(NU/1745-9) Business survey for National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise 2023

One of NICRE’s key objectives is to connect with businesses in order to generate insight into the circumstances of rural enterprises. This business focussed objective is vital to providing an evidence base for policy and support services for rural enterprise, and also to informing NICRE’s business engagement and development plans. At the heart of this objective is NICRE’s business survey. NICRE has a requirement to conduct a telephone survey of businesses operating in three specific regions in the UK (the West-Midlands, South-West and North-East). The survey will focus on aspects of business resilience and planning for both internal and external threats. Interviews will last around 20 minutes and should be conducted with a member of the senior management team of each organisation. Survey coverage should be broadly representative of the business population and sufficient to allow for (sub-regional) spatial, sectoral and firm size analysis. We require that the survey include non-farming and farm businesses and we propose to over-sample farm businesses and those located in rural areas. We therefore envisage a sampling structure which covers size, sector and rural/urban location within each of the three target regions