For more than 150 years, the Birmingham Post has been a champion of business and enterprise.

Today, we are very proud to be in a position to offer direct support to the business community, thanks to the Government’s Regional Growth Fund.

The Birmingham Post is well-placed to work with our partners to ensure the money is well spent -– and hopefully to play a role in getting the Midlands moving again.

A Regional Growth Fund panel chaired by Lord Heseltine has approved our bid for £5 million from the £1.4 billion fund.

As with the rest of the fund, the money is available to be used creating jobs in the private sector. This might mean anything from subsidising the cost of new equipment to paying for the training of staff who might not otherwise be employed.

The Post’s involvement is designed to open up the Regional Growth Fund to businesses which might otherwise have been excluded.

Ministers ruled that the minimum bid to the fund would be £1 million, to prevent the panel being inundated with bids for much smaller amounts of money.

But this created a danger that only larger companies – those making the type of investment that might require support of £1 million or more – would be able to access the funding.

As a result, the Government suggested that businesses with strong local knowledge and ties to the business community in their area should step in and bid for funding, not for themselves but to pass on to small and medium sized firms in their region.

This is what the Birmingham Post has done.

The mechanism for distributing the cash is not yet in place but it’s not something we are going to do all by ourselves. We intend to work with partners in the business community to create a relatively painless process allowing firms to apply for grants and ensuring the money is delivered where it is needed most.