Thirty Years of Hurt, Never Stopped Me Dreaming Speech given by Andrew G Haldane, Chief Economist and Member of the Monetary Policy Committee  Institute for Government 30 June 2021  The views (more so than ever!) are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or Monetary Policy Committee. I would like to thank Andrew Bailey, Nick Butt, Shiv Chowla and Mette Nielsen for comments, Jack Meaning, Sandra Mills and Sarah Saunders for help in preparing the text and hundreds of Bank colleagues over several decades for their support. 1  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/news/speeches and @BoE_PressOffice  THIRTY YEARS OF HURT, NEVER STOPPED ME DREAMING At the end of September I leave the Bank of England, 32 years almost to the day since I joined. Most would say that is a decent stint, but in Bank terms it is just really getting started. My personal assistant, the brilliant Sandra Mills, has just completed 44 years. The Bank’s company secretary, John Footman, is just about to clock 52 years. I never was a completer-finisher. It has not, of course, been 30 years of hurt.1 I have loved almost all of my time at the Bank. I promised myself one thing when I joined - that I would only stay as long as it was interesting. It has been interesting for 32 years. Events made it so. And it remains no less interesting now.
Those SME financing fault-lines have been clearest at times of financial stress. During the Global Financial Crisis, many UK SMEs struggled to access bank credit on reasonable terms or, in some cases, at all. Constrained credit to companies was, in turn, a potent factor behind the UK’s anaemic subsequent recovery. These same fault-lines were re-exposed during the Covid crisis. The good news, this time around, was that large numbers of loans – in excess of one and a half million of them – were made to UK businesses by UK banks in the space of a few months. The bad news is that the vast majority of these loans would not have been made at that speed without a 100% guarantee from Government. Only by effectively nationalising SME lending were the Macmillan gaps bridged in crisis. Over the years, several initiatives and institutional fixes have been attempted to close the Macmillan gaps. These include the British Growth Fund (BGF), the British Business Bank (BBB) and Innovate UK. While individually helpful, none of these has had either the scale financially, nor the scope regionally, to close the Macmillan gaps. Fintechs, using new data and new technologies, have sought to bridge these gaps with some success but, realistically, are likely to do so only slowly. To my mind, what is needed to bridge the Macmillan gaps, durably and comprehensively, is the equivalent of a UK Development Bank, operating on a decentralised basis.