Enterprise UK Blog

Jane Burston and Dan Lewer, founders of Carbon Retirement, joined other small business owners (including a bunch of Enterprise UK Ambassadors!) last week at a reception at 10 Downing Street. Jane took the opportunity to put some tough questions to Sir Alan! Here’s how Jane got on:

As an Enterprise UK Ambassador and Director of carbon offsetting company Carbon Retirement, I was lucky enough to be invited to a small business reception last week at Number 10. The event was a celebration of Britain’s small business success – in pioneering solutions to today’s challenges and contributing to helping the UK out of recession.

The evening was hosted by Business Secretary Lord Mandelson and attended by Sir Alan Sugar along with 100 other successful businessmen and women. At the event Lord Mandelson took the opportunity to promote the government’s Graduate Internship Programme, which will support graduates to get internships with small businesses, fund the placements and provide information and support regarding the scheme to small businesses.

This is great news for us – Carbon Retirement already makes use of interns to support the business and give graduates an opportunity to learn about business sustainability and the crucial EU emission trading scheme. We plan to make use of this new initiative, which is being run in partnership with the Federation of Small Businesses.

At the reception I cornered Sir Alan for a quick chat about what the government is doing to support small businesses to grow sustainably and take the lead in helping to mitigate climate change. Encouragingly small businesses are already doing it for themselves, in fact a number of business owners at the event were focussed on directly mitigating climate change. One of these was Liftshare founder Ali Clabburn, another Enterprise UK Ambassador. Ali has set up a hugely successful car-sharing scheme which takes cars off the road, improves air quality and helps to mitigate climate change.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Global Entrepreneurship Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.