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Small business agency to face radical overhaul

By Dan Martin September 2006
The government's much criticised Small Business Service (SBS) is to be radically downsized, trade and industry secretary Alistair Darling has revealed.

Small Business Agency ineffective, admits chief

Financial Times, June 20th, 2006

“State-funded support for small business is ‘incredibly complex’, ‘inaccessible’, ‘inefficient’ and ‘ineffective’, the head of the government agency charged with representing the sector has admitted.
“Martiny Wyn Griffith, chief executive of the Small Business Service, suffered an intense grilling from the Public Accounts Committee yesterday. The MP’s queried the rationale for the SBS surviving, given that the National Audit Office warned last month that the agency could not say what the £2.6 billion spent each year on supporting small businesses was achieving.

Grant News

Finding Funding

The task of finding funding to support the establishment and growth of Small to Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) is one of the hardest tasks that we have ever been involved with. So many worthwhile cases, put up by really dedicated and very knowledgeable people, just cannot get the requisite funding for one reason or another. But if it is so tough why have we chosen to become engaged in this arena?

The Budget - 21 March 2007

• A new tax credit for environmental investment will be introduced.
• Small firms will be able to claim a 175 per cent tax credit for research and development from April 2008.

Selective Finance for Investment in England

DTI official statistics publication – latest Annual Report.
In the year ending March 2006, businesses in England have accepted over 400 grant offers totalling in excess of £80m.

The Grant was replaced in January 2009 by the Grant for Business Investment GBI, and no statistics are yet available for this Grant

RSA Wales official statistics publication – latest Annual Report

In the 7 years to end March 2006, businesses in Wales have accepted 1173 RSA grant offers totalling £650m. These offers relate to projects with planned investment of £2.83bn with the aim of creating or safeguarding over 70,000 jobs.

Small business agency to face radical overhaul

By Dan Martin September 2006
The government's much criticised Small Business Service (SBS) is to be radically downsized, trade and industry secretary Alistair Darling has revealed.

According to Darling, the government's main agency for supporting small firms, which has been condemned by many groups for failing to deliver, will be restructured to make it "smaller and more focused on what it can do".

Speaking to the 'Financial Times', Darling said: "[The SBS] will have a much smaller policy focus and a much closer tie-up with the Treasury, so the Treasury is more tied into business concerns."

He added that a "lot of" the £150m in business support funding currently administered by the SBS will be transferred to regional development agencies.

The move represents the latest effort by the government at simplifying the system of business support services provided by various government agencies.

"The totality of support needs to remain but a lot of it is needlessly complex," Darling said. "You've got to ask what do [the schemes] add to the greater good and the answer is often 'not a lot'."

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