Friday 18 September 2015

£8 million is now available for rural businesses looking to expand and promote tourism

Farming Minister George Eustice says another £8 million is now available from the Growth Programme for rural businesses looking to expand and promote tourism.  

Hopefully this new funding will help unlock the potential in farming businesses across the country, but understanding how to access the money does not seem straightforward.

The Growth Programme provides grants to aid projects in England which create jobs and help the rural economy grow. They are funded by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD).  The Rural Payments Agency manages the grants, working with Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs).

However, the LEPs are not well equipped to manage the process of handling these funds.  In the past similar grant schemes have been various handled centrally by DEFRA and then by the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) and following their demise in 2010, by the newly created LEPs.  

LEPs are a rather strange invention of the last government which simply scrapped the old RDAs for ideological reasons and then left it to local authorities and businesses to set up their own LEPs.  This has proved a difficult task and now these bodies are being tasked with coordinating the delivery of funds such as the EAFRD which will prove a big challenge. 

Having looked at the website for the Heart of the South West, which is the LEP covering Somerset and Devon, there is no obvious reference to this latest tranche of funding although in the August newsletter, rural businesses are signposted to the LEADER scheme that is described as “one element of the Rural Development Programme for England, funded by the EU and Defra. 

“There is in the region of £12 million of funding available for projects that meet the eligibility criteria throughout most of rural Devon and Somerset, and the funding is available until December 2020.

“Grants will be available to support the local rural economy, and will be particularly aimed at increasing farm productivity, developing micro and small enterprises and farm diversification, rural tourism, rural services, cultural and heritage activity and increasing forestry productivity.”

The funding is being administered by eight Local Action Groups (LAGs), each covering a specific area and focused on the things that matter most to their local economies. For Somerset you are directed to contact www.somersetleader.org.uk which covers the LAGs for Western Somerset; the Heart of Wessex; parts of Making It Local; and the Levels and Moors. 

So, if you are a Somerset farming business interested in getting hold of some of this funding I suggest that in the first instance you contact the Somerset LEADER scheme in the hope they will have some idea about how you can access them.


James Stephen MRICS FAAV
Partner
Rural Practice Chartered Surveyor, Wells

T: 01749 683381
E: james.stephen@carterjonas.co.uk

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