Hull City Council has been awarded more than £3 million to regenerate areas of the city as part of the Government’s Clusters of Empty Homes programme.

The £3,589,968 award given to the council by Home and Communities Agency (HCA) was the fifth-highest funding from the pot of £60m, awarded to 20 bidders across England. In addition, this funding was only available for those areas that were suffering long-term problems with houses that had been empty for a long time.

Hull currently has more than 6,000 empty homes, the majority of them owned by the private sector. The funding will target some of the worst concentrations of empty homes, which are in the Boulevard, Wellsted Street and New Bridge Road areas of Hull. These are the only areas in the city that qualified for this funding.

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Councillor John Black, Portfolio Holder for Strategic and Operational Housing, said: "This is good news for the city particularly since regeneration budgets were cut nationally over recent months. It's pleasing to know we can start to regenerate areas that are particularly in need and help the many hundreds of people who are on the council's waiting list. This £3.5m award brings the total for our empty homes programme to £4.7m, after we were successful with a bid for £1.2m earlier this year. Through this investment we aim to give local labour opportunities to people along with increasing investment in the areas that will be improved."

David Curtis, Executive Director at the HCA, said: "The £3.5m funding for Hull City Council we have announced today will bring around 145 empty homes back into productive use, providing more new affordable homes for those on housing waiting lists and helping to remove the blight of dereliction in local communities, as a part of the wider housing strategy our partners are delivering in Hull."

(CD/GK)