The figures existed long before anyone read them aloud. They sat in the returns of 1,347 individual projects, each carrying a start date, a budget line and an expected completion. When the data was finally released under freedom of information laws and checked by hand, the sum it produced did not match the announcements that had preceded it. Of those 1,347 levelling up projects, 821 were not finalised as of May this year. That is 57 per cent still unfinished, years after the money was allocated. In 73 council areas across the UK, a bid had been accepted and not a single project had been fully completed as of May this year. A further 59 projects have been finished since the data was collected, which improves the ratio without changing its direction.
The promise behind those projects was made in 2019, when Boris Johnson’s government swept to power pledging to revive left-behind towns and spread opportunity under a levelling up agenda headed by Michael Gove. The project was the visible unit of that promise: a town hall, a station gateway, a skills centre.
The three funds arrived in sequence, each with its own deadline attached. The Future High Streets Fund opened in 2018 and was supposed to complete by March 2024. Town Deals followed in 2019, and the Levelling Up Fund in 2021; for both, the official deadline for spending all the money was March 2026. Under Labour, the Levelling Up Fund and the Town Deals were folded into a single Local Regeneration Fund. The deadline moved to March 2028. Extending a deadline is not the same as delivering a project, but it is a statement about the schedule.
Money has moved more slowly than the paperwork. Almost £1.8m of Town Deals awards is only being released this year and next, according to the Towns Fund Main Evaluation Report. The campaign group Power to Change calculated that at least £1bn of the £4.8bn Levelling Up Fund launched in 2021 was still stuck in limbo by 2024. Allocation is not expenditure. Expenditure is not a finished building. A finished building is not a working service.
Jack Shaw, the director of Groundwork Research, which supplied the data, named the distance between intention and result: “Despite significant funding, too many one-off commitments have failed to translate into substantive improvements in communities or local economies.” [1] His reading of the current scheme is more favourable: “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.” He added that 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.”
Where the Money Went and Why It Stopped
This is not a first attempt. In 2011, David Cameron’s government commissioned the retail adviser Mary Portas to produce solutions, which led to 10 pilot revamps. Several of those towns — Margate, Stockport and Stockton among them — are now cited as examples of regeneration. Others, including Croydon and Wolverhampton, continue to struggle.
The scale of the spending is easy to state and hard to picture. A string of successors to the Portas scheme — including the town deals and the levelling up fund — has pumped almost £12bn into town centres in the past seven years without producing widespread regeneration. The towns fund wraps together the £2.3bn in programme money awarded to 101 places in 2019 with the Future High Streets Fund, under which 72 places shared awards worth £830m from 2020. That is a large sum in aggregate and a modest one per site, and the difference between those two facts is where most projects live.
The pandemic and the inflation that followed, particularly on construction costs, forced many recipients to scale back, pause or redraw their plans, and difficulties in securing sites or planning permission added further slippage. Difficulties in securing sites or planning permission added further slippage. A focus on buildings and other infrastructure left projects short of resources for the staff needed to run them. Weak high street spending meanwhile led businesses and entrepreneurs to move cash once spent on improving stores towards selling online.
The pattern repeats across the map. Blackburn with Darwen council had eight projects funded through the Local Regeneration Fund, none of which has been fully completed. In Leeds, all eight funded projects are yet to close: five are in Morley — a town hall refurbishment, a learning and skills centre, a station gateway transport scheme, a project to make the area greener and better connected, and a Heritage Investment Programme that is only partly complete. Two more in Holbeck, a green housing retrofit and a local centre scheme, remain incomplete, as do the St Matthew’s community centre and Old Box Office project.
There is a benefit side, and it is not small. Henrietta Billings, the director of Save Britain’s Heritage, which campaigns for the preservation of historical buildings, said: “I think it is right the government is recognising that people are really fed up with seeing, at best, paint peeling off all the buildings … They see when no one cares about them and can feel let down. Set against that record, the ledger is mixed rather than damning.
