In an otherwise rather uneventful Budget speech, here at The Business Lounge we woke up when the Chancellor announced a “capital fund of £12.5m, specifically to encourage more women entrepreneurs”.

While our male readers may quite reasonably be non-plussed by this, it caught our attention. Unfortunately, neither the HM Revenue & Customs press releases nor the technical notes (together totalling more than 300 pages) mention more than “a new capital fund primarily focused on businesses run by women”.

The Business Lounge will be keeping an eye on this, and will bring you more when we know it.

“Access to finance”

However, this “announcement” was part of a list of measures, the purpose of which is to help small businesses raise finance in the current economic climate. The most notable other announcement from this list for very small businesses relates to the Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme.

This existing scheme allows government guarantees of loans which fall within the scheme’s conditions, and hence make such loans less risky to the banks. Your bank manager will be able to tell you more about the scheme in general, but the Budget changes include a “temporary” increase of 20% on the amounts available under the scheme, and a softening of the conditions in terms of the age of the businesses involved.

Therefore, if your business has not previously qualified for the scheme, or you have not even considered it, now may be the time to make enquiries.

Overall, these measures will hardly “shield” small businesses from the impact of the “credit crunch”, but the rather soft pledge was made that “Government will work with the banks to explore mechanisms to ensure small firms are able to access the most appropriate forms of finance”.

As with all our information in The Business Lounge, this is not comprehensive business advice, and may not apply to your specific circumstances; to discuss how these issues affect you, contact your accountant and your bank manager.