Honestly Bob if you have enough work just take somebody on, train them up and increase their wage
as they get up to speed.
The amount of crap you will have to put up with to get that £1500 will do your head in.
When starting up I went for a government grant through a similar programme, it was supposed to give me
£90 a week on top of my earnings for the first year.
Had to do a weeks business training and produce a business plan that met their approval.
Didn't have a lot of customers at the time so give it a go and to be honest the business training was useful.
But I was then given a mountain of paperwork which I had to fill out weekly and report to an adviser every two
weeks and give a detailed summery of how my business was going.
Not joking they where looking for how long it took me to do each job including start and stop times plus what I charged.
Would have spent most of the day filling out time sheets.
Failure to do this would end up in the grant being stopped.
For £90 a week I told them to get lost.
I honestly think that most of these schemes are started to make the government look as if they are doing something
but they really don't want to many taking them on so they make them as off-putting as possible.