What is the Helping High Streets programme and why does it matter for economic development teams?
Helping High Streets is a targeted support programme, designed and delivered by ALP Synergy on behalf of Enterprise Oxfordshire, to strengthen High Street businesses through data‑led diagnostics, tailored Boost Plans and a blended menu of webinars, peer collaboration and one‑to‑one support. It provides an evidence‑backed, scalable model for councils and Growth Hubs wanting to turn national High Streets policy into practical, local action.
Over six months, we worked with independent retailers, cafés, charities and services in town and city centres across Oxfordshire, focusing on high‑footfall locations that sit at the heart of local economies. The core purpose was simple enough to fit on a Post‑it note: help High Street businesses trade more confidently today while building resilience for tomorrow.
Between December 2025 and April 2026, 115 eligible High Street businesses registered, 79 engaged with support, and 59 completed a detailed diagnostic to unlock a personalised High Street Boost Plan. Those numbers translated into hundreds of hours of expert‑led support via webinars, Collab Labs, one‑to‑one conversations and a county‑wide High Street Summit in Didcot.
As one participant told us afterwards, “There aren’t many support programmes designed specifically for High Street businesses like this. It’s been really great to meet like‑minded businesses and to get expert one‑to‑one support designed for me.”
And yes, that quote made our team a bit emotional. Economic development can feel abstract until someone tells you the late‑night session you planned for them to squeeze in between school runs and ordering stock actually helped them pay their staff.
How does the Helping High Streets model work in practice?
Helping High Streets is built around a simple, repeatable cycle: diagnose, design, deliver and loop back into place‑level decisions. It is deliberately lightweight for busy owners yet rigorous enough to give councils and Growth Hubs a credible evidence base.
Each participating business completes a self‑assessment across seven themes:
- Leadership and local capacity
- Business resilience
- Place branding and partnerships
- Customer experience and footfall drivers
- Digital skills and marketing
- Innovation and diversification
- Sustainability and community engagement
That diagnostic generates a personalised Boost Plan which links scores directly to practical next steps and relevant support offers, such as:
- “Successful High Streets – Setting the Ambition”
- “Promoting Your High Street Business Online”
- “Customer Experience”
- “Diversifying Your High Street Business / Innovation & Resilience”
For economic development teams, the power lies in aggregating those diagnostics. By combining 59 assessments from across Oxfordshire, we built a detailed, town‑by‑town snapshot of what’s actually happening on the ground. That insight now underpins place‑based recommendations and provides funders and local authorities with a defensible, data‑rich platform for decisions. If you’ve ever sat in a committee meeting debating “what businesses really need” without recent data, you’ll understand why this matters.
What are High Streets in Oxfordshire doing well, and where are they struggling?
Oxfordshire’s High Streets painted a surprisingly consistent picture: strong innovation and customer experience, with structural vulnerabilities around resilience, place branding and trading conditions. In other words, the businesses themselves are far from the problem; in many cases, they’re the bright spots.
Key strengths we heard and saw:
- Innovation and diversification: This was the standout strength. Across 59 businesses, Innovation & Diversification scored an average of 4.3 out of 5, with 92% rating themselves 4 or 5 for trying new ideas and reviewing what works.
- Customer experience: Ninety per cent reported that they “mostly” or “always” offer something unique that attracts repeat customers, and 71% rated their premises as accessible and welcoming.
- Digital basics: Eighty‑three per cent reported an up‑to‑date website or social media presence, and 88% felt confident using basic digital tools such as email, spreadsheets and online forms.
- Sustainability and community engagement: Many businesses are already reducing waste, promoting local suppliers and taking part in community events, with some scoring at the very top of the scale for these actions.
However, there were shared vulnerabilities that individual shops simply cannot solve alone:
- Business resilience: Average resilience scored 3.3 out of 5; 44% of businesses scored 3 or below for having a simple continuity plan or being able to cover three months of costs if income drops.
- Place branding and partnerships: Only 20% felt part of wider High Street promotions or joint branding efforts, meaning strong individual stories are not yet amplified at town‑centre level.
