Designing Effective Programmes for Encouraging the Business Start‐up Process

There has been a substantial growth in training programmes in the UK over the past decade and particularly in the 1980s, aimed at supporting the business start‐up process. In the 1970s, small business training, channelled mainly through the Industry Training Boards, concentrated almost exclusively on the existing small business. That there has been such substantial growth reflects the priorities and influence of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC). Its pioneering work on the New Enterprise Programmes in the late 70s led on to a hierarchy of start‐up programmes in the 80s covering a wide variety of client types. Behind this, in turn, lay the political commitment to support of self‐help progammes aimed at increasing the rate of starts of small business as a counter to unemployment, and increasing their viability, thus lowering the failure rate. Start‐up training has gone much farther in the UK than in the rest of Europe, and several European countries have followed British practice in recent years1. The growth in provision can partly be monitored by the Manpower Services Commission's own figures which show 64 starters being helped through training in 1978/79 and 31,000 in 1986/87. The MSC is planning to revise its programme portfolio in this area, in the light of its evaluation, and in an endeavour substantially to increase the through‐put of participants with targets of over 45,000 in 1987/88.