Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what steps he is taking to improve competition in small and medium-sized enterprise bank lending; and if he will make a statement.

The Government has driven a wide ranging programme of reforms to help Small and Medium Sized Enterprises to gain access to finance and to support competition in the SME lending market.

The Government introduced the Current Account Switch Service which is a free-to-use service for customers that makes it easier, quicker and more reliable for customers to switch banks. At Budget 2015 the scheme was extended to include 99% of SMEs.

This year the Government will lay final legislation requiring major UK banks both to share SME credit information with other lenders and to offer to share the details of SMEs rejected for a loan with online platforms that can match them to alternative finance providers. Alongside these reforms, the British Business Bank is increasing and diversifying the supply of finance available to SMEs, and aims to facilitate up to £10 billion of finance by 2019.