During these challenging times, it is important that we still take the time to reflect and celebrate the success of outstanding British businesses.
The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise are the most prestigious awards for UK businesses and is a globally recognised royal seal of approval for UK companies. We want to ensure that businesses can still apply for a Queen's Award, despite factors which could have prevented them from doing as well as they had originally predicted for 2020. We appreciate that businesses may have been affected in many shapes and forms by uncontrollable circumstances in recent months, such as flooding and Covid-19, but we want to encourage businesses to still apply and we will do what we can to support applications.
That is why for the 2021 round, we have not changed the eligibility criteria and have instead made some changes to the application system to enable you to manually input your financial years. This means that you could wind back a year if your last financial year has been affected by Covid-19, storms, or flooding. For example, if you are applying for International Trade and your overseas sales growth was affected in 2020, you can now wind back a year and provide your figures for 2017, 2018 and 2019, rather than up to 2020. Alternatively, you may prefer to submit figures over a shorter period of time. For example, for Innovation, you can select a two or five year period to demonstrate your commercial success. Similarly, with International Trade, you can opt to demonstrate overseas sales growth over a six or three year period. We assess applications on a case by case basis and will evaluate commercial success and challenges by uncontrollable external factors. It is important for us to see the trends and patterns of each business' commercial success, to see how well they have performed before these challenging times.
The full eligibility can be found on our website, but if you do have any questions, please do send us an email on queensawards@beis.gov.uk
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