BiKBBI Conference: Minister for small business “Help to Grow”

Minister for Small Business Paul Scully MP introduced Government's Help to Grow scheme for SMEs.

04 Mar, 22

Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, responsible for Small Business Paul Scully MP introduced an SME support scheme at the recent BiKBBI Conference.

BikBBI Conference: Minister for small business unveils "Help to Grow"

He explained the Help to Grow scheme provides a leadership and training programme, with online advice and software vouchers for small businesses.

Paul Scully MP explained: “To help businesses reach their full potential, we’ve launched a new Help to Grow scheme to help small and medium-sized businesses to learn new skills, reach new customers and boost profits.

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“It aims to deliver an intensive leadership and management training programme for 30,000 SMES across the UK.

“It is a 12-week course, the Government pays 90% of that cost but it’s led by business leaders, not Government.

“I’m a fan of the Ronnie Regan Mantra that the nine most feared words in the English language are ‘I’m here from the Government and I’m here to help’. I want to make sure that we’re here for you and you guys crack on.”

He explained the Help to Grow training programme is designed to sit alongside full-time work and its Help to Grow digital scheme can support 100,000 small businesses with online advice and vouchers for software costs, up to £5,000

Paul Scully MP added: “This is something we want to make sure is available to everyone, to renew innovation and make it easy for you to spend more time boosting profits and more time doing core  work you want to do that you actually got into business to do in the first place.”

He said the Government’s focus on ‘levelling up’ the country to restore underperforming areas was “progressing well”.

“We talked about, in our manifesto, about making the UK the best place to start and scale a business but we want to go further than that.

“It should not matter where you are in the UK, it should still be the best place to start, grow and scale a business with access to finance, access to infrastructure, peer to peer networking so you can speak to and learn from people. That’s how great entrepreneurs start to learn.”

Installation challenges

However he added: “But we can’t overlook the fact the installation sector is facing some challenges at present.

“I’m aware that a range of materials and goods that are essential to your businesses are in short supply nationally and indeed globally in some cases. Prices for some are increasing significantly.

“I recognise that’s a critical situation for a number of sectors, not just installation, and we are following events really closely.

“But as the world bounces back from COVID-19, consumer demand spikes we are seeing growing pains and inflationary pressures as well.

“As a Government we are looking at elements of the supply chain where we can really make a difference – we’ll do what we can to help – just as we aim to decisively ease the pressures of supply of fuel or increase testing capacity for HGV drivers.”

Fellow speaker at the BiKBBI Conference, Shadow Minister for Business and Consumers Seema Malhotra MP countered: “Small businesses are really feeling difficulties but the environment for success is the responsiblity of Government.

“It is our view the Government isn’t doing enough dealing with the supply chain difficulties that we’ve seen.

“We need to see more done to tackle that and more done to make life easier at the borders and the ports because hold ups where they don’t need to be are absolutely within the control of this Government.”

CEO of the BiKBBI Damian Walters said Government must support professional installers and pointed to the organisation opening dialogue about mandatory regulations for fitters.