CAMBRIDGE AND PETERBOROUGH
BUSINESS GROWTH
Company
The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority Local Industrial Strategy will connect the growth, investment and skills support resources of Cambridge, and elsewhere, to firms across the economy, creating a marketplace for growth.
WELCOME FROM THE CHAIR
The Business Growth Service (Growth Works) is a flagship programme for the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority Business Board. It is a £26M support package aimed at small and medium sized businesses in the region that have a high growth opportunity. It includes business coaching supporting companies to achieve high growth, along with growth grants and equity investments to fund growth. It provides and inward investment service to attract firms to the region and a skills service to ensure our people find new and better jobs and companies have all the skills they need for growth.
I am really excited to be working with both the Business Board and the Growth Works team. Through our first year we have already seen a positive impact on the business community and with our team of highly engaged, experienced and positive people we are looking forward to building on this in the years ahead.
Nigel Parkinson
Independent Chair
OUR MISSION
The Business Growth Service (Growth Works) is a flagship programme for the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority Business Board. It is a £26M support package aimed at small and medium sized businesses in the region that have a high growth opportunity.
It includes business coaching supporting companies to achieve high growth, along with growth grants and equity investments to fund growth. It provides and inward investment service to attract firms to the region and a skills service to ensure our people find new and better jobs and companies have all the skills they need for growth.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Our economy is already home to a high concentration of high-growth firms and a highly skilled and entrepreneurial workforce. We are one of a small number of regional economies that provide a net contribution to the Treasury and offer the potential to play an important role in leading national economic recovery from the impacts of COVID 19. Our strength comes from:
GREATER CAMBRIDGE
Greater Cambridge which is the UK’s fastest growing economy and the most likely part of the county to recover quickest to help regain the £3.7bn GVA lost. It gives us Global Leadership in life sciences and education and has the largest share (16%) of the UK’s knowledge intensive business services. It generates more patent applications per head of population than any city in the UK and more than all of the EU put together.
GREATER PETERBOROUGH
Greater Peterborough which has reinvented itself as a Smart City, with UK leading levels of digital connectivity and its major cluster in environmental technologies. It is also home to a high-tech manufacturing base that has grown whilst the sector has shrunk nationally, now representing 18% of its businesses, compared to 9% nationally.
THE FENS
The Fens which are considered one of the country’s greatest natural assets and contain over 50% of the UK’s grade one, highest quality, land for food growing.
There is still much-untapped potential and, as markets recover to a new norm and permanent shifts in customer behaviors and workforce practices become apparent, a fantastic opportunity will open up for the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority & Business Board to deliver even greater impact by supporting our brightest firms to adapt to grow faster, longer and more sustainably.
How we might achieve this, has been set out in our Local Economic Recovery Strategy, co-developed by the Business Board and the Economic Recovery Sub-group of the COVID 19 Local Recovery Forum.
A key element of this Strategy is the Business Rebound & Growth Service.
OUR VISION
Accelerate the rebound and regrowth of our economy, to lead the nation out of recession, rebooting it to achieve our ambition of doubling GVA over 25 years, in a way that is more sustainable, greener, digitally enabled, and inclusive.
GROWTH COACHING SERVICE
Engaging with and supporting our highest potential firms; increasing the speed of their growth, building their capacity for growth and sustaining their period of growth.
INWARD INVESTMENT SERVICE
Better connecting Cambridgeshire and Peterborough into global markets, engaging with and persuading firms to start-up or relocate into our economy or invest in our strategic projects.
SKILLS AND APPRENTICES
Linking learners and those retraining for new jobs, to employers and skills providers, improving the supply of skills within our growth sectors.
CAPITAL GRANTS AND EQUITY INVESTMENT
Helping SMEs, grow through organic expansion, offering an integrated range of grants, loans and equity products unavailable commercially.
OUR PRIORITIES
To ensure growth is inclusive means delivering the benefits of economic growth to everyone across our economy. Currently, areas have high levels of disparity, with pockets of both urban and rural deprivation.
The Local Industrial Strategy and its delivery is an opportunity to address the inequalities that are undermining economic growth. We will ensure that new growth in the future promotes an inclusive and diverse economy, with good jobs and greater earning power for all. We will ensure that all communities are able to benefit from the opportunities of economic growth and greater collaboration. An inclusive growth strategy that improves absolute standards of living is vital for the long-term economic sustainability of our economy; as such it represents a risk mitigation strategy as well as an opportunity.
Enabling the doubling of our economy in a way that increases inclusivity of place-based growth, improves productivity and facilitates better global market access for our businesses cannot be done through more of the same quality and quantity of business support. The volume of engagement with firms must be increased along with the intensity of support and the ambition of outcome impacts. To support this, we need an approach to targeting firms and offering growth support to them, that is tailored to the very different needs of our three sub-economies and each individual customer.
A vehicle that is able to develop and deploy more efficiently and more effectively new and innovative forms of growth support to encourage individual business leaders, sectors, and places to join to build an economy-wide business support eco-system to enable one another.
Growth Co will manage the Growth Service Delivery Fund and with it, procure the delivery of the Growth service itself from specialist supplier(s) in the private sector.
- To deliver value for money
- To deliver against the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority’s overall Vision and Values
- To contribute to Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority’s Corporate objectives
- To deliver sustainable and inclusive business growth
Growth Co participates as a Delivery Partner in two projects part funded by European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF), both of which are delivered through our Business Growth Service branded Growth Works ;
European Social Fund (ESF) funded “Skills Talent Apprenticeship and Recruitment (STAR) Hub which is a digital, online platform combined with physical brokerage and facilitation services that will create better connections between employers, training providers and learners, creating a dynamic Skills Marketplace across the Greater Cambridgeshire Greater Peterborough.
European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) funded “GROWTH COACHING/ROAR SERVICE. This project provides revenue Growth Coaching Grants to SMEs. It is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund
More details can be found on the project website via https://www.growthworks.uk/.