Funding and Access to Finance: Our principles

The group has determined 3 proactive objectives.

• To  develop a truly access to finance portal for all firms in the LEP area,, covering all the providers of funding either in grant or financing, from small to large scale. This will probably need some investment from the LEP – it needs to be both dynamic and well maintained.
• Secondly to develop a roadmap of funding opportunities for the LEP not just the traditional of UK government gifts such as Growing Places, but genuine opportunities to either bid or develop jointly with others from both the private and public sectors providing models of finance that can be focused either on businesses or the LEP area.
• Thirdly we need to put in place an effective investment management approach to support the development of key sites and the related infrastructure. One gap the UK has compared to others is that if a major site needs developing or has a potential client to take it forward it is not actually that easy for them to do so. One of the obvious outcomes of the review in Coventry & Warwickshire of sites for an enterprise zone is the rich list of opportunities that exist in the LEP area. If we are going to make a difference then we need to get these sites moving and this will require, both infrastructure and development.