Micro-Enterprise Development
To encourage entrepreneurial activity in rural North East England both within and outside traditional land based industries with the objectives of:
- Increasing business start-ups
- Strengthening existing businesses
- Improving the sustainability of rural businesses
- Creating markets for rural business products and services
- Encouraging young people in business activity
Hadrian's Wall Farmers Market
Example outcomes:
- Increasing rural employment opportunities through entrepreneurial activity
- Promoting business start-up as an employment option for rural communities, especially for women and young people
- Supporting existing micro-businesses to promote growth and access to new markets through increased innovation and use of technologies
- Supporting an increase in business start-ups that develop and add value to agricultural and forestry products
- Supporting business people in developing better skills, including traditional land based skills, to strengthen their business and product offer
- Working with rural estates to help them increase and diversify growth, ensuring sympathetic historic and environmental development
- Facilitating better access to and take up of appropriate business support services
- Facilitating increased networking and collaboration of rural micro-enterprise
- Helping more micro enterprises profit from the sustained use of the region’s environmental assets
Most of the Northumberland Uplands area and its business needs do not normally benefit from the large public sector economic development programmes including the city region initiative, nor do they benefit from the expansion in key public sector services such as the expansion of the NHS. The move to a more central form of public administration could provide another threat. These public sectors are much larger scale and tend to work with large urban based businesses and communities where economies of scale provide lower cost service provision.
Not only does the Northumberland Uplands area suffer from its remoteness from the city regions but it is dominated by rural based private-sector micro-businesses which require micro-economic solutions. The New LEADER approach presents a real opportunity to address issues specific to rural micro-businesses.
Empirical research shows that compared to the North East region and Northumberland county, business registration rates and stock rates are high in all three of the main local authority districts which the Northumberland Uplands overlaps. Tynedale in particular has a high per capita density of businesses and the business stock is growing. Nationally, businesses situated in rural areas have a greater chance of survival. In pure economic terms this provides a sound basis on which to build new micro-business solutions.
More qualitative research shows non-economic factors also provide a good basis for growing the business stock in the Northumberland Uplands. A recent tourism business motivational survey has shown that 49% of the tourism businesses in the area felt that a personal or lifestyle decision was the main reason for locating their business and over 70% described themselves as long-term residents (Source: Business Motivation Survey, QA Research 2008). Similar results have been obtained from motivational surveys of farm businesses, that is the local business community and new businesses are attracted to the area as a result of lifestyle decisions related to factors outside traditional economic modelling e.g. the natural and cultural capital.
The social, economic and environmental health of the Northumberland Uplands is all deeply interlinked. Many businesses are either directly land-based (agriculture, farming, and forestry) or use the high quality landscape and cultural assets as key drivers for their products (tourism, recreation, heritage). The issues of economic under-performance are not just within business sectors they are focussed on age groups. The lack of opportunities for young adults (aged 20 to 34 years) and the ageing traditional workforces indicate the need for local socio-economic solutions, which fit to the New LEADER approach.
