Tories only spent a quarter of money allocated to levelling up Exclusive: FoI requests reveal £2.5bn was spent out of £10.6bn fund for three main local regeneration schemes.
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 flagship regional spending scheme failed to live up to expectations.
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.
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.
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.
