About these schemes
Beneath the famous national programmes sits a layer of hundreds of local funds: council business support grants, combined-authority growth funds, town and high-street funds, rural and coastal programmes, and growth-hub vouchers. They're smaller — but they're also dramatically less competitive, faster to decide, and often written so broadly that ordinary trading businesses qualify.
What they fund
- Job creation and apprenticeships
- Premises fit-outs, high-street units and equipment
- Digital adoption, energy efficiency and green upgrades
- Community services and social-impact projects
Eligibility highlights
- Registered or trading in the scheme's specific geography — this is the key criterion
- Deliver something the local plan wants: jobs, footfall, skills, decarbonisation
- Often requires match funding (commonly 50%) and simple monitoring afterwards
Why nobody finds them: these schemes live on hundreds of separate council and growth-hub websites, open and close quickly, and rarely get press. That's a discovery problem — precisely what Fortune's scanning is built for.
How Fortune helps
- Find: we track local schemes continuously and surface the ones live in your postcode.
- Match: your impact story is mapped to what each local plan actually prioritises.
- Win: local applications are short — with your profile in place, Fortune drafts them in minutes, so you can apply to several.
General starting points: gov.uk business finance and support finder ↗ · your local growth hub.