Sunday 20 August 2023 2:39 pm

HomeServe founder pours £110m in crusade to revive flailing British high street

TMT Reporter

Fresh figures from the British Retail Consortium show UK retail sales were up by 2.5 per cent year on year last month, which is a growth of more than five per cent from last year.

HomeServe founder Richard Harpin is injecting £110m of his own cash into medium-sized businesses, aiming to breathe life back into the UK’s beleaguered high streets.

After cashing in on the sale of insurance company HomeServe to Brookfield last year for a cool £4.1bn, the home repairs mogul Harpin said he is trying to “help others grow their businesses and galvanise a regeneration of our city centres.”

Up to 15,000 shops could disappear from the UK’s high streets by the end of 2025 as a growing number of consumers choose online over in-store shopping, a new report recently warned.

Having already given £55m to businesses looking to grow, such as Passenger, Keelham Farm Shop, and Crafter’s Companion, Harpin is doubling it to fund around ten more firms.

“I am not doing it primarily for financial return,” he explained to the Daily Mail.

“If we are going to get the country and economy going, we need to help businesses scale up.”

In other good news for London’s high streets, Westminster City Council recently launched a new £10m scheme to reverse the decline of London’s iconic Oxford Street, making shops vacated by illicit candy stores available to small business owners rent-free.

Retail investment in central London is expected to surpass £1bn this year, with up to a tenth of that cash forecast to be spent on Oxford Street.