Many Greater Manchester levelling up bids were ‘guaranteed to fail’ after ministers changed rules on selection

Many of Greater Manchester’s levelling up fund bids were ‘guaranteed to fail’ as the Government changed the selection criteria after applications had been received, councillors have heard.

In January, Greater Manchester missed out on more than £276m of Levelling Up money in the latest round of funding announced by the government.

Among the unsuccessful bids were 224 homes and a new public square near Rochdale railway station, a revamp of Eccles shopping centre and a range of works in the town centres of Stalybridge and Denton.
 

Read more: Anger and disappointment as towns miss out on £40m in Levelling Up funding for deprived areas - but Prime Minister's own affluent constituency receives £19mPublished: 20 January 2023

 

Read more: Rochdale council to forge ahead with station square revamp despite Levelling Up fund blowPublished: 21 February 2023

Three bids were successful, bringing nearly £60m to Trafford, Wigan and Oldham. It has now emerged that as applications for the fund were oversubscribed, ministers at the department for levelling up changed the criteria and deselected many bids from the north west as the area had ‘exceeded its allocation’ of cash grants in previous years.

Ministers also made the decision after bids had been lodged with them to limit any successful schemes to one per authority and take account of those areas which had received previous levelling up fund cash. The Municipal Journal estimates that councils across the country spent around £27m in submitting bids for levelling up funding with around 80 per cent of projects later rejected.

Nationally, just 111 schemes out of 529 applied for were approved. Bolton, which had two bids for a combined £40m for town centre redevelopment and road improvements rejected in the latest round, is run by a Conservative administration.

During a recent scrutiny meeting of Bolton Council, their leader, Councillor Martyn Cox, said it was ‘odd that you would set up a levelling up system where for every winner you have four losers’. He pledged to deliver a message to ministers that he was ‘not a great fan in the way the government is approaching this’.

Labour opposition leader Nick Peel went further saying most bids from the region were ‘guaranteed to fail’ and called the changing of criteria ‘an outrageous way to treat local authorities’.

He added: “To chuck in a new rule at the last minute is absolutely unforgivable. If we knew about this we wouldn’t have spent all of that officer time, all of that money, all that energy, working up these bids.

“We’ve been left with disappointed members of the public who are saying ‘what was all that for?’ The government has behaved absolutely appallingly towards us and other nearby towns.

“They are saying that because Bolton received some money a few years ago, we shouldn’t have bothered asking for more. It also makes clear that the Conservative government believes that the north west has been given enough already, completely shattering any idea that it was ever about providing assistance to the areas that have suffered the most under austerity.

“We now know the reason why relatively affluent areas in the home counties received more cash than the left behind areas in the north.”

Paul Whittingham, assistant director of place for Bolton Council, introduced a report on the levelling up bids to councillors.

He said: “Bolton is deemed a high priority town within the process due to high levels of deprivation. We were hugely disappointed that Bolton was not supported and has not secured the two bids.

“Guidance published by the government on the decision-making shows that the scale of the short-listed bids resulted in the use of additional considerations by the ministerial team. They took account of those local authorities which were successful in round one and also capped bids for round two at one per local authority.

“The decision was also made to deselect bids from the north west as the region had exceeded its financial allocation between 2017 and 2021. This information wasn’t available to us, we didn’t know about this.

“There is an offer of feedback via a letter but no time-scale has been provided.”

Conservative minister Dehenna Davison is the parliamentary under-secretary of state for levelling up.

During a visit to Bury last Thursday she was asked about the lack of success for Greater Manchester’s bids and the late changes to the criteria.

She said: ‘It’s a really difficult one and I’ve had a lot of these similar conversations since the levelling up fund was announced.

“I think the thing that made it so challenging is that there were a lot of places that were after this money. Ultimately, we had around £8.8bn of bids but only £2.1bn to allocate.

“So we knew a lot of places were going to end up disappointed but frankly we couldn’t determine what the level of demand would be until the bids were in. One of the things we had to consider as ministers is that the fund gets spread as far and wide as possible.

“Right at the beginning of the fund we made it clear that there are technical considerations including geographic spread which is very important to us to make sure levelling up is for everyone. The decision was taken, not an easy one, to make sure the fund can go far and wide to some of those authorities that didn’t benefit from round one.

“This isn’t the end of the road, nor is it the only fund that’s devoted to levelling up. It’s just one of a huge package of measures that we’re putting in place to tackle levelling up issues.

“We will also provide full feedback to everyone and there is going to be a round three of the levelling up fund too. All hope is not lost.”

All councils in the city-region apart from Bury, which won both its bids in the last round of funding, applied for the latest cash allocation announced on 18 January.

The three successful bids were funding for Haigh Hall in Wigan, a Green Technology and Innovation Network in Oldham and Partington Sports Village in Trafford.

Chris Gee, Local Democracy Reporting Service