Towns Fund: Levelling Up in Action
Neil O’Brien, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, discusses how the Towns Fund is helping drive Levelling Up.
Our Towns are the lifeblood of this country. Each community represented within the 101 Towns across the Towns Fund programme has its own local pride and something unique to offer.
This is why the Towns Fund is such a key part of the Government’s mission to level-up the country. The programme enables regeneration, improves quality of life, and increases opportunity for thousands of communities.
Through the Towns Fund programme, 101 Towns are carrying out major regeneration work to transform communities, and we're working with them to turn their visions into reality. The Towns Fund Delivery Partner is also working with project leads to build sustainability into both design and operation to help deliver a net zero future.
The 12 Missions outlined in the recent Levelling Up White Paper set an ambition to deliver tangible change in our communities. This includes hundreds of thousands more people completing high quality skills training every year, significantly increasing arts spending outside of the capital to restore local pride and improving local public transport connectivity by 2030.
Small improvements at a local level cumulatively enrich the quality of life for a whole region. The work of the Towns Fund is already helping to improve people’s pride of place. The projects below are just a few examples of Towns who are already delivering change and regeneration on the ground.
Creating hundreds of new jobs and changing the face of the Lincolnshire coast
Towns Fund is supporting East Lindsey District Council to bring ambitious and diverse plans in Lincolnshire to life, stretching across urban greening, public transport, housing and tourism schemes.
Skegness and Mablethorpe in East Lindsey, Lincolnshire, have been working on the development of a theatre, nature resort, train station, learning campus and even a 136-hectare urban extension to modernise the Towns.
Mablethorpe is a seaside town with high levels of poor health and 58% of its working population describe themselves as inactive, compared to 20% in England. The improvements to be delivered through the Towns Fund projects in the area will inject exciting new jobs and opportunities in the area.
The Mablethorpe Campus for Future Living, which has a target to support 150 start-ups through business incubation spaces and 500 different training interventions.
Improvements to Mablethorpe Colonnade will bring exciting new events and festivals, which are expected to boost the local economy by around £3m a year as with both both new and returning visitors.
According to Lydia Rusling, Assistant Director for Economic Growth for East Lindsey District Council in the Towns Fund ‘Our Town Stories’ profile on Mablethorpe, “the combination of the Towns Fund itself, the work to engage with the local community and our partners, and the idea for the Campus for Future Living have all combined to be an immensely strong magnet” with a key connection to the local community.
Four key themes of Levelling Up are Connectivity, Education & Skills, Regeneration and Business. These themes exemplify how the Towns Fund is focused on supporting and upskilling our communities, giving them a strong foundation to invest in the futures of these vibrant coastal communities.
Inspiring the young creatives of Margate
Levelling Up is also about supporting and enhancing cultural engagement and education throughout the country, not just in our biggest cultural centres. Margate’s Creative Land Trust supports creatives including design, music, publishing, architecture, film and video, crafts, visual arts, fashion, TV and radio, advertising, literature, computer games and the performing arts.
It is due a significant boost, in the form of renovations to 2000m2 of office space, and the refurbishment of three new buildings which are currently derelict.
The project’s Business Case was the first to be approved for the Margate Town Deal.
Accelerating the road to Net Zero in Corby
As we continue efforts to decarbonise at a national level, a new campus in Corby will transform Tresham College, the former 1950s office block, into a modern, zero-carbon building to bring hundreds of students back to Corby Town Centre. This project is a gamechanger for students across the local area, with improved educational opportunities through the re-introduction of a wide-ranging A-level syllabus.
The college has a target of 936 new learners over four years, creating 36 new FTE (Full-Time equivalent) new jobs.
There will also be a safe cycle route into the Town Centre which will provide a vital active travel link to support people of all generations to live, work and travel more sustainably.
The local benefits these projects provide can positively shape our communities’ futures and provide new opportunities across the board. Levelling Up, both regionally and nationally, is made possible through these incremental improvements across our Towns.
I look forward to working with all our Towns as the Towns Fund programme progresses and seeing these projects brought forward, opening a new positive chapter in the rich history of these unique communities.
Neil O’Brien
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities