Manufacturing Growth Fund

Supporting SME manufacturing in the Liverpool City Region

The Manufacturing Growth Fund supports SME manufacturers across the North West (Cheshire & Warrington, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Liverpool City Region), and provides impartial manufacturing expertise to assess business opportunities and barriers to growth, making business improvement recommendations, and suggesting a suitable consultancy project which will increase profitability and productivity via grant support.

What support is available?

A grant fund for SME manufacturers which provides impartial manufacturing expertise to assess business opportunities and barriers to growth, makes business improvement recommendations which will increase profitability and productivity, and suggests suitable consultancy projects for grant support.

Projects will be approximately £15k in scale and attract a 36% grant. The project is designed to help you streamline your manufacturing processes, drive up production capacity and innovation, improve your business systems and access new markets.

What are the benefits?

The project will support you by providing a specialist Manufacturing Advisor to carry out an on-site review of your key barriers and opportunities for growth, setting out recommendations and identifying particular actions that will unlock growth and help achieve improvements in productivity and competitiveness.

A grant is then available towards the cost of bringing further specialist advice into the business; typically projects are £15k in value and will attract a £5,400 grant.

The scope of projects eligible for grant support covers:

• Sales & marketing
• Production / operational efficiency
• Business systems
• IT / digitalisation
• Innovation

Projects must drive job creation, introduce new processes internally or new products to market, and drive up productivity.

Where actions are suitable for a grant, the project will support you to create a detailed specification of work and to identify potential providers.

How much will it cost?

Businesses benefiting from the 36% grant will need to fund 64% of the consultancy project themselves.