The aim of this service is simple, to enable publicly-funded business support organisations such as Business Link, the Learning and Skills Council, and UK Trade and Investment find the right supplier to meet the needs of their customers.

What is a “Supplier”? A business or organisation that provides a service(s) that can support the growth and development of other businesses. The details of the supplier are kept on the “Service Provider Register”. A supplier can be referred, signposted or brokered to a customer after the publicly-funded business support organisation has received an enquiry or undertaken a diagnostic with the customer.

What is “referral and signposting”? This is providing the customer with a number of suppliers that have the potential to meet their needs from the information held on the Service Provider Register.

What is “Brokerage”? This is a service that is being paid for wholly or in part through public funding, e.g. a grant. To be included in the list of suppliers that are put forward for brokerage activity the supplier must have been through the quality assurance process built in to the registration procedure.

Finding clients that can really benefit from the services your business provides is more that just conducting advertising and promotional work. And for your potential clients choosing the right supplier involves much more than scanning a series of supplier lists and prices.

To join the Register you will be asked to give details of the services you provide to business, where you are located, and how you may be contacted. This is the basic level of registration on the Service Provider Register and means that your details will be available to Business Advisors and Brokers looking for general support services for their clients.

To be eligible for publicly-funded business support projects, you will need to be “Quality Assured”. As well as the basic information about you mentioned above, you will need to provide details of Professional Indemnity Insurance (which is a mandatory requirement), list your professional qualifications (if appropriate) and supply the names and contact details of five clients for whom you have worked in the last twenty-four months. These references will be taken up and providing all is in order you will be awarded a “star” rating as a Quality Assured Supplier. If there is a question over any aspect of your registration details you will be contacted for clarification.

Details of your PII, qualifications and references will be maintained on the Brokerage System solely for audit purposes and to support your star rating. These data are not used for any other purposes and are not viewable by any third party including Business Advisors and Brokers, who may only see your “star” rating.

We regret that if a Service Provider is unwilling to provide details of PII and suitable references then they cannot progress to the Quality Assured level on the Register.

The Service Provider Register is not a replacement for your own marketing efforts but, by placing your company and its services on the Service Provider Register you will be raising awareness of your business amongst the region’s publicly-funded business support organisations such as Business Link, Learning and Skills Council, and UK Trade and Investment.

To register your interest, please complete the online registration form. You will then receive additional information on how to become a full, quality assured service provider and the potential benefits for your organisation.

If you have any questions regarding the use or policies in respect to the East Midlands Brokerage Platform, please contact East Midlands Brokerage Services on 01483 408198.

If you experience any technical difficulties when using this system, please contact the technical service desk during office hours on 01483 408198 or click here to report the problem via e-mail.

This system has been primarily designed to work with Internet Explorer 5 or above (some features require Internet Explorer).

The browser "Back" button has also been disabled within the emda Brokerage Platform, this is to keep all functions performed within the application internal. There is however a " Go Back" on each page that will perform the same function.

This system also uses Pop-ups, all pop-up blockers must allow pop-ups from this site for the system to function correctly. Use the following steps to enable pop-ups in Internet Explorer for this site:

NOTE: This option is only available on pages where pop-ups are used and need only be done once for the entire site.

1. From the Tools menu, point to Pop-up Blocker, and then click Always Allow Pop-ups from This Site.
2. In the Allow pop-ups from this site? dialog box, click Yes.