- Trading conditions: Businesses most often cited rising running costs (47%), footfall, demand and customer spend (39%), parking/access/location issues (24%), competition from online and out‑of‑town centres (19%) and staffing/capacity (24%) as their key challenges.
For economic development professionals, that mix is important. You are working with a cohort that is already proactive around innovation and community, but operating in an environment where structural pressures erode resilience, relationships and limit the impact of individual effort.
As Ant Parsons, Managing Director of ALP Synergy, often says: “High Streets don’t fail because businesses stop caring; they fail when the system around them stops noticing what those businesses are already doing well.”
What did ALP Synergy actually deliver on the ground?
To respond to those findings, Helping High Streets combined flexible, online access with place‑based collaboration. The design is intentionally modular so councils and Growth Hubs can scale it up or down across places like Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire or Cornwall.
The core delivery elements were:
Spotlight Sessions: Short, focused online sessions led by subject experts, all recorded so busy owners could join live or catch up later. Topics ranged from digital basics and customer experience to diversification and resilience planning.
Collab Labs: Small‑group workshops in targeted locations plus online sessions for wider town connection. These labs gave businesses space to:
- Share what’s working and what feels hard
- Design joint campaigns and trails (including “Hidden Gems” concepts)
- Build relationships with town councils and local leaders
- One‑to‑one support: Confidential 1:1 sessions on priority topics such as finance, marketing, customer experience and staffing, scheduled around trading hours. These conversations turned diagnostic insights into practical step‑by‑step actions.
- Oxfordshire High Street Summit: In April 2026, we convened the first Oxfordshire High Street Summit at Cornerstone Arts Centre in Didcot, bringing together High Street businesses, local leaders and media, including BBC South and local radio. The summit created a county‑wide moment to share findings, celebrate success and identify collective actions.
By April, 79 High Street businesses had engaged with some form of support, whether diagnostic, Spotlight Session, Collab Lab, one‑to‑one advice or summit participation.
From a practitioner point of view, one lesson we learned (the honest way) is that hybrid support really does matter. The shop owner who can’t leave their premises at 11am on a Tuesday might still listen to a recording at 9pm, coffee in hand, dog snoring in the background.
Why should funders, County Councils and Growth Hubs beyond Oxfordshire care?
Although Helping High Streets was designed for Oxfordshire, the underlying lessons are highly transferable to places across England and Wales. For County Councils, Combined Authorities and Growth Hubs, three headline messages stand out.
First, there is real capacity and appetite on the High Street. Independent businesses are already leading on innovation, sustainability, community engagement and customer experience; they are not passively waiting for support to arrive. They are often the ones convening community events or experimenting with new offers long before funding applications appear.
Second, the toughest problems are shared, place‑level issues. Rising costs, uneven footfall, parking and access, competition from online and out‑of‑town centres and local capacity constraints cannot be addressed shop‑by‑shop. They demand partnership between economic development teams, transport and planning colleagues, landlords and community organisations.
Third, relatively modest but well‑targeted support can unlock action quickly. A blend of diagnostics, webinars, peer collaboration and 1:1 advice was enough to generate concrete business actions, new collaborations and clearer “asks” of local authorities in a matter of months.
When we’ve worked with High Street businesses, one recurring observation is that they often feel “done to” rather than “worked with”. A diagnostic‑based model flips that dynamic by making their own assessment the starting point for support. It appears a small shift, but it changes the conversation.
Put bluntly: it does not always require a multi‑million‑pound urban transformation scheme to shift momentum. Sometimes it requires a structured way of listening, a small pot of flexible delivery and a willingness to join the dots.
How does Helping High Streets align with the UK Government’s High Streets Strategy?
The UK Government has signalled a renewed focus on High Streets, announcing a £150 million package to revive struggling town centres and restore community pride as part of a forthcoming High Streets Strategy. Written statements and ministerial briefings emphasise community‑led renewal, support for independent businesses and stronger powers for local authorities over key assets.
