Companies within the SME sector – defined as having less than 249 employees – reported that the availability of credit, while continuing to deteriorate, is doing so at a slower pace.
In addition, the rise in the cost of finance appears to be slowing as 27% of respondents reported an increase of more than 1%, compared to 33% in March.
About 37% reported no change, up from 26%, while 10% reported a fall in interest rates for new lines of finance.
For existing lines of credit, 7% reported an increase of more than 1%, compared with 15% in March. In addition, 14% reported that the cost of existing credit lines had fallen over the quarter.
However, Mark Halstead, red flag operations director at Begbies Traynor, said that the easing of credit was not apparent in the print industry.
"People are willing to lend, but their strategies have changed dramatically," he said. "For example, lenders are only lending at 50% of the value of an asset at interest rates of up to 25%."
Paul Holohan, chief executive of Richmond Capital Partners, agreed. He said: "My feelings on the ground are that things are getting progressively worse in our industry.
"There are recent examples in the trade press where bank behaviour has been nothing less than shameful, pulling bank credit out, or reducing it, just when firms need it most – even when the banks are secured."
He said that he had never known a time when it had been this difficult to raise new credit in the industry.
"Even asset-based lending is now extremely difficult to obtain and, where it is, forthcoming rates are being jacked up and so are overdraft rates. It is only loans linked to LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) and the Bank Base Rate which are coming down.
"Those loans which would be sought by the print industry are not coming down. The banks are determined to rebuild their balance sheets and someone has got to pay."
Halstead added that one of the key drivers of the high interest rates was a lack of competition in the print lending sector.
"The banks aren't really lending so there is little competition in the market. We need to see more lenders to drive interest rates down."
The CBI's survey comes as the Bank of England held interest rates at a historic low of 0.5%.
'Notable' rise in availability of credit for SMEs, CBI claims
There has been a "notable" increase in the availability of finance for factoring and invoice discounting and for overdrafts over the past three months, a CBI survey has found.
