Issue - meetings

To receive a presentation on a number of initiatives being delivered by Capital Enterprise members including:

• Empty Property Schemes
• Business Turnaround scheme
• New Business and self- employment start- up programmes

The Panel heard from Capital Enterprise on initiatives supported by them. Capital Enterprise offered to implement and manage pop up shop schemes for London Councils, Landlords and Town Centre Managers. A “pop-up” shop was a short term let of a property in a good or unusual location for a nominal rent to either a team of creative individuals who use the shop to display and sell their time limited offers or limited number of creative wares or to a pre-vetted new businesses to test and trail new innovative products/services or retail concepts in a suitable high street setting. It was noted that an intermediary such as the LYST was needed to run the schemes. A major issue that had been identified was that the rental price was likely to be very high. This was due to landlords wishing to keep the capital value as high as possible.

Another initiative was the Business Turnaround Service launched by Capital Enterprise as a service which offered a free of charge professionally qualified business turnaround advisor. Currently seven London Councils were funding this service in their boroughs. An investment of £25 k would support around 50 businesses. Members requested details of the literature provided by other boroughs on this scheme. The meeting noted that the LDA had reduced their funding to Haringey to only £50k, (a letter from Cllr Kober to the Mayor of London to raise Haringey’s concerns about the reduction) and the target for business support was now around job creation. An update on LDA funding support was requested. Members were informed that there appeared to be a running down of funding from the LDA and the number of business agencies had reduced from 3 to now only one (LBDC). The challenges to meet the gap were difficult.  The LBDC advised that the Council needed to give urgent consideration to the support to SME’s especially with the Government’s shift to encourage businesses to start up without the full support being in place.

RESOLVED:

1. That the report be noted.
2. That information be sought from those borough’s using the Business Turnaround service
3. That an update of LDA’s funding regime and implications for Haringey be provided.