Helping High Streets sits naturally within that policy direction. It provides:
- A practical vehicle for delivering “everyday economy” support at High Street level, addressing the sorts of businesses highlighted in national statements, including small retailers, hospitality venues and services.
- A diagnostic‑driven evidence base that can inform how new High Streets funding is targeted within counties, identifying where resilience is weakest and where innovation is strongest.
- A ready‑made mechanism for community and business engagement that mirrors the Government’s emphasis on empowering “people who know their neighbourhoods best”.
For County Councils and Growth Hubs in areas such as Monmouthshire, Gloucestershire, Cornwall or Oxfordshire, programmes like Helping High Streets can effectively bridge national priorities and local delivery. They offer a structured way to translate policy statements into tangible, measurable support.
As one national commentator put it, Britain’s High Streets are visibly in flux, and any credible strategy must balance investment in physical fabric with direct support for the people trading on those streets. Helping High Streets is one way to get that balance right.
Why is ALP Synergy a strong partner for High Street support programmes?
ALP Synergy is a strong partner because our High Street support offer is rooted in lived experience of running, growing and exiting real‑world High Street businesses, not just designing programmes from behind a laptop.
For a decade, our core team owned and operated a High Street convenience store in Gloucestershire, embedded in its local community. Day‑to‑day, that meant wrestling with exactly the same issues many independent retailers bring to our workshops: staffing headaches, procurement decisions, stock management, razor‑thin margins and the constant quest to earn genuine customer loyalty. The business did not just survive; it expanded its services, won awards for innovation and community contribution, and built a reputation for being the sort of place people missed when they went away on holiday.
That experience matters because it shaped the way we now design programmes. Our emphasis on customer focus, resilience and adaptability is not theoretical; it was stress‑tested in the real world, under real pressure. In 2024, after ten years of growth, the business was successfully transitioned to new ownership. Managing that process from the inside out gave us practical experience in succession planning, business valuation and organisational continuity – precisely the issues many High Street owners raise when they talk about retirement, exit or handing the reins to a new generation.
Our capability is further strengthened by team members with deep sector‑specific expertise. One colleague runs a successful holiday accommodation business serving around 100 weekly guest stays each year, giving us a direct window into the visitor economy and the way retail, hospitality and tourism feed into one another on High Streets and in market towns. Another previously managed a High Street bank for five years and brings significant experience in business finance, risk management and due diligence – skills that underpin our monitoring, reporting and the practical financial conversations we have with owners.
Put simply, when we sit down with a shop, salon, café or visitor‑facing business in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire or beyond, we are drawing on thousands of hours of lived High Street experience as well as our programme design work. That combination of “been there, done it” and “can help you plan the next stage” is what makes ALP Synergy a reliable delivery partner for councils and Growth Hubs aiming to support small and medium‑sized businesses to start, grow or thrive.
What’s next for Helping High Streets, and how can economic development teams get involved?
Enterprise Oxfordshire’s Helping High Streets support will continue through 2026 – 27, offering free, expert‑led webinars, Collab Labs and guidance to High Street businesses across the county, while deepening place‑based collaboration in specific town centres. The programme will keep generating diagnostic insight and feeding it back into local decision‑making.
For funders, County Councils and Growth Hubs elsewhere, there are several ways to engage:
- Commission a tailored Helping High Streets‑style programme for your area, using the Oxfordshire model as a template.
- Integrate the diagnostic into existing business support or regeneration activity to sharpen your evidence base.
- Partner on cross‑regional pilots, for example linking market towns in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire or exploring cross‑border collaboration with Monmouthshire.
If you would like to explore how this approach could support High Street businesses in your area, we would be very happy to talk. To discuss partnership or funding opportunities, or to learn more about Helping High Streets and related programmes, please contact:
Ant Parsons, Managing Director, ALP Synergy Ltd
Email: ant@alpsynergy.co.uk
Resources and case studies: www.alpsynergy.co.uk/resources
You bring the place and the partners; we bring the framework, facilitation and a slightly over‑used set of sticky notes.