Recommendation 16

According to its business case, the Department expected to allocate £720 million of the total £4.8 billion budget in the first round of the Levelling Up Fund. In October 2021, government announced 105 successful bids totalling £1.7 billion for the first round.47 The Department told us that there had been a large number of good-quality bids and, as part of the routine course of the spending review, the Chancellor thought it would it appropriate to fund £1.7 billion work of projects in the first round.48 The Department and HM Treasury were unsure whether bidders had any indication how much government was intending to award in the first round of funding but HM Treasury told us that the figure £720 million had never been in the public domain.49 We expressed some concern that local authorities would have had to decide whether to bid in the first round or to wait to later rounds and that the greater the money paid out in the first round, the smaller the amount available for those that chose to hang back. We noted the risk that this decision may have been more difficult for local authorities not familiar with these particular bidding processes, such as those in the devolved administrations.50