Only 1% of entrepreneurs who applied for a government scheme set up to help businesses access credit during the recession received any help, according to a survey.
And 32% of the small business owners questioned in the survey, carried out by Clifton Asset Management, said they hadn’t even heard of the Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) scheme. Of those who had heard of it, 93% said they saw little point in applying.
These figures back up the huge store of anecdotal evidence that it's near-impossible for business owners to access finance from the banks, regardless of the EFG
Antony Carty, Clifton Asset Management
Total lending on the scheme has fallen since last year, falling well short of the £1.3bn budget.
Under the terms of the EFG, the government will guarantee bank lending to UK businesses with a turnover of up to £25m who are struggling to raise business finance, enabling them to secure loans of up to £1m.
Antony Carty, director at Clifton Asset Management (CAM), isn’t surprised by the findings. “These figures, and the results of our own extensive survey, back up the huge store of anecdotal evidence we constantly receive from the business owners we help and advise who report it is near-impossible for them to access finance from the banks, regardless of the EFG. Maybe the government isn’t putting as much pressure on the banks to promote the scheme and lend cash as they would like us to believe.”
Of another of the survey’s statistics, Carty says: “If this is supposed to be the government’s flagship idea for helping UK SMEs out of recession then it is a damning statistic that over one in four of the people we spoke to didn’t even know what the EFG was.”