What a Local Board Can Actually Buy
The current scheme was designed around those failures. Pride in Place was launched under Keir Starmer as a revamp of previous Conservative plans, then expanded to offer 284 deprived communities up to £2m a year for 10 years, inside a £5.8bn national programme. On becoming prime minister, Andy Burnham made clear that reviving town centres would be one of his priorities and gave his backing to the £5.8bn national programme, which also fits his wider devolution drive. Funding is allocated on published deprivation and community need data rather than on bids. The menu of automatically accepted spending runs from skills training to modernising social housing to making space for nature, with locally relevant alternatives subject to approval. Unlike many predecessors, it can cover a project’s running costs. Neighbourhood boards of residents, businesses and community members allocate the money alongside the council, and the communities secretary, Angela Rayner, framed the change plainly: “Our pride in place programme is a break from past approaches by putting local people in charge … no more ‘Whitehall knows best’. This is local people deciding what matters most to them.” [1]. Once the world’s largest fishing port, the Lincolnshire town has been hit badly by the decline of its trawler fleet since the 1950s, and the council has spent the lion’s share of the £59m in government-backed regeneration funds awarded to it since 2021 on the town centre. It is now beginning to spend a further £20m from Pride in Place. In June, King Charles visited to celebrate a youth centre in a previously derelict Victorian warehouse and a charity drop-in centre in a vacant bank on the high street. Scaffolding shrouds one end of the shopping centre, part of which is being converted for a cinema and a food market. “It is nice to see something happening for once,” said Jack Vincent, a local resident in town with his partner and two young children, who added: “It is getting better and we have got the new cinema coming.” Linda Hooper, 75, put it more soberly: “They are generally making it nicer and there’s a good shopping centre.” The shopping itself is not the problem. On a Friday, the Freshney Place centre is busy, with a revamped Marks & Spencer, a Primark and a good mix of other shops, while the nearby Abbeygate pedestrianised street is packed with independent boutiques and eateries. The main high street, by contrast, is punctuated by vacant units and has become a racetrack for teenagers on bikes and scooters. Large commercial buildings remain empty: a former Wilko, a former House of Fraser, and Victorian structures including the vast Victoria Mills and the Grimsby Ice Factory. The Riverhead building, put up in the noughties and once home to a row of bars, finally welcomed an inflatable play park in September after standing empty since 2024, and the revamped St James’ Square is still bordered by shuttered premises. Spencer Hunt of the local council is direct about the position: “We still have issues.” The scepticism has an arithmetic behind it. Neela Parker Talwar, from the Centre for Cities, argues that “£20m is not so much money” and is unlikely to be able to fund major projects such as buying up large empty buildings for redevelopment. Communities may know their own problems better than Whitehall does, but the causes of high street vacancy can sit beyond a local authority’s reach: access to jobs, transport, schools, “things the local authority can have leverage over but only to an extent”. You can’t expect Blackburn to become Cambridge,” Talwar says.” Grimsby’s own diagnosis points somewhere other than the grant letter. The council has brought in Our Future, a local group backed by Jason Stockwood, the entrepreneur behind Grimsby Town football club, to help catalyse community involvement, with £850,000 in grant funding to be handed out to local projects making use of vacant buildings. Mark Webb, who heads up the Grimsby 2025 group of local businesses aiming to invest in local regeneration, dates the change to a shift in what the town believes it is for: “For Grimsby the stars aligned when we stopped thinking about fishing and started thinking about wind. We stopped looking back and started looking forward.” [1] The niches he lists are logistics, chemicals and food processing as well as renewables, and his view of the present is unembarrassed: “We are a typical northern industrial town. We weren’t going anywhere, but now we are. People look at the town now and it is a bit of a mess, but it is a brilliant mess because someone is doing something behind those hoardings.” Politics runs alongside the economics. In May, voters in North East Lincolnshire gave Reform a large enough vote to take minority control of the council, in a town that backed Brexit overwhelmingly on the promise of a fishing revival and then lost processing jobs after the UK left the EU.
More money is still being announced. Last month brought a further £210m to help turn boarded-up shops and other businesses into community spaces, and hopes are pinned on further money for regeneration in John Healey’s first budget as chancellor on 28 October. Neither answers the question the file of 821 unfinished projects poses, which is not whether Britain can write a cheque but whether a cheque can arrive before the thing it was meant to save has closed.
Widened far enough, the frame stops making the town centre look like a local failure. It is the part of an economy a person can walk through, and it was laid out for a way of buying and banking that has since moved onto a screen — a shift running for decades, first through out-of-town retail parks and then through the internet. What is being asked of Grimsby, Blackburn and Leeds is that they rebuild a physical form for a function that has partly left it, using fixed-term capital in a place where the binding constraint is revenue, demand and time. The honest measure of the £12bn is not the ribbon-cuttings but the hoardings, and behind some of them a town is quietly changing what it produces: not fish, but wind, logistics, chemicals and food. Economies do not regenerate because a scheme is announced; they regenerate when the work underneath the announcement changes, and the state’s contribution is measured in whether it arrives in time to help.
Sources
Mentioned organisations (context, not sources)
- Labour Party — Organisation (homepage)
- Power to Change — Organisation (homepage)
- Save Britain’s Heritage — Organisation (homepage)
- Conservative Party — Organisation (homepage)
- Centre for Cities — Organisation (homepage)
- Marks & Spencer — Organisation (homepage)
- Primark — Organisation (homepage)
- Wilko — Organisation (homepage)
- Grimsby Town Football Club — Organisation (homepage)