Pandemic cash

North Lanarkshire Council has set up a fund to help locally-based businesses recover from the devastating effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Surplus money withdrawn from Business Loan Scotland and funding from the West of Scotland Loan Fund will be used to provide a total of £1.5 million to support small and medium sized businesses in North Lanarkshire.

While presenting a report on this to a virtual meeting of the council’s Enterprise and Growth Committee, NLC’s enterprise manager Yvonne Weir said:“The purposes of the fund are really to enable businesses to restart, adapt and recover from the impact of coronavirus.”

Approximately £200,000 of the fund will make up a Back to Business Grant Fund offering one-off non-repayable cash grants of up to a maximum of £2,500 per business to approximately 80 SMEs who meet certain requirements.

The remaining £1.3 million, along with any extra money the council is also able to receive from the European Regional Development Fund, will establish a Covid Recovery Grant Fund providing grants of up to £20,000, chiefly for SMEs with over 20 employees.

So far during the pandemic,the council’s enterprise team and Business Gateway Lanarkshire have collected a lot of information about how businesses have been affected.

Between March and May, the enterprise team received almost 1200 queries from more than 900 firms.

Half of the queries related to grants of £10,000 and £25,000 which the council was administering on behalf of the Scottish Government.