Levelling Up Fund Round 2 – Successful Projects Announced
Levelling Up Funds Round 2 Announced
After an autumn hiatus, the much waited for announcement of successful Levelling Up Fund Round 2 projects has been revealed. Most media coverage so far has focussed on the amount of Levelling Up investment being made in London and the South East. There was also a distinct shift away from investment into the major metropolitan areas of England, with only handful of projects being awarded in Core Cities and their wider Combined Authority areas. Only £231m (or 11% of the overall pot) has been awarded to projects in the core city areas of the city regions of Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, West Midlands, Leeds City Region, South Yorkshire, the North East Combined Authority area and Bristol.
There have been a number of headline grabbing projects including the Eden Project North in Morecambe, Gateshead Quays regeneration and the Blackpool Multiversity. However, there appears to be a general trend within the projects selected for supporting town centre regeneration in medium and small urban areas (especially linked to public realm and cultural regeneration), a series of ‘connect’ style public transport projects to ease town centre congestion and a range of training and education led projects.
A full list of Levelling Up Fund Round 2 projects is available here
The Levelling Up Fund has been part of a wider process of allocating resources on a competitive basis, whereby economic need and relative disadvantage are part of a wider framework of assessing which areas are deemed to be of the highest priority. Within this framework, bids are then assessed and awarded on a competitive basis.
Whilst welcoming the investment into regeneration and economic development projects, CEDOS members have stated allocations of resources based purely on competitive bidding does not direct resources to the areas that need investment the most or underpin long term strategic approaches to growth and place making that are critical to delivering Levelling Up. We re-iterated these views with our response to the ‘Funding for Levelling Up’ enquiry undertaken by the Levelling Up Committee.