The funding comes from The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Create Growth Programme and is designed to expand the programme to cover six new geographical areas in England, which must be outside London.
DCMS is inviting Expressions of Interest from what it’s calling ‘local area partnerships’ which can be formed from a combined authority, local authority or local enterprise partnership (LEP), but these EOIs must be submitted by 23:59 on Wednesday 9 August 2023.
The Creative Growth Programme is designed to support creative businesses and economic growth outside London by addressing market and information failures related to investment in the creative industries. It’s an expansion of the Creative Scale Up pilot (2019-2021), which provided the Greater Manchester, West Midlands and West of England Combined Authorities with a package of business and investor support to support creative businesses to scale and access finance.
Each successful local area partnership will get £520,000 to deliver business support activities to support high-growth potential creative businesses. As well as that, creative businesses in participating local area partnerships will also have the opportunity to access part of a finance growth support fund totalling £9 million in FY2024/25, as well as an investor capacity building programme delivered in participating regions.
If you would like further information on the scheme, please contact Loren King at DCMS loren.king@dcms.gov.uk.