Billions of pounds of initiatives announced with great fanfare by the Government to help Britain to survive the recession have yet to be paid out to the companies and families that they were meant to help, it emerged yesterday.

Business groups and opposition parties have attacked the Government for the speed with which it is implementing bailout schemes as the economy spirals into the worst decline since the Second World War. About 140,000 people a month are losing their jobs, the Council for Mortgage Lenders is expecting 75,000 homes to be repossessed this year, and the economy is set to suffer the steepest decline since the 1940s.

A number of emergency programmes, funded with taxpayer money, have either stalled since they were announced or have disbursed only a trickle of cash.

The Automotive Assistance Programme, announced in January to offer £1.3 billion in loans and loan guarantees, has not yet started. A spokesman for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, which has masterminded the programme, designed to encourage banks to extend credit to companies manufacturing certain types of green vehicles, insisted that the scheme was “work in progress”.

Another programme — the Working Capital Scheme — was designed so that the Government would guarantee £10 billion of bank debt, already lent to small and medium-sized businesses. It was hoped that the guarantees would free more capital for the banks to extend to business. Of the £10 billion earmarked in January, £1 billion has been signed off to underwrite part of a package of loans from Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest.

The department said that other banks were in advanced discussions and that they had never intended to use all the funds in one go.

The Mortgage Rescue Scheme, which began in January and was designed to help about 6,000 of the most vulnerable homeowners to keep their properties, has only 300 households in the system so far.

The findings are likely to spark fresh speculation that the Prime Minister’s team is focused on finding initiatives to announce, rather than deliver. Before the G20 summit, it emerged that Mr Brown’s inner circle had abandoned trying to find “deliverables” — practical results that could be billed as big achievements for Mr Brown’s leadership of the G20 — and instead were looking for “announceables” — less significant gestures that could be presented as results.

The Federation of Small Businesses said that companies were confused at the number of piecemeal schemes that had been announced, who was eligible and how to apply.

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