On the Level – Not.
England’s market squares are going to enjoy a boom time, if all the money that is promised in the government’s levelling up funds are spent as promised. Many local councils offered a share in the largesse are spending at least some of the cash on revamping markets, doing up public squares and refurbishing shopping centres.
At the moment the money is coming from two funds – the Towns Fund and Future High Streets Fund. There was a lot of publicity ballyhoo about both of them, strangely, just before the General Election December 2019. But Boris Johnson was no doubt hoping that people had forgotten Theresa May’s Stronger Towns Fund. Remember that? The £1.6bn Stronger Towns Fund was first announced in March 2019 with £1bn to be allocated by a needs formula and the remainder open to bids. Funny that, its been absorbed into Boris Johnson’s levelling up cash - £3.6bn to target left-behind communities, initially supporting 100 towns. The Future High Streets Fund was announced way back in 2018 and given £675 million to spend. Boris Johnson has since topped that up with an extra £325 million to bring the total to £1 billion. When you add that to the Towns Fund, you get a grand total of £3.6 billion.
High Street, Durham (image credit: unsplash.com)
Leave aside that the PM started off by calling this money “new” If he means that the Towns Fund itself is new, then he’s right — before he took office, the Stronger Towns and Future High Street Funds were separate, and now they are combined. But actually, there is only £1.325 billion extra from the Johnson regime. .
Still, an £1bn increase in investment for the Towns Fund and a £325m increase in funding for the Future High Streets fund is not to be sniffed at. Indeed sniffing is not encouraged - for there is a lingering whiff of political partisanship in the allocation of these funds.
Nearly two thirds of the towns announced as beneficiaries are home to seats which the Tories either held or were hoping to win. Of the 100 towns that were invited to work with government on new 'town deals' worth up to £25m, 61 are marginal seats, where one party holds a majority of 10% or less. A further four, Newhaven, Nuneaton, Colchester and Rowley Regis, are in seats where the Conservatives majority is between 10 and 12%. One, Torquay, is in the constituency of Torbay which is on the Liberal Democrat target list. In Cornwall, where the Conservatives have a fragile hold on five of the six seats and the council already has a devolution deal, four towns have been invited to develop town deals. Two towns in the Calder Valley constituency, where the Conservatives have a majority of just 1%, were named in the list, as were two in Ashfield, a Conservative target where Labour lost its majority of 0.1%, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Kidsgrove, in Stoke-on-Trent North, both Labour marginals successfully targetted by the Tories. Darlington was one of the towns on the list.
No fewer than 32 towns on the list fall outside the 300 worst-off in England according to rankings from the Office for National Statistics. Among the least deprived locations given priority are Stocksbridge in South Yorkshire and Loughborough. Others include Cheadle, Worcester and Crawley, which all sit in constituencies that returned Tory MPs with majorities of less than 5,000 at the 2017 election.
Towns like Hemsworth, which had a 10,000 vote Labour majority, were overlooked. Instead ministers chose nearby Brighouse, whose Tory MP had a majority of just 600 votes. This was despite Brighouse being ranked as less of a priority. Another town in the Yorkshire and Humber region to miss out was Knottingley. This is despite civil servants ranking it the ‘medium priority’ town with the greatest need for investment.
Barnsley also missed out despite civil servants ranking it more in need than six Yorkshire and Humber towns which did get funds. The marginal southern seat of Bournemouth received funding while the more deprived Northern Labour-voting seat of South Shields missed out.
The NAO had a look at these odd choices. After the 41 high priority towns were allocated their share, civils servants drew up a list of criteria which gave other towns ‘medium priority’ and ‘low priority. The criteria included such things as ‘deprivation, exposure to Brexit, productivity, economic resilience and investment opportunities. Interesting use of the word ‘exposure’ there in the context of Brexit, which was after all, supposed to be an unalloyed good for the people of Britain. Crucially, the mandarins left government ministers to choose which of these groups would be awarded funding. They have not published their justification for these choices – other than to say they used their ‘local knowledge’.
