Government ‘has failed to deliver levelling up funds’
The Government has failed to deliver most of the funds at the heart of its flagship levelling up project, MPs have said.
Just over 10 per cent of the promised £10.47bn from the Government’s three Levelling Up funds (as of September 2023) has been spent, while councils hoping to win funding for projects designed to reduce geographical inequality across the country have only been given £3.70bn of the total allocation as of last December.
A report by the influential Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said Michael Goves’ Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) had been “blinded by optimism” about funding “shovel-ready” projects with the result that a total of 60 out of the 71 projects to receive funding and which are due for delivery this month are delayed.
The report criticises what it terms a “worrying lack of transparency in the department’s approach to awarding funds”. It cited the example of councils learning after they had submitted bids for round two of the Levelling Up Fund that they could not secure cash if they had been successful in round one.
The changes have “wasted scarce public resources and caused some
The PAC report says it is surprised and concerned “given the generational ambition of this agenda”, that there appears to be no plan for evaluating success in the long term.
local authorities to miss out”. By altering fund application rules “as it went along,” the report says cashstrapped local authorities wasted time and money preparing and submitting ineligible bids.
A more consistent process would have saved “considerable time and money in preparing and submitting ineligible bids”, which cost £30,000 on average to prepare.
Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the PAC, called the delays in handing out funds “absolutely astonishing”, adding: “The vast majority of levelling up projects that were successful in early rounds of funding are now being delivered late, with further delays likely baked in.
“DLUHC appears to have been blinded by optimism in funding projects that were clearly anything but ‘shovel-ready’, at the expense of projects that could have made a real difference.”
She said the PAC’s role is to scrutinise value for money in the delivery of government policy “but in the case of Levelling Up, our report finds that the Government is struggling to even get the money out of the door to begin with”.
The DLUHC said: “Buildings do not go up overnight and these are multi-year programmes, so it is to be expected that the capital spend ramps up in later years.”