Today’s review by the National Audit Office describes
the process by which the Ministry of Housing, Communities &
Local Government (the Department) selected the 101 towns that in
September 2019 it invited to bid for up to £25 million, or up to
£50 million in exceptional circumstances, from the £3.6 billion
Towns Fund for England (The Towns Fund).
The Towns Fund aims to provide a selection of towns
across England with funding to address issues such as ageing
populations, limited regional economic opportunities and lack of
investment. Each selected town has been invited to put forward a
plan for how they will spend the funding and what it will
achieve, which must then be agreed with the Department to form
the basis of a Town Deal.
This review describes the process followed by the
Department to select the 101 towns. First, this involved an
assessment – scoring, ranking, filtering and prioritising – of
all 1,082 towns across England by the Department’s officials
against a range of criteria. Second, ministers selected the towns
to be invited to bid for Town Deals using the officials’
assessments to guide them.1 The Department published
the list of selected towns in September 2019 but did not publish
the basis on which they selected the towns.
We set out in this review:
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The criteria, process and sources of evidence used
by the Department to assess and rank towns.
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The results of the assessments and ranking of
towns, which towns were selected, and the rationales given for
selection.
This report considers only the process for
determining the 101 towns invited to develop Town Deals. The two
other, separate strands of Towns Fund – the Future High Streets
Fund and the upcoming competition for towns – are outside the
scope of this report. While the Department has committed to a
further competitive element of the Towns Fund, it has not yet
decided what this will focus on and ministers have not considered
the priorities or criteria to be used to select towns. The
Department intends to design the process and any associated
methodology for the competitive element of the fund in due
course.
- ENDS -
Notes for Editors
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Officials provided ministers with suggestions of other
factors they might consider in their selection. This included
disqualifying the largest towns, or towns with a City Deal;
clustering towns; aiming to spread town deals across and
within LEPs; and, consulting with mayors on town selection.
See paragraph 2.6 for more details.
