Application Update
Thank you to everyone who submitted an application for this funding opportunity. The application window is now officially closed, and we are currently undertaking a thorough appraisal of all received submissions.
Our team is carefully reviewing each application to ensure a fair and transparent assessment process. We appreciate your patience as we work through this stage. All applicants will be contacted directly with the outcome of their application in the coming weeks.
Once the appraisal and awarding process is complete, this page will be updated to include a list of the successful applicants and details of the grants awarded.
We are grateful for the interest and effort shown by all applicants and look forward to announcing the outcomes shortly.
About the Business Sustainability Programme
The York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority is using a proportion of its UKSPF allocation to deliver a Business Sustainability Programme.
The Combined Authority is delighted to be able to offer this programme to businesses and farms across York and North Yorkshire. At its core, the programme is about supporting businesses, delivering climate action and contributing to the economic growth of our region. The programme, co-designed by York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority, North Yorkshire Council and City of York Council, builds on the success of North Yorkshire Council’s award-winning SPF Business Sustainability programme.
In 2023-2025, North Yorkshire Council, City of York Council and Grow Yorkshire provided free energy audits and renewable feasibility studies to businesses and farms across the region. This programme aims to provide an opportunity for those businesses and farms to access funding, in order to implement recommendations that arose from those audits and assessments. For farms, this includes recommendations relating to energy system optimisation and renewables, as well as the potential to develop demonstration farms that can showcase the agricultural sector’s role in and capacity for energy improvements, reducing emissions and energy costs.
Later in the year, we will be offering businesses an opportunity to access free of charge audits, to help them understand more about their carbon footprint, energy use, resource efficiency, and cost saving opportunities.
If you have any questions please contact our Growth Hub Team, farming questions will be answered by our Rural Business Officer, and all other enquiries will be answered by our Sustainable Business Officer.
Programme Objectives
The specific outputs and outcomes of this programme are to:
- Increase the number of enterprises adopting new to the firm technologies or processes
- Reduce carbon dioxide equivalent as a result of support
The objective of all projects must be to implement recommendations from their energy audit. Such objectives might be related to:
- Supporting decarbonisation across the region in alignment with the objectives of York and North Yorkshire’s Routemap to Carbon Negative
- Supporting business resilience through increased energy security and climate change adaptation
- Facilitating measures that are not only good for the planet, but for business’ bottom lines
- Developing York and North Yorkshire as a hub for ‘green business’ and showcase the commercial benefits of decarbonising your business
- Enabling farm business resilience through reduced emissions, increased energy efficiency and lower costs.
- Developing demonstration businesses that can support knowledge-sharing and encourage wider future uptake of energy efficiency and renewable measures.
Projects are not expected to deliver against all the above objectives within a single application or project. For each objective selected, applicants should have an understanding of the current baseline of activity.
As part of the application, you will be asked to specify the objectives you expect your project to achieve, as well as the quantities. Property-based projects should take a ‘fabric first’ approach, focussing on improving energy efficiency prior to new heating or energy installations. For successful applications, this will inform the content of a grant funding agreement.
