Most Levelling Up Projects Still Unfinished Years After Funding
Of 1,347 projects funded under three levelling up programmes, 821 were not complete as of May this year, according to an analysis of data released under freedom of information laws. In 73 council areas that won money, not a single project has been finished. The money was allocated between 2018 and 2021.
The three funds had their own deadlines and all have slipped: the high streets money was due to be spent by March 2024 and the town and levelling up funds by March 2026. Those commitments have since been folded into a single regeneration fund with a deadline of March 2028, and the present government’s own replacement, worth £5.8bn, pays out at £2m a year over ten years for each place. Completion has been slowest in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and low in north-west England and Yorkshire; Blackburn with Darwen has eight projects and none complete, Leeds eight and none closed. Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England chief economist, was scathing about the design rather than the delivery: it was “better than nothing”, but “in some ways the kind of worst of Whitehall. Because all the decisions were centralised. There looked to be degrees of pork barrel politics rolled into which places got it.” Two honest limits: this is one newspaper’s analysis rather than official statistics, and it identified 59 completions since the data was collected.