To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform how long he expects the (a) Enterprise Finance Guarantee and (b) Working Capital scheme to operate. (252242)

The Enterprise Finance Guarantee is available to viable businesses struggling to access finance, due to the economic downturn, from 14 January 2009 until 31 March 2010.

The Working Capital Scheme is not available directly to businesses. The scheme enables participating banks to increase the amount of working capital they can make available to businesses.

By guaranteeing portfolios of working capital facilities, this will release regulatory capital held by the banks against these portfolios. The banks have agreed they will make commitments to re-deploy this capital in order to increase all types of lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and mid-sized corporates above their current base line. The scheme runs until 31 March 2011.

To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform how many publicly-funded business support schemes there are in the Business Support Simplification Programme; what the cost of these schemes was in the last year for which figures are available; how many publicly-funded business support schemes he expects there to be once the programme is complete; what estimate he has made of their total cost; and what estimate he has made of the cost of the programme in (a) 2008-09 and (b) subsequent years. (258738)

[holding answer 25 February 2009]: The Government announced Solutions for Business, their streamlined portfolio of business support products, in October 2008 with 30 schemes to be in place by March 2009, all other schemes will have closed, or been given notice to close by March 2010. Business Link will be the main access channel to this support.

Solutions for Business is flexible to changing economic circumstances and business need. The Government have committed to keep the streamlined portfolio at less than 100 products in total, covering all of the £2.5 billion spend on business support announced at the beginning of the programme.

The Impact Assessment published December 2007 estimated the cost of the programme to be £5 million, of which £l million was estimated for 2008-09. These costs represent the time/opportunity costs of staff implementing the change programme. Costs in the future will change through transition, however, BERR does not account for other departmental and delivery partner costs.

To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform how many loans were guaranteed under the small firms loan guarantee scheme (a) in the UK, (b) in each region and (c) in each county in each year from 2004-05 to 2007-08; and what the value of loans guaranteed in each area in each of those years was. (261644)

The information is as follows:

The number and value of loans for the above was extracted from the respective Industrial Development Act reports. The Small Firms Loan Guarantee (SFLG) Annual Report 2007-08 has updated figures for the totals of number and value of loans for 2006-07 and 2007-08. However, these data are not produced by county.

Since the Graham Review, lenders record a guaranteed loan on a web portal after the money has been drawn down by the business, however, occasionally later updating occurs which for 2006-07 and 2007-08 is better reflected in the SFLG Annual Report 2007-08 as it incorporates more recent extracts from the web portal and thus more fully updated totals for these years.

Direct year-on-year comparisons would not be appropriate because of changes to the operation and delivery of SFLG during this period, including as a result of the implementation of the Graham Review changes in 2005, which created distinct versions of the scheme.