Welcome Back Fund
Welcome back fund
The Welcome Back Fund was established to support the safe reopening of high streets and town centres to help build back better from the Covid 19 pandemic. This fund has enabled us to put in place measures to create and promote a safe environment for local trade and tourism.
The funding for the Welcome Back Fund was made available from the England European Regional Development Fund as part of the European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme 2014-2020.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (and in London the intermediate body Greater London Authority) is the Managing Authority for European Regional Development Fund. Established by the European Union, the European Regional Development Fund helps local areas stimulate their economic development by investing in projects which will support innovation, businesses, create jobs and local community regenerations.
What has been done
We have worked with town councils across the district to implement a range of activities from June 2020 to encourage the public to visit their local town centres safely.
The work has included:
- obtaining data to identify changes in visitor/consumer behaviour (including footfall) in a number of areas with a view to using this to inform recovery plans
- installation of temporary traffic management measures and awareness raising signs and pavement markings to enable social-distancing
- erection of temporary barriers to widen footways, in locations of high footfall where social-distancing was challenging
- producing and making available safer working poster templates
- installation of 5 solar compacting bins along Lymington Quay (providing a more hygienic bin and to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and savings in waste collection costs)
- installation of 5 water bottle filler stations in Brockenhurst, Burley, Hythe, Fordingbridge and Totton (helping to reduce waste as you can reuse plastic water bottles)
- providing free e-learning for local businesses on disability awareness to help businesses become confident and more assured in their engagement with disabled people
- a district wide 'Supporting our Community' campaign working with Go New Forest to focus on on creating a strong focus on the local economy. The aim of the project being to promote a safe 'reopening' of town centres to residents/visitors and instil a positive 'open for business' impression to residents/visitors, alongside safety and social distancing messages. We will continue to work with Go New Forest on developing this message after the welcome back fund ends.
- a specific 'Christmas days in New Milton 2021' campaign to promote the shopping experience in New Milton and increase footfall to New Milton during the Christmas period
- producing video maps of some our business areas across the district. The video maps provide both aerial videos and 360 panoramas which can also work with VR headsets
- producing two marketing based videos focusing on the area as a tourist destination and also as a shopping destination. You can watch the videos below
Watch the New Forest destination video
Watch the New Forest town and villages shopping video)
Footfall information
We have started using information from cellular networks to explore and understand how people use the district's town and village centres. The strictly anonymous data is gained by using the connections of people's mobiles phones to cellular networks as they move around.
Information reveals details of town centre footfall including numbers of people, and how long people spend in each area.
Information is available on a weekly basis from 2019 to 2021 with live daily figures from January 2022. You can view the results of the data using the links below:
Share this page
