Are you a manufacturing business or do you provide services to manufacturing in Cumbria? You might be eligible for grant funding of between £10,000 and £1m through the Cumbria Growth Fund!

A wide range of businesses from across the county are already benefiting from the funding, between them creating or safeguarding 417 jobs. These include:

Allerdale – Gen II, Harbourside Products, Keswick Brewery, King Kong Climbing Walls, NT Precision, Shaun Bell Electrical, Tweddle Engineering, Wild & Fruitful

Barrow – NW Total Engineering, Optech Fibres

Carlisle – Autosport Logitical Solutions, Bells Fishmongers, Grafix Signs, JMT Trade, Jobling Purser, More Handles

Copeland - Ennerdale Brewery

Eden - North Lakes Foods, Quattro Products, South Tynedale Railway Preservation Society

South Lakeland – Burlington Slate, CN Metal Work, Fuel Exhausts, Ginger Bakers, Kendal Nutricare, Lakestone, Oxley Group, Pintail Candles, Storth

Tony Bell, managing director of Bell's, said: “We've had to invest to make the job viable. When we started it was too labour intensive to get the price right for the customer. We did it all by hand at first but now we have a machine that guts and gills the fish. Where it was taking six men four hours to do one tonne – around 3,000 fish – now two men can do that in an hour and a half.The grant has also helped pay for conveyors and cutting tables to boost throughput of game such as pheasant, partridge, duck and rabbit."