That ‘local knowledge came in handy in the case of Communities’ Secretary Robert Jenrick’s Newark constituency which despite being only 270th on the list of the most deprived towns in the country- got £25 million. Of course, Jenrick himself didn’t allocate that cash – that task fell to hiis then junior minister Jake Berry, whose own costituency of…….. was awarded x million. That decision was taken, handily, by Robert Jenrick.
So back to those funds already allocated. What do they tell us about the government’s priorities? Although the bids are drawn up by local panels, they are heavily steered in the direction they should go by something called the Towns Unit, part of the ‘service’ provided by Whitehall to ‘support’ the panels. Here’s some advice for bidders to make sure that ‘ Projects should also think about their specific contribution towards the government’s wider objectives such as the levelling up agenda and net zero, the requirement to analyse local impacts is an opportunity for towns to demonstrate local economic and social benefits such as employment which are now elevated in the economic case – ( though it does pose the question as to why the Treasury’s Green Book didn’t include this before? ) environmental impacts should be considered and follow new guidance including changes to discounting impacts.
The first tranche reveals some concentration on what might be called ‘cosmetic’ fixes and a heavy reliance on improving transport links. For example, there’s £39.5m to upgrade the Blackpool Illuminations and to support the development of the Blackpool Airport Enterprise Zone.
£22m to modernise Torquay town centre, transforming it into a retail and leisure ‘destination’ - which one might argue is what town centres are supposed to do already - as well as improving transport links with a ‘new focus’ on walking and cycling routes.
£23m for Peterborough to start up a skills centre for green technologies, enterprise and culture hubs, a new pedestrian bridge and an extension to Peterborough Museum for the display of Bronze Age boats discovered at nearby Flag Fen archaeological site and turn it into a ‘must see’ UK and international tourist trail.
Darlington’s £22m deal includes funding for the town’s T-Levels offer which will help learners kickstart their careers.
Barrow has secured £25m to spend on developing a new learning quarter, community well-being hubs and improving the local cycling and walking infrastructure. They also plan to run a housing renewal programme to address the lack of high-quality housing in the region.
Norwich’s £25m will help to realise the city’s ‘2040 Vision’, which includes a new digital hub, a digi-tech factory and an advanced construction and engineering (ACE) centre.
In Warrington, the £22m will help to build an electric bus fleet depot, an advanced construction training centre and a health and social care academy.
Redditch has a plan to redevelop the existing town centre library site into a public square to help drive footfall to and from the Kingfisher Shopping Centre. There will also be railway station improvements and a Redditch Digital Manufacturing and Innovation Centre.
Nor is the only cash that will be coming, At some point councils will be able to bid for the Levelling Up Fund, announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak back in November. That’s worth £4bn – though it seems that only part of it will be for left behind communities. No details are available yet but ‘a portion of the Fund will target places most in need across the UK, such as ex-industrial areas, deprived towns and rural and coastal communities.’ £220m will be allocated in 2021-22 as a pilot to help local areas prepare for the introduction of the Fund presumably in the following year.
Then there’s the Shared Prosperity Fund. That’s designed to replace the EU funds that used to go to parts of the UK deemed needing a leg up – social funds and structural funds. There’s going to be £1.5bn of that., as the PM has promised to match the amount of cash doled out when we were still members of the EU. No details yet on how that will be dished out – though it’s pretty certain that Whitehall intends to keep close control of it. Partly because it going to be of use in the government’s pro Union campaign in Scotland with UK branding all over it. .
So far so good. Resources are being directed to those areas which have so far missed out on the regeneration of the economy. But hold on, some confusion seems to be arising from the government’s marketing every bit of public spending as part of their levelling up agenda. The phrase keeps cropping up everywhere, whether it’s in skills and training, racial equality measures new hospitals or schools and more nurses and police. It appears that no government spending is not capable of being squeezed into the ‘levelling up’ agenda. There’s an old PR saw that says you need to repeat a phrase or slogan so frequently that people get fed up hearing it – then you know it has truly lodged in their brains and the Tories hope to reap the electoral benefit thereof . But it’s also partly an exercise in party management as ministers are keen to allay fears in the Conservatives’ southern constituencies that they will not be disadvantaged by any levelling up for the North’s Red Wall areas. Hence that manifesto pledge to build 40 hospitals – is now rebadged as levelling up when in reality there are just 8 Northern hospitals in the programme, compared to 10 in London and the South East.
