David Cameron has backed Start Up Britain, the private sector led initiative aimed at helping people to set up businesses.

The Prime Minister said that ”now is the time” would-be entrepreneurs should launch their businesses.

Start Up Britain is offering support worth about £1,500 in areas like internet advertising and will provide practical help for new businesses.

Start Up Britain is also supported by companies such as Google, 02 and Microsoft.

Senior economic expert at the University of Sheffield, Dr Jonathan Perraton said these schemes should help reconnect businesses in the North.

He said : ” It is to try to make it a lot easier and simpler to start up firms, to help with the bureaucratic processes and to encourage broadband access across the country.

“We don’t want an economy  simply reliant on financial services and periodic house price booms. We want to move into new areas that are more sustainable and anything that encourages the growth of firms in those areas the government would welcome.”

Entrepreneurial

David Cameron echoed one of his speeches from 2010 by stating that: ”I believe we can make this decade one of the most entrepreneurial decades in our history.”

Former Sheffield MP Helen Jackson said public money would be needed to help the scheme work. She said: ”Where they had a big thing like the London Docklands or a Sheffield Development Corporation, they put substantial amount of Government funding behind them.

“It’s important to encourage new enterprise and new businesses in one form or another. But it does need a bit of pubic money going in to it. Hammering the public sector is not the right way to go about it.”