infrastructure

A great leveller

This article originally appeared in the Municipal Journal.

Despite its clear flaws, the Levelling Up Fund is one of the few funding mechanisms councils can access to provide much needed investment in their places.

Launching this week, a new report from the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) and the Centre for Local Economic Studies (CLES) provides a guide for how councils can avoid falling into the trap of developing regeneration initiatives that extract wealth and deliver poor outcomes for people, place and planet, with a toolkit for projects to maximise their positive impacts locally.

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Community is economic energy – we must use it

This article originally appeared in the LGC

Post-Covid-19, local authorities must guard against merely following the economic development path taken after the global financial crisis. Then, as now, the bounceback was predicated on a stimulus programme in which national government sought a return to growth via its willingness to part investment in “shovel ready” hard infrastructure and regeneration projects. But whilst these shovel ready projects offer construction jobs over the very short term, over the longer term, jobs are dependent on subsequent investment.

Therein lies the rub: in a highly-probable global recession investment will be sluggish at best. With many of these projects predicated on commercial office or retail development, securing additional funds will be challenging, especially given ongoing social distancing measures, changing consumer behaviour and the normalisation of home working.

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  • BULLETIN

    The Autumn Statement 2014

    17th December 2014
    239.9kB     .pdf
    This bulletin seeks to explore this debate of infrastructure development versus cuts in more detail and highlight what was in the ...