§ Mrs. Curtis-ThomasTo ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will list the members of the group developing a best practice model for large businesses to work with suppliers and customers to improve the skills of their workforce. [123564]
§ Mr. Alan JohnsonThe group working on this Competitiveness White Paper commitment were: Mike Kinski, then at Stagecoach; Howard Bentley from Sainsburys; Jerry Cope from Post Office Counters; Stephen Dunn from Scottish Power; Barrie Oxtoby, then at Rover; and Les Shearn from British Aerospace.
518WWe do not collect national records of the nature of every assistance given, in order to minimise the management requirement of Business Links. However, we do ask them to omit trivial activity. The table shows activity for the period 1999–2000. The figures given are the numbers of businesses assisted in each quarter. A business which receives advice twice within a quarter is only counted once, but a business which receives assistance in two separate quarters will be counted in each quarter. It is not possible, because of the risk of double counting, to give a precise total number of businesses being assisted each year.
Learning through Business Networks—the final output from this work—was published in September 1999.