Government mirrors County business scheme

Staffordshire’s bank busting loan scheme to help viable businesses grow now adopted by Government

It’s eighteen months ago that Staffordshire County Council launched the Staffordshire Business Support Fund.

It’s one of those policies which has been very obviously successful with clearly positive results on the ground. It involved using a couple of million pounds of public money to underwrite lending to viable business when banks refused to for no reason.

Dozens of good business have been supported which have secured, and even created, several hundred jobs overall. We were only talking a few weeks ago why national government hadn’t eased back on Quantitative Easing and copied our more direct approach.

The Staffordshire scheme has the County Council directly underwriting borrowing for business on commercial lending terms where as the QA the government have used involves pouring money into banks… where it seems to stay put.

But in the Autumn Statement the Chancellor announced a mirror image of Staffordshire’s scheme on a national scale. Good news and nice that the principle started here with the County Council.

Click here to comment on this post