New Businesses: Graduates
Business, Innovation and Skills

Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood, Labour)

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills what steps his Department is taking to support graduate entrepreneurship (a) in Birmingham, Ladywood constituency, (b) in the west midlands and (c) nationally.

Mark Prisk (Minister of State (Business and Enterprise), Business, Innovation and Skills; Hertford and Stortford, Conservative)

The Government are funding the National Association of College and University Entrepreneurs to build a self-sustainable business model that will support the creation of student enterprise societies in every university and most colleges by 2015. The societies work to drive the growth of entrepreneurship in higher and further education, raising awareness of enterprise as a potential career choice and providing advice and support to students and graduates as they start up in business. Within the west midlands, societies have been established, or are planned, within a number of universities and colleges, including those in the Birmingham area.

Government funding is also being provided to the National Centre for Entrepreneurship in Education as it builds a sustainable infrastructure to enable higher and further education institutions to better support entrepreneurship. Activities include the provision of an Entrepreneurial University Leadership programme to improve the capability of university leaders to deliver entrepreneurial training, thereby encouraging more graduates into self-employment.

Those graduates entering into self-employment will also be encouraged through support under the Budget 2012 announcement, which made available £10 million in 2012/13 for a programme of enterprise loans to help young people set up and grow their own businesses.