26/10/10 No sniff of SIF

The Economic Renewal Programme has received a great deal of publicity in the last three months, not all of it good.  Here's a true story which tells you why...

A company entered into discussions with the Welsh Assembly for grant assisatnce to purchase a number of capital items and create 2 jobs.  Acting on the advice of its account manager (who is entirely blameless for what follows), they submitted a claim for Single Investment Fund (SIF) support in July 2010.

There then followed a period of silence.  The Deputy First Minister announced the end of grants, the end of SIFs, and a new direction for Welsh business support in a blaze of publicity.  Then it all went quiet again.

By the end of August the company was asked to resubmit some of the same information.  It did so, and then settled back into silence.

By the end of September and having heard nothing for quite a long time, the company called their account manager.  She didn't know the answer, and didn't know when she might know the answer.  She was very apologetic, and passed the CEO up the line to someone more important.  They didn't know either.  As Donald Rumsfeld would say "This is a known unknown - things we know we don't know".  Sorry, they said.

Herein lies the problem:  if the answer were to be "no", then life goes on, strategies are revised, decisions are made;  if the answer were to be "don't know, but we will know by [date]", then again decisions can be made, timeframes revised and life, again, goes on.  The answer from WAG was neither, and as such strategic limbo has been the order of the day for this company and, presumably, many others.

How frustrating would it be to make a decision on the assumption that the answer will be "no", and then find out the day after that it was in fact "yes"? 

And so to today - an update from the Assembly.  We are sorry for the delay, and we expect to give you an answer by   mid DECEMBER!

Will it be a Happy Christmas, or will businesses in Wales have not survived that long?