Great Yorkshire Show organisers ready to bounce back after it secures vital £1.5m cash injection

The Yorkshire Agricultural Society today announced it has received £1.5m in support from Barclays through the Government backed Coronavirus Business Interruption Scheme (CBILS).

The package will allow the society, which organises countless events in the region including Countryside Live, to maintain the ability to trade through the Covid-19 crisis.

Nigel Pulling, the society’s chief executive, said the CBILS loan would improve the society’s cash flow, prevent any further cuts and allow it to bounce back as and when restrictions were relaxed to allow it to continue staging vital awareness and fundraising events.

Mr Pulling told The Yorkshire Post that the loan was an “insurance policy” against any future uncertainty.

He said: “It gives us resources. There is still no clear idea of when events can reopen.

“We run a lot of events to teach and raise funds, the biggest of which being the Great Yorkshire Show, which is a huge proportion of our income.”

Next week should have seen the Great Yorkshire Show take place on Tuesday through to Thursday, with more than 100,000 people expected at the Harrogate showground for the annual rural showcase.However, the society took the decision in late March to cancel the event as the pandemic began to sweep through the country, a move which wiped out 70 per cent of its annual income.

Mr Pulling admitted he did not know if the show’s sister event Countryside Live could be staged in the autumn but that the £1.5m CBILS injection would help shore things up in the meantime.

“The idea of this loan is that it will enable us to be ready for when we can get up and running again.”

The cancellation of this year’s Great Yorkshire Show was only the second time it had been cancelled in full since the Second World War, when the 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis forced organisers to call it off.

In 2012 it was cut short after the first day when heavy rains flooded the showground.

Mr Pulling said that the summer months were typically home to a variety of smaller scale events that ranged from helping young farmers to work in rural communities, most of which have been called off.

However, he did promise that if it could return the Great Yorkshire Show would be back “bigger and better than ever “ in 2021.

Tim Watson, Barclays relationship director agri-food and landed estates, put together the funding package for the deal and said; “We have a very close relationship with YAS and we keep in touch with Nigel and the society regularly so we have a deep understanding of their business.

“We contacted Nigel knowing the pandemic would have a devastating impact on their income stream and this new funding will help them.”