British Business Bank.... valuable support or Govt bluster?

The British Business Bank is a solution in search of a problem. As someone who's built businesses through grit, capital and risk, not government application forms, I can say this much: I’ve never met a single founder, landlord or business owner who swears by it. It is faceless, slow, and allergic to urgency. Rachel Reeves funnelling more taxpayer cash into what is essentially a state-backed spreadsheet is not economic vision. It’s political theatre. In 2023, just 1.5 percent of SMEs accessed finance through British Business Bank schemes. Most still turn to high street lenders or private investors who actually understand time sensitivity. What small business needs is not more abstract “support”. It needs lower taxes, faster approvals, fewer box-ticking regulators, and policies shaped by operators, not career civil servants. Boosting the BBB is like painting a stalled van. What we need is to fix the engine. And that engine is private enterprise, not state intervention in a tailored suit.

I think a lobotomised amoeba would have more sense with regards to economic policy than this Labour government.

It’s actually such a sorry state of affairs when we have such untalented people in charge.

Do you recall when Reeves launched the office for value for money? And have you seen how its webpage is still not updated with… anything?

They launch more departments, like a local council, because it means they can obfuscate. This government and previous governments does not have an idea as to how incentives and utility work.

I get more and more depressed by the day at the decisions being made and the gaslighting these very untalented people are imparting on the uk.

This is all in the face of declining payrolls, higher inflation and increasing long term sick.

Oh, and now Mauritius is giving its citizens tax breaks while ours increase.

There should be riots, not this placid moaning quite frankly.

In theory this is a good move, but, and it's a big but, I and pretty well everyone I speak to in business, have absolutely no idea a) who can apply for finance from the British Business Bank b) what is involved in applying for this finance and c) what makes this a better option than normal commercial borrowing. Surely, especially in today's digital age, every business large and small should by now have received clear communication on all of these issues from the British Business Bank but, unless I've missed them, this communication has not happened. They say that first impressions matter, but it's hard to form a first impression when what you're looking at is under a cloak of invisibility.