Humber High Street Challenge Fund

The Humber High Street Challenge Fund delivered grants aimed at encouraging private sector landlords and property owners within strategically prioritised city/town centre locations in each of the four Humber local authorities to undertake building and conversion projects that reanimated high streets, diversified the traditional high street offer and brought unused floor space back into use.

The grant programme served as seed corn funding to deliver early improvement works as a precursor to larger-scale MHCLG Future High Street funding that was sought by the four Humber local authorities.

The project targetted clusters of problem properties in areas that had a clear pre-existing strategy for regeneration and renewal to support the mitigation of market failure issues and re-purpose void properties. This included:

• A strategic scaling back of existing retail space where appropriate
• Diversification of the traditional retail-dominated high street offer
• Opportunities to convert some retail units to residential use, particularly at upper levels
• Tailoring development/ change of use to the unique nature of each urban space
• Encouraging innovative proposals to bring vacant spaces back to use

Grants were offered at a maximum of 50% total project cost, with applicants providing match from their own funding sources. Although the main purpose of the grant scheme was to diversify the high street offer and bring floor space back into use, there was discretion to allow applicants to include costs related to business support activities to assist in securing specific/ identified new end users.