Humber High Street Challenge Fund

The Humber High Street Challenge Fund will deliver 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 animate high streets, diversify the traditional high street offer and bring unused floor space back into use.

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

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

• 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 will be 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 is to diversify the high street offer and bring floor space back into use, there is discretion to allow applicants to include costs related to business support activities to assist in securing specific/ identified new end users.