Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many start up loans have been approved by his Department for participants on the new enterprise allowance scheme in each year since that scheme began.

Following a trailblazer started in January 2011, New Enterprise Allowance was launched in April 2011 creating 46,000 new businesses between April 2011 and March 2014.

Table 1 Table 2

Table 1 shows the number of loans that have been made on behalf of DWP under the New Enterprise Allowance Scheme.

Table 2 shows the number of New Enterprise Allowance Loans that have been made since October 2013 under the Start Up Loans scheme administered by BIS.