Government announces £350m to support small businesses

The money will be used to train staff and give workers the skills and expertises they need. Skills Secretary John Denham said: "Small businesses are an important engine of our economy and we must make sure that we support them during tough economic times. We are overhauling the training system to make sure that they can get help with training their staff with the very minimum of bureaucracy. "We know that firms which invest in skills do better than those that don't, which is why we will be urging small businesses to take up this offer from Government." The funding to support training will be drawn from the Government's 'Train to Gain' programme - the scheme that supports and subsidises staff training. Funding for the programme is planned to rise to £1 billion by 2010-11, ahead of the Olympics. Top priority will go to small businesses in the private sector, those with up to 250 employees. The key elements of the £350m Train to Gain package are: *Relaxing the rules to allow funding for "bite-sized chunks" - small units or modules of qualifications in subjects known to be important to SMEs, such as business improvement, team-working, customer service, and risk management; *Help for groups of SMEs located together in business parks so that they can increase their purchasing power and share resources to support the training of local SME staff; *Extending DIUS's successful leadership and management programme so that more SMEs can benefit from it, including in companies with just 5-10 workers; *Relaxing the rules to allow workers to get training up to level two even if they already have a previous qualification at this level; and more funding for level three training; *Brokers to offer tried and tested skills diagnostics and audits so companies can have their training needs more accurately identified; and point SMEs to the right solutions from the most appropriate providers; * A new communications campaign to begin next month to underline the benefits of upskilling and reskilling and the breadth of the support on offer from Government.