Napier Brown, Cranswick Foods, Riva Foods and Chaucer Foods are among the seven companies to have benefitted from a Humber Local Enterprise Partnership (HLEP) financial backing scheme.
HLEP’s Growing the Humber programme has allowed the region’s food industry to invest a further £12.7M into business growth projects, which has created 222 jobs.
£30M into local businesses
So far the scheme has invested £30M into local businesses, creating 1,500 jobs.
Up to 50 new jobs will be created at Chaucer Foods, which will invest in equipment to manufacture a new bread snacking product for European retailers, said Jeff Kipling, Chaucer Foods’s finance director.
The company already supplies bread products to the industrial and foodservice markets and the investment will allow it to grow the business and diversify its product offering, he added.
“We’re pleased to be able to increase our capacity and capability at our base in Hull allowing us to employ more people through expansion into new markets,” said Kipling.
‘Wealth of growth projects’
David Kilburn, chair of the HLEP board, said: “It is great to see a wealth of growth projects being helped by the Growing the Humber programme, helping to create more than 200 jobs in the LEP’s priority sectors.
“There is still some time for businesses to talk to us about their business growth projects and whether the Growing Humber programme can help.”
The announcement of funding in the Humber followed news that the Bank of England’s Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS) recorded a poor performance for the second quarter in a row today.
The scheme, which was created to give companies greater access to finance, failed to lend enough money to businesses between April and June this year.
Lending by banks involved in the FLS fell by £3.5bn during the period and overall lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) fell by £435M, according to the Bank of England’s figures.
Chuka Umunna, Labour’s shadow business secretary, said the lack of investment in SMEs was preventing economic growth.
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