Lambeth’s Economic Resilience Fund has paid out £9,508,190 to over 850 businesses in need since January, safeguarding nearly 8,000 jobs across the borough in the process. To date, the Fund has focussed on providing direct grants to support businesses through the acute challenges posed by restrictions and closures. Now the economy has reopened, the Council are seeking to fund a range of activities that will help businesses and different sectors to help drive economic recovery.
Lambeth are inviting expressions of interest from organisations who wish to bring forward projects that deliver large scale business support by enabling a diverse, locally rooted business and cultural base which survives and adapts to the impacts of Covid-19 and instils confidence in Lambeth as a place to invest and do business.
The third phase of the Economic Resilience Fund will provide £2.45 million of funding to projects aligned with the following themes:
Town centres and high streets
Lambeth are interested in projects that drive recovery and new economic activity by reanimating places and spaces, whilst creating new spaces and clusters of activity as part of reimagined high streets and town centres. This could involve a range of interventions supporting retail and hospitality and visitor economy businesses that are vital to Lambeth, including:
- Pop-up uses and cultural activation, drawing the borough’s uniquely varied arts, community and cultural landscape.
- Destination marketing to reignite the visitor economy, focussed on the newly accelerated potential of domestic tourism, and the attraction of international visitors longer term – complementing wider London marketing campaigns.
- High street and town centre focussed business advice and guidance, supporting new skills acquisition and adaptation to new ways of trading and developing robust business models in response to Covid-19.
Diverse business communities
The pandemic has disproportionately affected people from disadvantaged backgrounds – from both a public health and economic perspective. Lambeth will seek to support projects that provide tailored business support targeted at priority groups within our business communities to help their businesses to survive and grow, such as:
- Business support advice and guidance for Black, Asian, or multiethnic owned businesses, women owned business and business owned by people with disabilities.
- Support for new and existing workspaces that have a strong track record and commitment to supporting diverse business communities.
Priority growth sectors
Key to our ambition for Lambeth’s recovery is the clustering and support for high growth potential and high value sectors, including the creative and digital industries, life sciences and low carbon industries. These industries have the potential to provide better paid employment opportunities for local residents and drive overall employment growth helping underpin town centre and high street businesses that rely to a degree on office worker spend. Projects may:
- Support enterprise activity that will help Lambeth respond to the climate emergency and work towards Lambeth’s target to be carbon neutral by 2030.
- Build on existing business support initiatives aligned with ‘Creative ways to grow’ – Lambeth’s creative and digital industries strategy for growth.
- Help realise the borough’s potential to grow our health and life sciences economy.
Conditions of funding
Project proposals must acknowledge the following conditions of funding:
- Revenue only–grant funding should not be used to acquire, upgrade or maintain physical assets. Projects that focus on refurbishing or acquiring commercial spaces are outside the scope of this funding.
- Beneficiaries of business support projects must be Lambeth-based businesses and active in the borough. This funding cannot be used to support businesses that are not active in the borough.
- Projects must have commenced delivery by no later than31st March 2022.
Process
Completed forms should be returned to Enterprise@lambeth.gov.uk by 5pm Friday 1st October 2021. Forms received after this date will not be considered.
Following submission, your expression of interest will be reviewed and you will be notified of the outcome by Monday 25th October 2021. If your expression of interest is successful, further checks on eligibility will be required in line with government guidance. Successful projects should expect their grant award in November-December 2021.
Partners are welcome to submit multiple projects for consideration within one expression of interest form. However, we anticipate that this funding will be heavily oversubscribedas with previous phases of the Economic Resilience Fund. Assessment of projects and funding awards will consider the scale of outputs, alignment with the themes outlined above, track record of delivery and ingenuity of proposals.
Successful projects will be forward-funded, with grant agreements in place to guide and report on activity for a defined period of time (up to three years), with relevant claw-back mechanisms in place.
Please contact Enterprise@lambeth.gov.uk with any queries relating to this process.
| Background information | ||
| Registered name of lead organisation | ||
| Registered address of lead organisation | ||
| Contact email address of lead organisation | ||
| Is this a partnership proposal? If so, please list the other organisations/groups in your partnership | ||
| Business support project details | ||
| Please detail the project idea(s) that you are seeking funding for, including:
· How the proposal is aligned with one or more of the priority themes outlined in the introduction section · Evidence of need for this support · How the proposal will provide direct support to local businesses · The intended outcomes from the support provided · How you will market the programme to engage local businesses and ensure take up |
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| How will your organisation’s previous experience enable you to deliver this programme successfully?Please describe your track record of delivering similar projects/services to the one you are applying for funding towards. | ||
| How many businesses will your proposal support directly? | ||
| How many businesses will your proposal support indirectly? | ||
| How many jobs will your proposal safeguard? | ||
| How many new jobs will your proposal support? | ||
| Please describe any other economic recovery focussed outputs your proposal will support (for example, footfall generation, increased income etc.) | ||
| Project delivery | ||
| What are the project costs? Please provide a detailed cost breakdown | ||
| What are the expected delivery timescales? Please outline key milestones. All projects must commence delivery before 31st March 2022. | ||
| Does the project have any match funding? If so, please include the amount and source(s) of match. | ||
| Are there any project dependencies, external requirements, or particular challenges that could hamper the project progressing? | ||
| Please describe who will lead and be involved in the project leadership and management. | ||
| Please describe how you will work in partnership with any other organisations involved in project delivery. | ||
| How will you evaluate the success of the project and document learning? | ||
| Please share any other relevant information not covered in previous sections. | ||
Declaration
Local authorities are required to make further pre-payment checks for all Additional Restrictions Grant payments regardless of whether any previous Covid-19 business grants have been paid. The government will not accept deliberate manipulation and fraud.
Any business caught falsifying their records to gain additional grant money will face prosecution and any funding issued will be recovered, as may any grants paid in error.In completing this application, you declare that:
- you are (or acting on behalf of) the lead organisation submitting this Expression of Interest.
- the lead organisation is not in receipt of state funded support in excess of the business grant subsidy allowances under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU.
- the lead organisation is not subject to insolvency, striking off or any administration proceedings or is an “undertaking in difficulty”.
Any information you provide through this service will be processed in line with Lambeth Council’s Privacy Policy.
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