Despite the apparently large sums of money being talked about, the scheme’s critics are numerous – and their points are various.
First it’s too small – especially when measured against the huge cuts to local spending since 2010. For example, the share coming to the North West is £281 million. This won't even touch the sides in Oldham alone, the Government has cut £208 million from the council since 2010. Since 2010 Greater Manchester has had £1.7bn cut from our public services; so the total fund for the entire country is less than the amount taken from that city region alone.
In Loughborough, which is getting X, academics at Loughborough University says that the “Towns Fund is far too small and semi-detached on its own to be decisive in catalysing significant and sustained activity. The Loughborough Town Deal £5 million annually over six years, in a town economy with a GVA that around £2 billion this amounts to a stimulus probably under 1/400th of the town’s economic value-add.
And remember local councils like Leeds have had to increase spending to the tune of £119m just because of the pandemic, Then there’s the age old problem of Whitehall’s left and right hand co-ordination. The levelling up agenda talks a lot about connectivity – but they have cut m from transport links that would have
Here’s Loughborough again - guidance is relatively silent on alignment and synergies with BEIS, LEP, UKRI and programmes to come like Shared Prosperity Fund; and also key Covid-19 themes such as NHS public health and DWP employment interventions.
And in another Whitehall blind spot, it’s all capital expenditure and as any fool knows, it has to be backed up by revenue funding – there’s doesn’t appear to be any.
Then there’s the blithe insistence that private funding will be available “To expect pre-Covid-19 models of attracting private funds or involving communities to be achievable is highly optimistic. “ In other words, there won’t be anything like enough private investment available.
The Coalfields Community Trust also points out that the employment rate in older industrial Britain prior to the pandemic was 6 per cent behind the level of the south-east of England. Covid has made things worse. It is estimated that as a result of this economic downturn caused by the pandemic, one in six adults of working age in older industrial Britain are now claiming out-of-work benefits. In some local authority areas this is as high as 20 per cent. These same areas have older populations, higher numbers of people on incapacity benefits and a less healthy population. Rates of Covid infection are 10-20 per cent higher than the national average and the cumulative death rate in these areas was on average 30 per cent above the UK average.
To level up that employment rate to that of the south-east, would require nearly one million new jobs to be created – 580,000 more residents working in older industrial towns, 200,000 more in former coalfields and 210,000 in the main regional cities
Most of the funds – those which haven’t been thrown at marginal seats that is, are allocated by competitive bids – thus advantaging councils with large administrative staffs, high-profile spokespeople like metro mayors, and good relationships with local MPs.
Another major criticism comes from the 2070 commission, The Commission’s report, the culmination of 18 months of research and consultation carried out by six UK universities, and supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, feels its all a bit inadequate.
Instead, they advocate tripling the new Shared Prosperity Fund to £15bn per annum and continuing that commitment for 20 years – an extra expenditure of £200bn over that already planned. They also want to see infrastructure investment up to 3% of GDP per annum, particularly aimed at transforming transport connections new networks of Excellence” in regional Research and Development to match the ‘Golden Triangle’ of London, Oxford and Cambridge, and a radical programme of devolution.
Commission chair Sir Bob Kerslake, a former top mandarin himself, says, “Unless the Government’s levelling up programme is comprehensive, coordinated and long term it is destined to go the way of the failed initiatives of previous administrations. This will result in even greater disillusionment. We can create a fairer and stronger future, but only if we act at scale.”
The UK government is undermining its pledge to “level up” the country after it slashed the budget of the body planning a massive transport investment programme in the north, the region’s leaders have suggested. Transport for the North (TfN), a statutory organisation, will lose 40 per cent of its core funding and a fifth of its total annual funding for the next financial year, documents it published on Wednesday showed. As part of the cuts, the Department for Transport has shelved plans for contactless ticketing across the region and cancelled more than £100m of future funding for it.
