Northern regions received £21m less from Government’s flagship ‘levelling up’ fund

New analysis of the government’s Community Renewal Fund allocation has found that the North missed out on funding to the tune of £21m.

The CRF, which was a cornerstone of the government’s ‘Levelling Up’ agenda, was established to address regional inequalities through investment in place-based initiatives. However, the findings of a new study suggest that the current method for CRF allocation runs the risk of widening existing inequalities rather than ‘levelling up’.

Academics from Health Equity North (HEN), the University of Manchester and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration Greater Manchester (ARC-GM) examined the allocation of the first round of the CRF across regions, and whether more economically deprived regions are getting a proportionate share.

They found that: Nationally, there was no significant correlation between regional economic resilience and funding allocations. All regions in the North of England received less than their expected share of the flagship ‘levelling up’ fund. The least resilient region in England, the North East, received £13.4m less.
By contrast, the South West was awarded £9.9m more than their expected share.

To support CRF allocation, the government developed a way to measure economic resilience, which covered productivity, skills, unemployment, population density, and household income. These were selected to identify places with poor economic performance, which would be less able to resist and recover from shocks.

The CRF allocation process involved multiple stages, with the economic resilience index being used at the outset to identify 100 priority places. There are more than 10 steps from the identification of priority places to CRF bid approval, with the final decision made by the Secretary of State for the Department of Levelling up, Housing and Communities.

The analysis by HEN and ARC-GM used the UK government’s methodology to construct a regional economic resilience index to generate a ‘fair share’ funding allocation and compared these to the actual allocation. The average resilience score in England was 46.0, ranging from 28.5 in the North East to 65.6 in London.

Dr Luke Munford, co-academic director at Health Equity North, and Senior Lecturer in Health Economics at the University of Manchester, commented: “There are deep-rooted, persistent regional inequalities in health and wealth across England. People in the North live shorter lives and have higher rates of bad health, disability and economic inactivity.

“These inequalities have widened during recent decades and will continue to do so without effective policies put in place by the government. While investment like the Community Renewal Fund is very welcome, the methodology for distribution of the funding doesn’t add up and has the potential to further widen the North-South divide.”

By Matthew Neville – Senior Correspondent, Bdaily

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