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Phoenix Development Fund

The Phoenix Development Fund is a time-limited initiative designed to explore good practice in delivering business support and to find innovative ways to reach out to communities considered hard to reach by mainstream providers. It was not designed to provide long term or core funding for business support organisations. The Small Business Service (SBS, an agency of the DTI) will not be contracting for any new activities under this programme when existing contracts end in March 2006. We are currently discussing with RDAs the arrangements for local management of the fund. Since 2000, the Phoenix programme has done some excellent work to help budding entrepreneurs who face particular barriers when starting or growing a business. The main beneficiaries of the programme come from communities which are under-represented in business and/or live in deprived neighbourhoods. The programme is made up of two elements: the Phoenix Challenge Fund, which supports Community Development Finance Institutions; and the Phoenix Development Fund, which supports projects aimed at finding innovative ways to provide business support to the above communities. It has been decided that the Challenge Fund will continue as a national budget of the Small Business Service for a further two years but in the main will be managed by the RDAs who have also received a contribution to the ““single pot”” for 2006–07 and 2007–08 for this purpose. The Phoenix Development Fund has been successful and we now need to ensure that the innovative approaches that have been developed are built upon by mainstream providers of business support. The knowledge and good practice accumulated over the years in dozens of projects funded by the PDF is being collated and catalogued and we will be working with stakeholders and partners over the next year to ensure this legacy is embedded in mainstream provision of business support. Delivery of initiatives to encourage more enterprise in under-represented groups and deprived communities is increasingly managed at the Regional Development Agencies and Local Authorities in line with their wider responsibilities for delivery of business support and economic regeneration. RDAs have already been awarded an increase to their finds from April 2006 in recognition of their increased responsibility that, although it will not replace the national funding, will augment their existing provision. In addition, the Government have introduced the Local Enterprise Grant Initiative that will provide £300 million over three years to local councils in the most deprived areas to encourage the development of more enterprising communities and this programme will benefit from the lessons learned through the Phoenix Development Fund as well as being joined up with the continuing work of the Phoenix Challenge Fund and the Community Development Finance Institutions that it supports.