Small businesses in the UK are missing out on loans available from the European Investment Bank (EIB) due to a tangle of bureaucracy.
That's according to Simon Brooks, Vice president of the EIB, a non profit bank owned by the European states.
He claims that there has been a slower uptake of the loans in the UK than had been expected.
A few days ago the UK Treasury said that more than £700 million of a potential £4 billion of EIB loan funding had been approved for nearly 3,000 small UK businesses.
Stuart Mackinnon from the FSB said the banks offering the loans needed to work more closely with firms and that bureaucracy was a turn off.