Westmorland & Furness Business Premises Survey 2024

Overview

Welcome to the first ever Westmorland & Furness Business Premises Survey! Each year, we will carry out a survey which targets our business community with premises within our council area. Your survey response is central to the work we do, as it will give us useful feedback concerning the supply and demand for business premises and land across our geography. This helps us to better plan for future employment development and to understand the opportunities and challenges facing our business community.

Work will soon begin on our new Local Plan for Westmorland and Furness and survey responses will help inform this process. The Local Plan will need to ensure that local employment and housing need is provided for in the right places, at the right time and in a way that balances the economic, social and environmental impacts.  The Local Plan will also set out our development strategy for the area and land allocations. The voice of our business community is important for this process.

We will not identify individual companies in the results, so please be open and honest in your response. If you provide your contact information as part of the survey, this will not be shared, though we may wish to contact you if you have asked for additional support or have feedback we wish to follow up on.

This survey is conducted by the council’s Economic Development and Regeneration team, who lead on our Invest in Westmorland and Furness programme to support our businesses to grow and thrive.

Data Protection Act 2018: The information provided in this survey will be only used for the purposes of the Westmorland and Furness Business Premises Survey ]and the development of the Westmorland and Furness Local Plan. Your responses are stored electronically on our Business Survey Consultation Database. This information will be held and used according to the Data Protection Act 2018 and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). We will only use this information for the Business Survey and Local Plan and do not share it with third parties outside of the council. You can view the council’s Privacy Notice on the council’s website or can be provided on request.

What happens next

Once the results are collated, an overview of our survey findings will be published on www.investinwestmorlandandfurness.co.uk/survey