as at June 2019) Start-Up Loans, which since 2012 has delivered almost 66,500 loans worth over £527 million to small businesses (at end-August 2019).
The Rose Review into Female Entrepreneurship published in March explored barriers women face starting a business and what can be done to overcome them. Government have set a goal to increase the number of female entrepreneurs by 50% by 2030 – that’s an additional 600,000 female entrepreneurs.
We have asked the Princes Trust to carry out an independent review to better understand young entrepreneurs, the specific barriers and opportunities they face, and what more can be done to support them to start and grow a business.
Asked by: Jonathan Lord (Conservative - Woking)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to increase entrepreneurship and business education in schools.
Answered by Nick Gibb
There are a number of opportunities for pupils to develop entrepreneurial skills. The new Business GCSE, which was first taught from 2017, is intended to enable students to develop as commercially minded and enterprising individuals. In 2014, for the first time, financial literacy was made statutory within the national curriculum as it is now taught as part of the citizenship curriculum for 11 to 16 year olds. Schools are free to cover enterprise and entrepreneurship teaching within their personal, social, health and economic education.
Personal characteristics like resilience, problem-solving and good character are crucial for setting up a business. Good schools will offer a wide range of opportunities for their pupils to develop these characteristics through activities such as debating, sport and volunteering, or through programmes such as the National Citizen Service or the Cadets.
Published in December 2017, the Government’s careers strategy aims to give young people from all backgrounds the opportunity to learn from employers about work and the skills that are valued in the workplace. The strategy introduces a new expectation that every school should offer every young person at least seven encounters with employers, including those who are self-employed, during their education as part of a high-quality careers programme.
The Careers & Enterprise Company’s network of Enterprise Advisers will support the delivery of this ambition. Enterprise Advisers are senior business volunteers who help schools and colleges to work with local businesses. At the end of June 2019, over 2,200 schools and colleges had been matched with an Enterprise Adviser. The Department will give all schools and colleges access to an Enterprise Adviser by the end of 2020.
Asked by: Lyn Brown (Labour - West Ham)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, if she will make an assessment of the implications for her Department's policies of recent trends in the level of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
Answered by Kwasi Kwarteng
BEIS is supporting a number of community, business and government-led initiatives, as part of the UK’s bilateral relationship with Brazil, that help increase the value of Brazil’s standing forest, promote the sustainability of agricultural production systems, and restore deforested land.
Implementation arrangements for these initiatives regularly assess how deforestation levels, and the underlying drivers, are changing relative to recent trends. BEIS officials work closely with teams in the UK’s Embassies in Brazil to routinely monitor progress, risks and opportunities.
Initiatives include:
Asked by: Emma Little Pengelly (Democratic Unionist Party - Belfast South)
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what steps he is taking to encourage more working parents (a) in general and (b) who are women to get back into work.
Answered by Rishi Sunak - Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service, and Minister for the Union
The government supports women and parents to return to work, including through: spending almost £6 billion on childcare support in 2019/20 – more than ever before, providing the right to request flexible working and a system of shared parental leave, investing in opportunities and support for people returning to work after time out for caring and having an ambition to increase female entrepreneurship by half by 2030.
The female employment rate is at a record high of 72.1% and 1.9m more women are in work since 2010. The employment rate for parents is 83.2%, also a record high.