To ask the Minister for the Economy (i) to account for the low number of completed applications to the Digital Selling Capability Grant and the Equity Investment Fund; and (ii) for her assessment as to whether there will be a significant underspend on these schemes.

The Digital Selling Capability Grant

The Digital Selling Capability Grant (DSCG) was launched on 8th September 2020. It is anticipated that this new grant will run in consecutive years, therefore this launched the first Call for the DSCG, a competitive £1M per annum fund targeted at retail and wholesale businesses based in NI and the scheme is managed and delivered by Invest NI.

Financial support under DSCG will facilitate businesses to:-

Developing their digital/online e-commerce strategy; and

Implement the strategy and/or enhance their e-commerce offering.

At the closing deadline for the scheme on 7th October 2020, Invest NI had received 126 applications. They are now in the process of reviewing all of those submitted.

Grants will be between £5k and £20k. Working on the basis of an average award of £10k, Invest NI believes that the scheme could afford to process approximately 100 successful cases.

Therefore, for Call One of the new DSCG, Invest NI expects to spend the full allocated budget of £1m. Due to timing and the launch of the new Grant, this expenditure will straddle the financial years 2020/21 and 2021/22. As a consequence of government accounting procedures, and conscious of pressures elsewhere due to COVID-19, Invest NI surrendered £450k of this £1m allocation in the October monitoring round, as the full budget for Call One is not expected to be completely spent by 31 March 2021.

However, as this budget will be committed to those successful applicants in the current period, Invest NI has bid for this £450k for 2021/22, in addition to another £1m for Call Two of the DSCG, which they also expect to spend in full during the next financial year 2021/22.

The Equity Investment Fund

The Equity Investment Fund, which was also launched on 8th September 2020. Unlike the DSCG, this new scheme does not have a fixed closing date, but instead there is a requirement for all investment legals to be completed by 31 December 2020. As applications are for investments, rather than grant support, the process is more detailed and companies will therefore take longer to prepare an application. Invest NI have received promising levels of interest and are engaging with companies to support them to submit their applications.

Full details on the scheme and eligibility criteria are available will be on the nibusinessinfo website at Covid-19 Equity Investment Fund