The UK Virtual Study Visit was organised by the Lead Partner Coventry University Enterprises Ltd and took place on 10th May 2022 online. This is the first of four events, each organised by one of the four RECREATE partners, with the aim to present two Good Practices in terms of business support offered to Transport SMEs specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After a brief summary of the main RECREATE project aims and objectives, a representative of the Coventry City Council, the main stakeholder of the West Midlands region, gave a general overview of the Coventry & Warwickshire Business Support providers approach. During the pandemic, cooperation between the local stakeholders grew exponentially and weekly catch-up meetings were set up in order to monitor key and emerging issues, challenges and opportunities for the local economy, while ERDF projects continued to be delivered virtually. The main issues identified during 2020 and 2021 were linked to supply chain disruptions, rising energy costs, shortages and rising costs of goods and materials, labour shortages, cashflow challenges, uncertain business and consumer confidence, action needed to respond to climate change.
Several initiatives have been put in place to support businesses. The two most relevant ones for the region were presented.
The first one is the Government Loan Schemes, business loans offered by the UK Government to businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. There were three types of loans, all managed by the British Business Bank:
- Bounce Back Loans of up to £50,000 offered to all SMEs;
- Coronavirus Business Interruption Loans of up to £5m for smaller businesses across the UK that were losing revenue, and seeing their cashflow disrupted, as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak;
- Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loans of up to £200m for medium-sized and larger businesses affected by the coronavirus outbreak.
By 31st May 2021, the three schemes disbursed over £79 billion through loans and similar facilities. The funds were all established by the UK Government. 7,400 Coventry businesses were able to access a total of £304.3m from these loans, as well as 15,000 Warwickshire businesses being able to access £655.5m in loans.
The loans complemented COVID Grants and Furlough Scheme. Local business support providers referred and assisted applications.
The second initiative presented is the Coventry & Warwickshire Specialist Grants, grants issued to local small and medium enterprises impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. These grants offered between £1,000 and £3,000 to SMEs to make necessary innovations or modernise practices to safeguard their longer-term competitiveness following the Coronavirus pandemic. Businesses were able to use the funding to pay for activities that would facilitate diversification and innovation, like:
- Access to specialist professional advice e.g. human resources, accountants, legal, financial, IT / digital, etc.
- Purchase of minor equipment to adapt or adopt new technology in order to continue to deliver business activity or diversify.
The funds came from ERDF, channelled to Coventry City Council through the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). Coventry & Warwickshire was allocated £500,000. A total of 200 SMEs from multiple sectors were supported, safeguarding jobs. The demand from SMEs exceeded the scale of the grant fund six-fold, and the window for applications needed to be closed earlier than expected.
These two initiatives will be analysed and described more in depth by the Lead Partner and included in the Good Practices section of the project website.
The final session of the event was dedicated to questions from the participants which led a lively discussion. It seems that in several regions, during the pandemic, Innovation as well as R&D activities grew: businesses realised they had to innovate to survive and the crisis was used as an opportunity to grow. In terms of business support, in UK there has been a diverse strategy: on one hand, helping all companies to survive and on the other, help the smaller ones to grow. In general, the approach was to provide smaller grants to a bigger number of businesses, rather than larger grants to a smaller number.
The next Virtual Study Visit will be organised on 18th May 2022 by Development Agency of South Aegean Region – READ S.A.