The UK awarded £2.1 billion ($2.6 billion) of funding to regional infrastructure and regeneration projects from Scotland to Cornwall, following months of delay to the allocations due to political turmoil in Westminster.
(Bloomberg) — The UK awarded £2.1 billion ($2.6 billion) of funding to regional infrastructure and regeneration projects from Scotland to Cornwall, following months of delay to the allocations due to political turmoil in Westminster.
Programs in areas including Morecambe and Blackpool in northwest England and Gateshead in the northeast will benefit from the cash, the second tranche of money awarded from the Conservative government’s flagship Levelling Up Fund, the government said on Wednesday in a statement. Some £672 million will go toward transport links and £821 million to community regeneration, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities said.
“Through greater investment in local areas, we can grow the economy, create good jobs and spread opportunity everywhere,” Britain’s prime minister Rishi Sunak said in the statement late on Wednesday. “We will build a future of optimism and pride in people’s lives and the places they call home.”
The funding aims to help deliver on former Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s electoral promise in 2019 to spread wealth and opportunity beyond southeast England. But data since then suggest Britain’s prosperity gap has widened, according to Bloomberg’s Levelling Up Scorecard.
The latest round of levelling up funding was expected to be announced in October last year, but was delayed amid the leadership upheaval in the Conservatives, as Liz Truss took over from Johnson in September before her administration imploded within seven weeks, opening the path for Sunak to take power.
The opposition Labour Party said levelling up funds are being distributed too slowly and don’t compensate for cuts in public spending by successive Tory governments since 2010.
“It takes an extraordinary arrogance to expect us to be grateful for a partial refund on the money they have stripped out of our communities, which has decimated vital local services like childcare, buses and social care,” shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy said in a statement. “It is time to end this Hunger Games-style contest where communities are pitted against one another and Whitehall ministers pick winners and losers.”
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