Westmorland & Furness Annual Business Survey 2025

Overview

Welcome to the 2nd Westmorland & Furness Annual Business Survey

Each year, we carry out our council-wide business survey with business premises across our area, and this year, we are trialling a fully digital survey! Your survey response is critical to the work we do, as it provides us with insightful feedback on the supply and demand for business premises across our geography. This helps us to better plan for future employment development and to understand the opportunities and challenges facing our business community.

Your survey response will feed in to the new Local Plan development process. The Local Plan sets the strategy for allocating land for employment and housing development in order to support the sustainable growth of our communities. It will ensure that new developments are built in the right places and in a way that balances economic, social and environmental impacts. The voice of our business community is important, so please ensure you feed in to this through the survey completion.

We ask that responses are both open and honest. No individual businesses will be identified through the final survey results, which will be published on the above website in Summer 2025. You can provide your contact information as part of the survey, which will not be shared, though we may 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 & Regeneration team, who lead on our Invest in Westmorland & Furness programme to support our businesses to grow and thrive. If you have any questions on the survey, please email invest@westmorlandandfurness.gov.uk