British Business Bank supporting more than 96,000 businesses with £12.2 billion of finance through its core programmes, with an above target adjusted return of 18.2%

Key highlights

The Bank’s performance against its six objectives in the last financial year was as follows:

• Increasing the supply of finance to smaller businesses – The stock of finance supported through the Bank’s core finance programmes was £12.2 billion at the end of March 2022, supporting more than 96,000 businesses.
• Helping create a more diverse finance market for smaller businesses – The Bank continued to deploy the vast majority of finance in its core finance schemes outside of the largest UK banks, exceeding the target set. 98.4% of the Bank’s finance was provided outside the ‘Big Five’ banks.
• Identifying and helping to reduce regional imbalances in access to finance – The Bank exceeded its target through strong deployment of finance across the UK’s Nations and regions by deploying £900 million of finance outside London in 2021/22. The Bank was supporting almost 83,000 businesses outside London at the end of March 2022.
• Encouraging and enabling SMEs to seek the finance best suited to their needs – Prompted awareness of the Bank amongst small businesses surveyed in 2021/22 was 22%, a decrease of 3% from 2020/21, during which the Bank administered the high-profile Covid-19 loan guarantee schemes.
• Being the centre of expertise on smaller business finance in the UK, providing advice and support to the Government – The Bank met its objective in deploying its expertise to the government effectively, ranging from engagement on the Spending Review and administering the Covid-19 response schemes to fulfilling priorities on research and market engagement. There were almost 17,000 downloads of the Bank’s research reports in 2021/22.
• Achieving its other objectives while managing taxpayers’ money efficiently – The Bank achieved an adjusted return of 18.2%, significantly exceeding its target.