The government has finally published the prioritisation methodology for its £4.8bn levelling up fund, prompting protest from many who suspect it is designed to favour areas that are electorally important to the Conservative party.
Experts and politicians have criticised the methodology for not incorporating social deprivation measures and giving a large weight to factors more common in rural areas.
Since its announcement in the recent Budget, the fund has been heavily criticised for the way areas have been prioritised, with relatively affluent places such as chancellor Rishi Sunak’s constituency of Richmond given a higher priority than more deprived urban areas such as Barnsley, Hackney and Sheffield. LGC analysis found that three quarters of areas given the top priority have at least one Conservative MP.
The local government sector has broadly welcomed the government’s plan for exiting lockdown announced yesterday, although leading figures have called for
EXCLUSIVE: Government caught out ‘reshuffling old money into new pots’
More than a quarter of a new infrastructure fund announced by the government in June was made up of reallocated money from an older pot, the Local Growth Fund, which has instead been quietly shelved, LGC has discovered.
The move, which has been described as “deeply disturbing” by one city region mayor, means money intended to provide certainty over local strategic economic planning into 2021-22 has instead been allocated to “shovel ready” projects under the £900m Getting Building Fund.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government has admitted to LGC that £250m of the Getting Building Fund was originally part of the last £387m round of the Local Growth Fund, which has been around since 2013 and was extended for another 12 months in this year s Budget. The remaining £137m of the Local Growth Fund went to the Department for Transport for “retained transport schemes”.