The £7.4 million Cultural Programme is part of the £95 million High Streets Heritage Action Zone initiative, which is currently working across 68 English high streets. Ramsgate is home to not one, but two Heritage Action Zones.
The programme is funded with £40 million from the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport’s Heritage High Street Fund, £52 million from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s Future High Streets Fund, and a further £3 million from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
HUGE north-south divide in Tory government funding for new businesses was exposed by Labour today.
In England, the Tories have allocated five times more start-up cash to London and the south-east than they have to Yorkshire, the north-west, north-east, and the Midlands, Labour’s analysis revealed.
New businesses in the south-east and London received more than £700 million in funding, while firms in the north and Midlands received just £140m.
Labour looked at funding allocations from the government’s so-called Future Fund between its launch last April and December 17, when the most recent data was released.
Awards for businesses in the north-east, north-west, west Midlands and Yorkshire were in some cases hundreds of thousands of pounds less than to businesses in London and the south-east.
In Scotland, the average award was just a third of the national average and in Wales it was half the national average.
Labour’s shadow business secretary Ed Miliband said: “While the government talks about backing the north and Midlands, the reality is starkly different.
“By investing much more heavily in start-ups in the south of England and squeezing out other parts of the country, they will be simply reinforcing economic imbalances in our country.”
TUC North West secretary Lynn Collins said: “This is yet another example of a government policy that widens the divide between the north and south rather than closes it.
“The direct impact on workers in the north of fewer businesses being supported is few jobs and more insecure work.
“If the government was serious about ‘levelling up,’ they would make sure that funding criteria tackles regional disparities and doesn’t reinforce them, and that businesses in the north are given a fair chance to succeed.”
Beth Farhat, secretary of Newcastle-based Northern TUC, said: “This is a really tough outcome for the northern economy. The government must urgently investigate how it happened and look for ways to redress it.
“Levelling up must include better targeted support for innovation and start-ups in northern towns and cities. With a fair share of national support, we can create innovation hubs where our universities, businesses and unions work in partnership to create new industries and good jobs.”
Bill Adams, secretary of Yorkshire and the Humber TUC, said: “It’s bad news again for the Yorkshire and the Humber economy and the North in general.
“The disparity in allocating funding from the Future Fund for business start-ups compared to the South East goes against the governments levelling up promises to voters in the North at the last election.
“Economic and social inequalities will only get worse rather than better unless the government commits to a fairer level of funding right across the country.
the 20 places most at risk of seeing their high streets “hollowed out” due to the impact of Covid on hospitality, tourism, non-essential retail and leisure businesses.
1.Torbay, 20.3%
2.Cornwall, 20.2%
3.Isle of Wight, 20.2%
4.Blackpool, 17.7%
5.Brighton, 17.4%
6.Rutland, 17.2%
7.York, 16.6%
8.Thurrock, 15.9%
9.Bath and North Somerset, 15.7%
10.Dorset, 15.5%
11.Cumbria, 15.4%
12.Devon, 15.4%
13.East Sussex, 14.9%
14.Southend on Sea, 14.7%
15.North Yorkshire, 14.2%
16.Nottingham, 14.2%
17.Northumberland, 14%
18.Herefordshire, 13.8%
19.Shropshire, 13.4%
LSE Research
‘make sure that 2021 is the year when levelling up becomes common political parlance’.
For example, the apparent intention to tackle inequalities both between regions and within them means that existing economic hubs within worse-off regions have no clarity about their role. The government has provided little indication of how it will involve local government in levelling-up, even though local leaders best understand the obstacles to success in their areas, and the conflicts between the central and local state have been worsened by Covid-19. The finance behind levelling-up may be constrained by a broader austerity agenda at Rishi Sunak’s Treasury. And the view of Whitehall economists on which projects are value-maximising might align little with how people in ‘left-behind places’ see their needs. For example, a recent survey suggests that people in deprived areas would give community facilities and meeting places a greater priority for ‘levelling-up’ than infrastructure projects.