Bradford business expert Adeeba Malik MBE is to head a national taskforce which aims to aid ethnic minority businesses.

The deputy chief executive of Bradford-based charity QED-UK will lead the new group which has been set up to identify the "barriers to business" of companies from different ethnic groups.

She will be joined on the taskforce by Yorkshire Forward chief executive Tom Riordan, who will serve as her deputy.

Mrs Malik is already a member of the Department of Trade and Industry Minority Business Forum and is a trustee of the Waterways Trust.

She said: "I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this agenda, and I am delighted that Yorkshire Forward has agreed to lead in supporting the task force.

"Ethnic minority businesses make a significant contribution to the GDP so it is important that they are supported and encouraged to flourish."

One of her first tasks will be to investigate the reasons behind a recent DTI survey which stated ethnic minority businesses face additional barriers in access to finance.

The survey stated that on average businesses owned by ethnic minorities tend to pay higher bank loan charges than white-owned businesses and that black owned businesses are much more likely than Indian, Pakistani and white-owned businesses, to be rejected outright for loans.

There are an estimated 300,000 ethnic minority small businesses in the UK, contributing up to £20 billion to the UK economy.

The taskforce was unveiled yesterday by the Minister for Industry and Regions, Margaret Hodge.

She said: "Over the next two years the new taskforce will propose ways to encourage more ethnic minority participation in enterprise. It will also reach out to potential entrepreneurs in under-represented groups, including ethnic minority women, looking to help remove the barriers to doing business which face them."

Other objectives for the task force are:
- To assess the impact of the regional economic strategies in increasing ethnic minority enterprise rates

- To increase awareness amongst ethnic minority communities of the type of funding and finance available to assist them in starting and running their own businesses

- To identify any barriers to the growth of existing ethnic minority owned businesses to ensure that business support is taken up by ethnic minority entrepreneurs across England.

Mr Riordan said: "If the English regions are to achieve their economic potential, then we need to create the conditions for minority ethnic businesses to grow and prosper. I intend to make sure that the taskforce has a real impact on the delivery of business support across England."