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Areas of Manchester have some of the highest rates of children living in poverty than anywhere else in the UK. Offering apprenticeships to teenagers provides hope, says H20 Drywall Systems’ director Simon O’Brien
Simon O’Brien and the H20 Drywall Systems team won The Christie Charity World Cup in 2010
The number of opportunities available to young people in parts of Manchester are limited, according to Simon O’Brien. As a local business owner and resident, it is something he is faced with everyday. According to Save the Children UK, there are areas of Manchester where more than a quarter of the children live in severe poverty.
When O’Brien left school at 16, he joined his father’s plastering company as an apprentice for five years. He has now been in the trade for nearly three decades, and is now the director of H20 Drywall Systems – a company with an estimated turnover of £300,000. In 2014, the company will be turning over £1m.
Today a major new report into the future of alternative finance was issued. The authors are Liam Collins from Nesta, Dr Richard Swart of University of California Berkeley and Bryan Zhang of the University of Cambridge.
To read the full report, click on the front cover below, or to view an infographic with report highlights, click on the chart
rebuildingsociety.com was featured in the Mail on Sunday and the Mail Online following some research on business savings rates.
Businesses are being urged to beat falling savings rates and help the economy by investing in other small firms to earn themselves higher returns.The average rate of interest paid on business accounts with a balance of £10,000 has fallen by nearly a third in the past year, from 2.34 per cent in December 2012 to 1.6 per cent today, figures show.
With small and medium sized-firms holding close to £126 billion in current and deposit accounts, this equates to a loss of about £931 million in interest before tax annually.
As the crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending industries grow, they will require specialist media to cover them and become reliable and impartial sources of information for all sides. We’re proud to be supporting CrowdFunding Focus, a new magazine available on iTunes and in January it will be available on the Newsstand at the Google Play store for Android devices.
The magazine covers, among other things:
rebuildingsociety.com’s response to the Autumn Statement with business owners and investors in mind:
For lenders / investors:
The Government’s announcement that it is looking to reform the criteria for stocks and shares ISAs to include peer-to-peer lending is a strong statement of intent even if it stopped short of making the full announcement, as predicted in the press earlier this week.
We feel the Government effectively announced what it could:
“The government is exploring whether to increase the number of retail bonds eligible for stock and share ISAs by reducing the requirement that such securities must have a remaining maturity above 5 years.”
In a guest post for rebuildingsociety.com, Whitecap Consulting, a Leeds-based strategy consultancy, gives business owners food for thought as the season for creating 2014’s strategy season is in full swing:
Understanding the environment you operate in is a key component of any strategy. It is critical to determine how you fit into the market, to monitor how it is changing and evolving over time, and to decide how you respond. It’s also important to know the different markets, sectors and segments available to you, to choose which ones to target, and then identify how to compete effectively.
Christopher Borkowski, SJI Ltd
Christopher Borkowski, MD of SJI Ltd who borrowed £100,000 in October has an exciting update to share with rebuildingsociety.com’s lenders:
“If I was a lender on your site and had lent money to a company I would want to know what was going on and how it had made a difference, so I want to give you an update on the project that the £100,000 we borrowed from you has allowed us to start.
“The money allowed us to pay legal and administrative fees on several projects and start work on them much sooner than expected. In one case we’ve engaged on a project in Nuneaton to redevelop an old listed cinema into a modern ‘miniplex.’ While keeping a lot of the original features, it’s going to reinvigorate the centre of the town, providing an arts centre, a training facility for schoolchildren and adults to learn about digital media, alongside a cinema.
“Ken Loach, the famous film director, was born in Nuneaton about a year after the original cinema was built. He has taken an active interest in the project, introduced us to the British Film Institute, who in turn has recommended our partner as the redeveloper.
In 2014, it might be time to look at innovative ways of putting enough cash aside to get on the bottom rung of the housing ladder as the future of Help to Buy comes into the spotlight, as Nick Moules explains.
The reality
Since the housing crash, it has been well-publicised that first-time buyers (FTBs) have been frozen out of the housing market. The Help to Buy scheme has an uncertain future (before it has really started) and if evidence of a housing bubble grows, political pressure to cancel the scheme will be ramped up.
From a lender’s perspective, it’s a tough ask to support FTBs as they’re typically the riskiest part of the market without the incentives; loans are at a high loan to value (LTV) and they’re under regulatory pressure to reduce risk and balance their books.
But it’s worse for the would-be borrowers for several reasons: (more…)