You can bet your bottom dollar that the smallest companies with the highest growth potential aren't seeing any of this money.

Stewart Baird, founder of investor Stone Ventures, on the Bank of England’s update that thirteen banks and building societies have now signed up to the Funding for Lending scheme, giving them access to up to £60bn of Bank funding. The government-backed scheme is designed to increase the levels of funding available to existing institutions, and encourage new ones to enter the market. Baird said the banks remained “intensely, almost pathologically, risk-averse.”