Small Business

Ms Dari Taylor
11. To ask the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills what steps his Department has taken to assist the development of leadership and management skills in small businesses.

Mr. Denham
We have increased our commitment to our Leadership and Management programme through Train to Gain from £4 million this year to £30 million per year. This aims to develop the capacity of small business managers to understand the skills needs of their business, and to make use of the publicly funded Train to Gain programme. We expect to support around 42,000 companies with between 10 and 250 employees and some 60,000 individual managers over the next three years. We anticipate that this will result in around 150,000 learners from those companies using Train to Gain.