The DTI is using taxpayers money to fund a “task force” to investigate barriers to black and ethnic minority businesses.

Apparently, black and ethnic minority business owners find it harder to get finance for their business than white people born here.

The “task force” looks like being another one of these unelected, taxpayer funded regional quangos if this is anything to go by:

Tom Riordan, the chief executive at the Yorkshire regional development agency, Yorkshire Forward, with be the deputy chair.

“I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this agenda and I am delighted Yorkshire Forward has agreed to lead in supporting the task force,” Ms Malik said. “Ethnic minority businesses make a significant contribution to GDP so it is important they are supported and encouraged to flourish.”

Mr Riordan said: “If the English regions are to achieve their economic potential, then we need to create the conditions for [black and minority ethnic] businesses to grow and prosper. To do so, we need to make sure they have access to the same levels of support as any other business. I intend to make sure that the task force has a real impact on the delivery of business support across England.”

Could it be that asians are a credit risk?  Could the fact that a lot of asians use more than one name and freely share their identities be a reason why banks are reluctant to loan them money?  I know from personal experience that this happens and it happens often.  I’d be interested to see some sort of statistics on the demographics of bad debts, in particular whether black and ethnic minority groups are statistically more likely to be bad debtors that white English people.  If this is the case then the “discrimination” is perfectly justified and the British government has no place interfering.  Credit Reference Agencies and Banks have built up their credit scoring systems over decades using their own experiences to identify which people are likely to be a higher risk.  Who knows best – banks and credit reference agencies or oppressively-PC civil servants and special (ie. self-) interest pressure groups?