§ Malcolm BruceTo ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many foreign inward investors have received support through(a)regional selective assistance and enterprise grants and (b)the Selective Finance for Investment in England scheme since their introduction; what percentage this is of the total number of foreign inward investors locating in the UK; what the average duration was of retained foreign investment 104W secured with the help of these schemes, broken down by region; and how many jobs were (i) projected and (ii) created by these investors. [175958]
§ Jacqui SmithStatistics on offers of Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) to foreign owned companies were first published in the Industrial Development Act Annual Report for 1996/97. Copies of the reports are available in the Libraries of the House. In England, 410 such offers were accepted between 1 April 1996 and 31 March 2003. We estimate this to be about 10 per cent. of the total foreign inward investment projects, of which the Department is aware.
All assisted projects are monitored for a minimum period following project completion. However, information is not held regarding tho total duration of the investment.
The number of projected jobs associated with the RSA offers is approximately 77,000. To date, around 54,000 have been achieved. As many of these projects are not yet complete this number is expected to increase. SFIE replaced RSA/EG in April of this year. To date, we are not aware of any offers to foreign owned companies. No such records have been maintained for Enterprise Grants (EG), which were available only to Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs).