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BusinessAdmin

Apr 20 2009 15:58

KEVIN LYNES, Cabinet Member for Regeneration, Kent County Council

Thank you for your question regarding help available for small business. I note that you feel you are not getting support from your bank, which unfortunately seems to be an increasing issue as banks recapitalise in the wake of the credit crunch and become more risk adverse. You will know that the Government has pumped billions of pounds into the banking sector to provide liquidity, but this it seems will take some time to work its way through the system and the recession will continue to bite for probably the remainder of 2009. However, one scheme that the Government has put in place is the Enterprise Finance Guarantee. Under this scheme the Goverment will guarantee lending to viable businesses to ensure that they get the working capital and investment they need. This scheme of £1.3 billion will enable small businesses with a turnover of up to £25 million to secure loans of between £1,000 and £1 million through the Government Guarantee up to 31st March 2010. The EFG scheme is currently availble through 26 lenders including many of the high street banks. Please note that there is no automatic entitlement to this financial scheme, and decisions about lending are delegated to the participating lenders.

There is of course a wide range of help available to small business, not just in terms of access to finance. The Kent Business Support Centre provides a large amount of information for business, including access to finance. Business Link is of course the Government funded national business support scheme which provides extensive support and advice to small businesses. There are also a number of business organisations working hard to support Kent businesses, such as the Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses and the Institute of Directors, with whom we work closely. The Kent Business Support Centre provides details of these as well as Business Link.

I hope this is of some help to you and wish you every success for your business in these difficult economic times.

BusinessAdmin

Mar 30 2009 11:03

Have you looked on the FSB web site where there is a mass of things listed, also on the business link web site fairly comprehensive listing. Have you spoken to your accountants. There is the Kent Backing Business site. Are you a member of a membership organisation, pays dividends these days, Chambers, IoD and FSB all very useful. FSB has been directly fighting issues with SEEDA for example where funding applications have gone astray.

Roger House, FSB

BusinessAdmin

Feb 12 2009 11:39

KEVIN LYNES, Cabinet Member for Regeneration, Kent County Council

There's a huge amount that we're doing and we've always tried to make sure through our commercial services operation that goods and services are usually streamed out to the local communities. We do everything we can to support local businesses. We always make sure that we make the scale and scope of that procurement muscle available to those private sector providers and that could be around lease cars, mobile phone contracts, it could be around buying office furniture. We can buy more, therefore we buy cheaper and we try to pass that onto the private sector at every stage.