Most levelling up projects still unfinished years after funding allocated

Data released under freedom of information laws reveals hundreds of projects unfinished despite Tory promises on regional equality

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Most levelling up projects are not finished, years after funds were allocated, highlighting how ambitious Conservative promises of quick progress on regional equality have faltered.

Data released under freedom of information laws and manually reviewed by the Guardian found 821 levelling up projects out of 1,347 were yet to be finalised as of May this year. Across the UK, 73 council areas that had a bid for a project accepted were yet to see a single one fully completed. The Guardian has identified 59 projects that were completed since the data was collected.

Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have seen slower delivery in their levelling up projects, despite having fewer overall. North-west England and Yorkshire also had low project completion rates, but they were also the two regions allocated the most projects to begin with.

Boris Johnson’s government swept to power in 2019 after promising to revive left-behind towns and spread opportunity as part of a levelling up agenda headed by Michael Gove. With 57% of projects still unfinished, the figures show many communities are still waiting for those ambitions to become reality.

The figures cover three of the main funds associated with the levelling up agenda : the Future High Streets Fund (launched in 2018), Town Deals (2019) and the Levelling Up Fund (2021).

The Future High Streets Fund was supposed to complete in March 2024, and the official deadline for spending all of the Towns Fund and Levelling Up Fund money was March 2026. The Levelling Up Fund and Town Deals were consolidated into the Local Regeneration Fund under Labour, with a new deadline of March 2028.

Labour has since also launched the Pride in Place programme. It gives places longer-term funding, with local boards deciding how it is spent, rather than making councils compete for grants.

Jack Shaw, the director of Groundwork Research, which supplied the data to the Guardian, said it showed a large gap between the intentions of levelling up and what had been delivered. He said: “Despite significant funding, too many one-off commitments have failed to translate into substantive improvements in communities or local economies.

“The Pride in Place programme is a step forward because it provides communities with £2m a year over 10 years, giving places the certainty and time to deliver visible, lasting improvements.

“But in future the government also needs to look at how investment can reach communities more quickly, so that funding announced at this budget can improve neighbourhoods over the course of this parliament, whether that be through new social infrastructure or a better public realm.”

Blackburn with Darwen council had eight projects funded through the Local Regeneration Fund, none of which have been fully completed.

Similarly, all eight projects funded in Leeds are yet to close. Five are in Morley : a refurbishment of Morley town hall, the establishment of a learning and skills centre, the station gateway transport scheme, a project to make the area greener and better connected, and the Heritage Investment Programme (which has only partly been completed).

Two projects in Holbeck – a green housing retrofit and a local centre scheme – also remain incomplete, as does the St Matthew’s community centre and Old Box Office project.

Part of the reason for the delays across the UK has been inflation, which meant councils had to scale back or pause projects due to increased costs eating into their awarded pots.

Zoë Billingham, the director of the IPPR North thinktank, said the Tories’ Town Fund failed because it had created a “begging bowl culture” where councils would need to approach Whitehall mandarins to access centrally controlled funding pots.

She said: “The levelling up – the ‘hanging baskets strategy’ as it was called – was short-term pots of money that could help clean up high streets and make tangible and important improvements. But that’s different to long-term support for what high streets are and should be. No one would dismiss it [levelling up funding], but you have to have a long-term plan rather than pots of money that run out.”

Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England chief economist who has advised Burnham, said the levelling up fund was “better than nothing” despite problems with it. He said: “It was 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.

“It was all a bit sort of unsightly and pork barrelly.”

The national figures exclude 69 projects that were either cancelled or merged into another existing project. Some of the projects are broader programmes of funding, parts of which may have been completed.

Sarah Longlands, the chief executive of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, warned Labour’s Pride in Place programme could face similar pitfalls to the Tories’ towns fund. She said: “It doesn’t surprise me the [Towns Fund] projects are not finished. Capital money takes time – you just can’t throw stuff up. This is my worry with the current programme of neighbourhood boards. We’re dealing with a lot of capital money, and it can’t be done quickly sometimes.”

You can look at the projects in your area and whether they have been completed or not using the map below. The government data may be missing some recent project completions. The Guardian has attempted to correct for this using published online announcements, but it is possible some completed projects may be missing from the data.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “We are committed to driving good growth in every postcode, giving local leaders stability through long-term targeted funding.

“That’s why we introduced our £5.8bn Pride in Place programme, giving the power to local people to decide how to invest this money to regenerate their own communities.

“And thanks to our Local Regeneration Fund, we’re seeing more money from previous funding programmes being delivered quicker.”