Tories only spent a quarter of cash for levelling up, FoI requests show

The Conservatives spent only a quarter of the money they allocated to levelling up, according to freedom of information requests that underline how Michael Gove's key regional spending scheme failed to live up to expectations.

- Kiran Stacey

The previous government allocated £10.6bn to the three main schemes under the levelling up programme, which provided funding for regeneration projects as diverse as leisure centres and local transport networks.

But answers provided by the government to the local government expert Jack Shaw show it only managed to spend £2.5bn of that money, which experts blame on a mixture of high inflation, bureaucracy and poor decision-making.

Shaw said: "It is clear that short-term, competitive funding is not the most effective way of investing in communities. The Conservatives spent too long requiring local authorities to bid for funding, didn't get it out on time and changed the rules of the game throughout - making it very difficult for places to invest."

The former prime minister Boris Johnson promised that his levelling up programme would help solve Britain's longstanding regional inequalities. He put Gove in charge of the scheme, which was designed to secure value for money for the taxpayer by making local authorities bid against each other for pots of money handed out by the central government.