Recommendation 14

The Department’s accounting officer reasoned that we had discussed and reported on the Towns Fund at quite considerable length and that he felt it had a been a valid and fair process.37 In respect of the Levelling Up Fund, he said that there had been a very high level of transparency, referring to an explanatory note setting out how decisions were taken, that it had published alongside the list of 105 successful bidders.38 Contrary to the Department’s indications about data published, it did not publish a list of unsuccessful bidders or any thematic distributional analysis of bids and awards and there is no transparency of the location and type of unsuccessful versus successful bids.The Department reassured us that the party of the local MP played no part in the decision-making but that, as they had set out in advance, there was a small allowance in the scoring for where a bid had demonstrated local MP support.39