Lord Sugar is to be the head of a new taskforce to help small companies that are turned down for loans. The new panel – an idea of Lord Mandelson – is called the Small Business Credit Adjudicator (SBCA).
Forget for a second the idea of the state deciding which companies deserve loans and which don’t; a staggering piece of nano-level interference in the market. Richard Lambert, head of the CBI, has called this “dotty” and “unworkable“.
Instead enjoy the irony of Lord Sugar being in charge of the panel:
This is the man who said last autumn that some small businessmen were “moaners” who didn’t deserve new loans and effectively lived in Disneyworld. The peer claimed that just 15 per cent of businesses rejected for bank loans had a genuine case; the rest needed an ‘insolvency practitioner’ rather than more money.
“I have seen some poor examples of businesses which simply won’t succeed — even in the best of times. The reality is that however good the help provided by government, some businesses simply don’t work. And government and banks can’t just write out blank cheques to anyone who thinks they have a good idea.”
Hat-tip: Suzy Jagger at the Times
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey