The UK Shared Prosperity Fund provides a great opportunity to underpin the ongoing revitalisation of our town and city centres. All that is stopping this is the way the plans and supporting partnerships, are put together. With time not on the side of the lead authorities, here we share our tips on putting together a winning Shared Prosperity plan.
1. Agree the importance of town and city centres
The level of people’s satisfaction with their town centre is identified in the government guidance as a headline contributor to delivering the key Shared Prosperity mission of boosting pride in place. Indeed, our earlier review of government guidance showed that issues such as the town centre business mix and empty shops are key components in monitoring pride in place. Agreement to focus on town and city centres as part of putting together a winning Shared Prosperity Plan, nevertheless, has to be considered alongside other funding objectives for boosting wider productivity and skills.
2. Build your plan around place-based evidence
Ideally build up your Shared Prosperity investment plan from place-based evidence of need at the individual town or city neighbourhood level, with locally agreed solutions. Processes such as the LGA’s revitalising town centre toolkit for local councils, offer a recognised approach for identifying and addressing need at the town level. Where such town specific evidence or existing plans do not exist, buy time by including town centre action planning as a first step in delivering your winning Shared Prosperity plan.
3. Focus on partnerships as much as projects
Resist the temptation to rush engagement with partners even though the initial timeframes seem short. At the strategic level such as district-wide, and the town level, focus on building lasting partnerships that bring together different knowledge and capabilities. Embrace the Shared Prosperity Fund’s guidance that emphasises the importance of a “comprehensive and balanced area-wide partnership as a core strategic component” of putting together a winning Shared Prosperity plan. Reflect this at the local level with town-based partnerships focused on coordinating and communicating activity for the duration of Shared Prosperity delivery and beyond.
4. Build capacity to deliver local priorities
An influential report on “building our social infrastructure”, cited in the Government’s Levelling Up guidance, recommends that “25% of the future UK Shared Prosperity Fund should be passed directly to community-led partnerships.” Take this guidance as your benchmark and use the Shared Prosperity’s Funds allowance for supporting interventions creating social capital (E9); enabling community engagement (E12); and building civic capacity (E11), to enable local capacity building.
5. Link issues, interventions and impacts
Both in putting together a winning Shared Prosperity plan, and its delivery, embrace and adapt the Fund’s emphasis on linking an understanding of issues, with effective interventions and impact measures. At People & Places, we have put together guidance to help you achieve this. In our new guide on potential Shared Prosperity interventions for town centres, we assess the fit between solutions tried and tested in using the LGA’s revitalising town centre toolkit in over 30 towns, against the Fund’s the eligibility criteria. Simply email services@people-places.net for a free copy of this guide demonstrating how to link identified town centre issues, eligible interventions and meaningful measures of impacts taken from the Shared Prosperity Fund guidance.
A winning Shared Prosperity plan is one that works
The timeframes for putting together a Shared Prosperity Fund investment plan may seem daunting. Take confidence though, from the fact that it is not a competitive process and focus on putting together a winning Shared Prosperity plan with proposals that you believe can help underpin the ongoing revitalisation of town and city centres. This will involve skilfully managing the process to create lasting partnerships, build local capacity and create an evidence base of identified issues that can translate into effective interventions with measurable impacts to show success. A winning plan is not one that simply secures the cash; it is one that works!
Find out more
You can watch a video presentation covering the main points of this blog, prepared for the ATCM Roundtable discussion on town centre interventions through Shared Prosperity Fund.
Find out more about the Shared Prosperity Fund and the opportunities it provides for sharing prosperity across our towns and cities, or request a copy of our new, free guide on the Shared Prosperity Fund: potential interventions for town centres, from services@people-places.net.
Read the guest blog from Iain Nicholson, founder of the Vacant Shops Academy on a measurable response to tackling empty shops and the related blog on monitoring pride in place.
The People & Places Partnership are creators of the Local Government Association’s national guidance for local leaders on revitalising town centres toolkit. This toolkit includes practical guidance on approaches to post-COVID 19 recovery planning and levelling up, with a methodology that can be used in Shared Prosperity Fund investment planning and delivery.
