The British Business Bank recorded a loss of £122m in the 2023/24 financial year, new figures have shown.

The Government-owned bank, which supplies finance to smaller businesses around the UK, still managed to commit a record £2.3bn over the course of the year.

According to the CEO at the British Business Bank, Louis Taylor, the impact of the activities the group carried out in 2023 is expected to create 39,400 additional jobs and £8.4bn of gross value added (GVA) over the life of the finance.

Taylor suggested that, despite an “unrealised loss”, the bank had managed to perform “above expectations against a backdrop of challenging market conditions”.

“As suggested last year, the continuing challenging market for investments has resulted in a loss of £122m for 2023/24,” Taylor said. “However, this is largely an unrealised loss, reflecting short-term falls in the book valuation of long-term investments, rather than actual cash losses.

“Significantly, valuations remain 1.35 times our original cost, and we would expect them to rise further over their five-to-10-year investment period as we enter a period of recovery and economic growth.”

For the first time, the British Business Bank has also published an impact report to sit alongside its annual report and accounts.

This showed that in the 2023 calendar year, the bank deployed a total of £6bn of finance into smaller businesses – £3.5bn of public funding with an additional £2.5bn of private capital leveraged alongside. This enabled the bank to fund 23,100 smaller businesses, 84% of which were outside of London.

“This is an especially exciting time in the bank’s development, with more being asked of us at a time when driving longer-term investment to support the growth economy is so critical,” chair at the British Business Bank, Stephen Welton, added.

“After a strong year for the bank in challenging markets, I look forward to working with the board and the executive leadership team, and other key stakeholders, as we look to increase the scale, effectiveness and impact of the bank, crowding in private investment and institutional capital for innovative, high growth firms to boost economic growth across the UK.”

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