Bank needs to take bigger risks

DESCRIBED by the First Minister as "the jewel in the crown of Welsh Government", the Development Bank of Wales has spent the past week celebrating the milestone of £1bn invested since its creation in 2017.

- DYLAN JONES-EVANS

It is an impressive figure at first glance and the scale of the organisation's activity - thousands of loans, hundreds of businesses supported in every corner of Wales, and tens of thousands of jobs reportedly created or safeguarded - has been held up as evidence of a vibrant and ambitious Welsh economy, with its new chair claiming that its distinctive model is "helping entrepreneurs who want to start up, scale up and adopt new technologies, fuelling vital job creation across Wales".

But if we look beyond the hubris and glossy press articles to subject the numbers to the scrutiny that any publicly funded institution should welcome, a very different picture emerges. What becomes clear is that while the Development Bank is extremely active, it is not building the growing economy Wales needs.

The simplest way to understand the problem is to break down the £1bn that has been deployed.

Spread across more than 5,000 investments, the average transaction comes in at just under £200,000. This is the behaviour of a cautious high street bank lender, not an economic development institution charged with transforming the Welsh economy.

This approach may help individual businesses with short-term challenges, but as this column has said so many times, Wales' prosperity ultimately depends on high-growth firms capable of commercialising ideas, scaling globally and delivering productivity gains that small, incremental lending simply cannot produce.

Nowhere is this structural weakness clearer than in the Development Bank's support for new businesses, having funded 787 startups since its launch.