‘Don’t get carried away with Levelling Up cash’
SO, now we know. Last week Chancellor Rishi Sunak threw the Potteries a couple of quid when he rubberstamped part of Stoke-on-trent City Council’s Levelling Up Fund bid, which will now see £56 million pour into Tunstall, Hanley, Stoke, and Longton towards various regeneration initiatives and heritage-led projects.
But the city council missed out on £17.5m towards improving bus services, which was arguably more important.
Of course, it’s positive news, but we shouldn’t get carried away. While funding towards our city’s regeneration is always welcome, the projects that will benefit from this latest Whitehall cheque will not address the more fundamental challenges that we still face in terms of poverty and inequality, education and skills, health, and our failing public transport system.
Two of the projects that will be seeing some of the Levelling Up cash are in my hometown – Tunstall. £3.5m will be made available towards the Queen Victoria Jubilee Buildings – namely the library and long vacant public baths – and the creation of a ‘mixed-use facility’ that will include apartments, a multi-purpose exhibition space, and a café.
The fact that this project is happening at all is down to the musical chairs that the city council has been playing with public services over the past decade, the latest being the planned move of Tunstall’s library service into the revamped town hall. And the allocation of funding also raises one or two other questions.
The two buildings have recently been placed on the market. Will they now be withdrawn from sale? Or will the
particulars be altered to say that the buildings now come with a substantial grant?
Tunstall has been in slow decline for decades. The High Street is row upon row of desolation. The town centre environment is as poor as it has ever been. There is little to attract visitors. You could argue it is pretty close to rock bottom.
The recent investment in Victoria Park and the town hall is much welcome, but the town hasn’t seen serious investment in years. However, there are jobs returning to the area through Ceramic Valley-related developments, so you would hope that this would provide the impetus to plan for serious investment in the town.
But to date, this doesn’t appear to be the case. The regeneration of the library and the public baths will become an island – albeit a very nice one – unless it is part of a comprehensive strategy for the town.
And inevitably, such a strategy will require investment, and substantially more than is on the table currently. Put simply, Tunstall needs more.
To put things into context, the £56m works out at £218.43 per head of population, hardly the biggest giveaway. And lest we forget the £31m hit that the city has had to take through the Universal Credit cut, and the impact of the decadelong austerity project.
But it seems that Abi Brown, the leader of the city council, recognises this. In an essay for think-tank Centre for Cities, she stated that ‘if you really want to level up places like this city, it won’t be achieved by a succession of beauty parades for small pots of cash for centrally-directed pet projects’.
She followed this with an appearance on Sunday’s BBC Politics Midlands show where she said that Sunak had ‘got to try a bit harder to impress me’, suggesting that she feels as many in local government do – that the Treasury is hampering the Government’s levelling up agenda. It seems like Abi may be up for a scrap.
There is one fundamental problem with all of this, and that is that localities are continually having to beg and dance to Whitehall’s tune.
Projects have to be bent to fit with predetermined criteria. Ludicrous timescales are imposed on authorities stripped of capacity to ‘bid’ for pitiful sums of money (£56m really isn’t a lot of money).
And in the end, we are expected to show gratitude, as if things that ought to be perfectly normal local/central government business is some form of charitable donation. It’s like a war of attrition, and it simply should not be this way.
But back to Tunstall, and I hope that now the town is getting a little bit of light shone on it, we can properly start to think about how to make it better for its residents and businesses, and those that visit it.
And we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that a few quid towards the library and public baths should be our lot – we should instead use this as the means to forge a new beginning.