Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to support women entrepreneurs.

The Government’s business support schemes have been put in place to help eligible businesses to get through the pandemic, including those led by women from all regions and backgrounds. Information on these schemes and other resources is available via the free Business Support Helpline. In 2020, 44% of the Business Support Helpline’s callers were women.

Start-Up Loans, part of the Government-backed British Business Bank, provides loans and intensive support to new entrepreneurs, including a year of free mentoring from industry experts. Since 2012, over 40% of Start Up Loans worth £280m have gone to women (up to June 2021).

The Government asked Alison Rose, CEO of NatWest Group, to carry out a review of female entrepreneurship, which was published in March 2019. In response to her report, we set an ambition to increase the number of female entrepreneurs by half by 2030, equivalent to 600,000 new entrepreneurs.