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Local Landscape

About Local Landscape

Local Landscape helps small and medium-sized businesses in Leeds, Yorkshire and the rest of the North of England find the money and support that is out there for them: grants, loans, investment, support programmes, competitions and business events. It started with Leeds and Yorkshire and now covers the North East and North West too.

How it works

Every night we read the public pages of councils, combined authorities, funders and business support organisations, along with GOV.UK's business finance finder and the newsletters they send out. Each opportunity's details (how much, the deadline, who can apply and where) are pulled into one standard form, so you can compare them side by side. Where a page leaves something out, a second pass looks for it on the official sources and tells you what it could not confirm.

Please check before you apply

All of this is gathered automatically. Where we can, the key details are checked against each scheme's official page, but only some have been checked by a person, and each scheme shows which. None of it is financial advice. Funding rounds open, change and close all the time. Every entry links to the pages it came from: always confirm the details with the organisation that runs it before you apply.

The Local Landscape rating

Each open scheme has a Local Landscape rating out of 10. It mostly rates our details for the scheme: how clear, how sure and how complete they are. It is the average of three parts, each also out of 10, moved up or down a little by ratings from businesses that have used the scheme (below):

  • Clarity: we know whether it is open, we have a summary of it, and nothing is left unclear, such as whether a business can apply itself.
  • Confidence: how many of the details shown have been confirmed on the scheme's official page or by a person. A detail we could not confirm counts for less.
  • Completeness: whether we found the details a business needs before it applies: how much (for funding), the closing date (for schemes that run in rounds), where applicants must be based, who can apply, and a link to apply or read more.

Schemes rated under 6 are left out of lists. The funding list says how many it has left out and can show them. On each scheme's page, the colour behind each detail shows whether it was confirmed, is uncertain or could not be found.

Ratings from businesses

Businesses with a free Local Landscape profile can rate a scheme or an organisation they have used: a score out of 10, and yes or no to "Was it worth the time?" and "Would you recommend it?". Once three businesses have rated a scheme, their ratings move its Local Landscape rating. Good ratings (8 or more, and yes to both questions) can add up to 1 point, and poor ones (4 or less, or no to both) can take off up to 2, the full 2 when a third or more of its ratings are poor. A scheme with fewer than three ratings is not moved up or down, and where ratings have moved a scheme's rating, its page says so.

We never show who rated a scheme, and for now we don't show the ratings themselves. Each business can rate a scheme once and change its rating later. Nobody can rate a scheme or organisation their own organisation runs, and we can see every rating and remove any that look wrong. Ratings of organisations are kept for later and don't change anything on the site yet.

Up to three schemes in the home page's Featured row can be sponsored places, paid for by the organisation for set dates and labelled Sponsored. Sponsorship buys only that place. We gather a sponsored scheme's details, work out its Local Landscape rating and place it in every other list the same way as for any other scheme.

For organisations

If you run a fund or programme listed here, find your organisation and choose "Claim this page": once your claim is approved you can keep its schemes right yourself, and visitors see that the details come from you. Your account also shows how many people we sent to your website, your schemes and your events. Our crawler identifies itself asLocalLandscapeBot and follows robots.txt.