Published: June 4th, 2020
The Marches Coronavirus Business Support Survey was launched on April 6 to try to gather a statistically significant database of evidence about the impact of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown on the Marches business community.
It has proved to be the most-responded to survey conducted by the Marches LEP, with 500 individual businesses taking the time to complete it within the three weeks it remained open.
The result is a significant insight into the challenges and difficulties the virus has created for businesses in Herefordshire, Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin and the views of the business community about the support they have been offered and its implementation.
Many businesses gave detailed comments about how they had been affected, what support they had tried to access and what their experience had been. The key themes which emerged from these comments were that many were not eligible for the coronavirus support schemes, there was a perceived lack of information and detail coming out and it was being released too slowly, the banks were being unhelpful in the way they were handling the schemes and there was some concern at a slow response in processing grants from some quarters. However, there was also praise from many businesses for the ease and speed at which they had received their grants.
