UK Shared Prosperity Fund
Central pillar of the UK government’s Levelling Up agenda £2.6 billion of new funding for local investment by
March 2025 to build pride in place and increase life chances across the UK.
Welcome the three investment priorities:
- Community and Place;
- Supporting Local Business;
- People and Skills – Multiply programme, followed by broader investment from 24/25
West Midlands Combined Authority is identified as the lead authority for the 7 Met area. This involves:
- developing an Investment Plan for approval by the UK government
- receiving an area’s allocation to manage
- assessing and approving project applications
- processing payments and day-to-day monitoring.
We welcome the opportunity to lead a strategic joined-up approach to identifying investment priorities that will support our levelling up ambitions. It is an opportunity to do things differently and better.
But the funding is not sufficient to do everything that we would want to, and the timetable for ‘people
and skills’ priority in particular creates a risk to provision and capacity to deliver.
We are working to identify the impact of this within the region – and to raise these issues with central
government, in order to explore how we minimise the impact, and strategically focus future investment.