Future High Streets Fund announcement within ‘weeks’

The government will announce which bids have been successful under the £1bn Future High Streets Fund within ‘weeks’, according to a senior civil servant.

Speaking in front of the public accounts committee yesterday (21 September), the director general of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Emran Minian said the government was ‘very conscious that towns have worked extremely hard to prepare these bids’ and that an announcement should be made within ‘a matter of weeks’.

‘I don’t think I’m in a position to be absolutely definitive and say that’s something that we’ll be able to do in October,’ he told MPs.

‘We haven’t yet put decisions to ministers for them to make. So, I expect it may feel a little bit later into the year than October, but it will be a matter of weeks, rather than months.’

The £1bn Future High Streets Fund was originally launched in December 2018 and the government announced in August 2019 that 100 towns had been shortlisted and invited to make bids.

Also appearing in front of the committee was the Whitehall department’s permanent secretary, Jeremy Pocklington, who was grilled about the selection process for the Towns Fund.

The National Audit Office published a report in July into the process after concerns of a lack of transparency were raised by opposition MPs.

In September 2019, it published the list of 100 places that would be invited to develop proposals for the Fund.

The shortlist included 42 places across the Northern Powerhouse and 33 places in the Midlands Engine, including Blackpool, Doncaster and Middlesbrough.

According to the NAO report, an initial assessment of all 1,082 towns in England was drawn up by officials at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Mr Pocklington said the government took a ‘deals-based approach’ to the Towns Fund rather than a competitive process that towns could bid for.

‘The reason for doing that is that we thought that the towns most in need of investment may be least ready to prepare a competitive bid and we did not want to have a process that was unfair on those towns,’ Mr Pocklington told MPs.

‘And that was because that we judged that many of these towns, some of them are relatively small, may lack the resources, the capacity and the experience of working with the department.

‘What a deals based approach based on a selection does is that enables us to provide advice and support to help towns develop their beard and build capacity.’

Photo Credit – Free-Photos (Pixabay)