Government takes axe to ‘confusing’ help schemes
1 min read
The Government today (23 October) began to make good on its promise to take the axe to thousands of confusing business support schemes and undertook to finish the job by March next year.
Business Secretary Peter Mandelson (pictured) revealed 30 advice, loan and grant products and services that will make up a simplified portfolio of services to be available via the Business Link network. A new Business Link Strategy Group, to include senior business leaders led by EEF chairman Martin Temple, will oversee the service.
All the newly dubbed 'Solutions for Business' products will be in place by March. They are a result of a streamlining exercise whereby the government committed to reduce over 3,000 products to less than 100.
The aim, said an announcement from the Department for Business, is to make it easier for companies, small and large, new and existing, to find the right products to help them with common business issues such as getting started, growing, finance, export, skills, innovation and the environment.
Businesses had complained they found government support complex and confusing.
Lord Mandelson said the scheme would help companies prosper and flourish and was about “helping the UK to become the most enterprising economy in the world".
Martin Temple said help which had been available to business was not currently taken up because it had been too complex, confusing to understand and hard to find quickly and easily. "However,” he warned, “the sheer scale of transition from the current plethora of schemes to a more streamlined approach will take time to be introduced but the benefits of the new system will become apparent within eighteen months."
EEF Chief Economist, Steve Radley, believed the government had been “right to take an axe to the current confused and cluttered system of business support which was neither aiding business nor providing value for money for the taxpayer”.
“The new programme of consolidation should not only be far simpler for companies to understand and access but in time should improve the quality of service and advice. The key now, as with all such reforms, is to ensure delivery so that business can see clear, practical benefits.”
