This blog is published alongside Plunkett UK’s 2025 State of the Sector report. It explores how community-owned businesses across the UK are performing, and how they play a vital role in sustaining rural life.
At Access, we’ve always used postcodes to understand where our funding goes, using the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). Recently, we started to look deeper. What more could these postcodes could tell us? Could they reveal patterns in how our funding flows between rural and urban areas? And what might that say about who we’re serving, and how?
The idea emerged after conversations with partners such as Plunkett UK. Their 2025 State of the Sector report highlights the growth, resilience, and importance of community-owned rural businesses. Their research shows a sector that’s grown by 59% over the past decade, with 94% long-term survival rates — bucking the trend of economic decline in many rural areas. But it also shows a sector under strain, with one-third of rural community businesses “just surviving.” This raised an important question for us: how is Access reaching rural communities — and what might we learn from how funding flows across different areas?
(Data snapshot: live as of 30 June 2025 — figures will continue to evolve over time)
To explore this, we analysed the full range of Access investments, comparing how funding flows to rural and urban areas and across programmes. We also looked at who these investments reach and what kinds of outcomes they support.
As Access’s funding and data focus on England, our analysis reflects the English context — where around 17% of the population live in rural areas and 83% in urban areas.[1] While Plunkett UK’s report takes a UK-wide view, our findings provide a complementary perspective, showing how rural reach plays out across England and how this aligns with wider trends in community business activity across the UK.
Next, we looked at how our rural funding is distributed across England, and how this aligns with UK-wide patterns reported by Plunkett UK.
Both Access and Plunkett identify the South West as the region with the largest concentration of rural organisations, highlighting its continued role as a hub for community activity. The North West also shows similar levels of rural engagement across both datasets, demonstrating consistency in reach.
There are differences too. Access has a higher proportion of rural organisations in the North East (12%) compared to Plunkett’s report, with a notable spike in recent years. In 2024 alone, Access doubled the total investment delivered to North East rural organisations for the second year running, illustrating growing capacity and engagement in this region.
Rural investments tend to focus on community-level needs, while urban investments target acute social challenges.
Across outcome areas, rural funding leans towards housing and local facilities (23%) and employment, education and training (19%), while urban investments focus on employment, education and training (18%) and mental health and wellbeing (11%).
This balance suggests that while rural investments strengthen community resilience and local infrastructure, urban ones respond more directly to poverty and crisis-related need, although further analysis would be needed to fully understand these differences.
We collect EDI data across four of our more recently launched programmes, tracking the leadership of VCSEs across four areas: women-led, Black and ethnic minoritised-led, LGBTQ+-led, and disability-led. This data gives us a clearer picture of who our funding reaches.
Looking specifically at rural investments, we found that:
The data highlights a clear contrast in inclusion between rural and urban funding. Disability-led organisations are relatively more present in rural areas, receiving 11% of rural investment compared to just 5% outside rural areas. In contrast, LGBTQ+-led organisations are entirely absent from rural investments supported by Access grant, while Black and minoritised-led organisations receive only a small proportion. While the numbers involved are relatively small, emerging trends may show where targeted support could have the greatest impact in strengthening equity across rural communities.
Rural organisations are not only being reached—they are continuing to grow. Over the last three years (2022–2024), Access delivered £7.5m in investment to rural organisations, up from £4.8m in the previous three years, reflecting growing capacity and engagement.
This pattern aligns with Plunkett UK’s findings on the UK-wide rural community business sector, which has grown 59% over the past decade and maintains long-term survival rates of 94%, far exceeding SME averages.
These insights underline the importance of continuing to reach, invest in, and learn from rural communities.
As a result, rural and urban reach is now a regular feature in our quarterly dashboard — not as a KPI, but as a conversation starter. It’s helping us and our partners see reach from a new perspective, and to explore what equitable distribution really looks like in practice.
This work ties directly to our 2025–2028 strategy, particularly our goal to improve reach and equity in the flow of finance. By understanding how geography shapes opportunity, we can better identify where finance isn’t yet reaching — and how tailored support, capacity building, and patient capital can bridge that gap.
We hope this analysis — and the insights shared alongside Plunkett UK’s report — encourages others across the sector to look more closely at their own data, question assumptions, and keep building our shared understanding of what “reach” really means.
