Councils demand independent review of ‘arbitrary’ levelling up schemes

4 comments

1. >there are now an estimated 36 pots[of funding] in total.

   I think I know why it failed. Thats clearly the result of a complete lack of planning or foresight. Its just setting up small bit of money here and there as new political slogans have been wanted through the chaos of this government.

2. Sunak said in the clip: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas, to make sure areas like this are getting the funding they deserve because we inherited a bunch of formulas from Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”

3. In a past life I used to give grants to people. Now I apply for them. If you work any kind of job where you try to change things in the public sector, your entire life is begging for money.

   I can assure you there is no correlation between the quality of the project and the enthusiasm of a funding committee. None. 

   There is an army of people employed to apply for grants, to asses those grants, and then to monitor them. Literally thousands. None of this work is worthwhile. Just form filling.

   This is the result of ‘government by press release’. 

   If you were to make a multiyear commitment to give every local authority in the 10% most deprived areas a fixed share of regeneration funding, they would go away and spend it. Some would spend it well. Some badly. No difference to grant funding, but would mean less people doing paperwork and more people doing actual work.

   It would result in a single press release. 

   If on the otherhand you create 36 pots of funding, each with two rounds of funding a year, each expecting projects to be delivered in 18 months at most, you can have a press release about funding regeneration more or less every week.

   Ok it’ll be crap because projects take time to properly work up, and you’ll waste money because everything is done at breakneck speed, and you’ll have an army of well paid form fillers to apply for and assess the grants, but who cares. Sure, you’ll miss every meaningful target  but think how often you get to go on thr Today Programme to announce funding and how many column inches you get.

4. I never really understood this.

   Who actually gets the money?

   A company gets money to build flats, builds them, sells them and then pockets that money too? And how does that ‘level up’ an area? No more money is being generated in that area, and often the architects and builders are from out of the area anyway?