Three schemes that funnelled £78 billion to businesses around the UK during the coronavirus pandemic might have saved millions of jobs, a report has claimed.
Researchers said anywhere between 500,000 and 2.9 million jobs might have been lost without the loans.
The research was commissioned and paid for by the British Business Bank, which oversaw the three loan schemes on behalf of the Government
It estimated that between 146,000 and 505,000 businesses that took Bounce Back loans might have gone under without the support. That is up to a third of the total number of businesses on the scheme.
Another 5,000 to 21,000 companies that took loans under the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) and its sibling programme for larger companies, CLBILS, might also have gone out of business, the report said.
“The Covid-19 emergency loan schemes were designed to address a drastically altered economic landscape for smaller businesses as lockdowns took effect,” said British Business Bank boss Catherine Lewis La Torre.
“This evaluation is the first indication of just how important those schemes were in saving livelihoods, businesses and hundreds of thousands of jobs, and we are proud to have played a vital role in their delivery.”
In the early days of the pandemic, only the CBILS and CLBILS programmes were launched by the Government.
But their size and the hoops that companies had to jump through proved too restrictive for many businesses, ministers later argued.
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