11/11/03 - Good cheer for pub co-op

Cumbria County Council is adding to the good cheer at a village pub where customers are aiming to buy and run it as a co-operative. The council’s Cabinet agreed today to put £15,000 towards helping the co-operative purchase The Old Crown at Hesket Newmarket. The purchase will help secure the brewery at the pub, which produces beers with local names, and also help establish the co-operative.  It will sustain the equivalent of three full-time jobs and is expected to support a five per cent increase in turnover.

Cumbria County Councillor Lawson Short, Cabinet member with responsibility for economic development, said:

“A key aim of the county council is to give support to community enterprises like this. There are a growing number of them in Cumbria and they have an important part to play in the regeneration of many of our communities. We are pleased to help them in the early stages of their development and hope they will prosper.”   

Other projects to be awarded grants are:

• Millom and District Credit Union, £10,000 towards creating a full-time post of business development manager, with the aim of increasing membership by five per cent.
• Image Makers, Cleator Moor, £10,000 towards setting up a new digital photography business and creating one part-time post.
• Workbase, Kendal, £15,000 creating two full-time posts and sustaining one part-time post while helping sustain a commercial craft and printing business that provides opportunities for people recovering from mental illness.  

The awards come from the county council’s community regeneration fund, set up to support emerging and developing community enterprise initiatives in Cumbria, the intermediate labour market (where 

jobless people are taken out of unemployment temporarily as a step towards permanent employment elsewhere) and New Deal projects. The fund, which has a budget this year of £295,000, awards grants up to a maximum of £15,000.