The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has announced the successful bids to Round 2 of the £2.1 billion Levelling Up Fund. Despite Sheffield submitting two bids, for Parkwood Springs and Heeley Development Trust, this funding round saw no Levelling Up Fund allocation to Sheffield in this round.

It’s incredibly frustrating to see Sheffield passed over for any Levelling Up funding, and the wider Yorkshire and Humber region deprioritised yet again for the South East.

When the South East is given almost double what Yorkshire receives, and when two-thirds of the fund goes to Tory-held seats, it’s clear that Rishi Sunak’s Government has abandoned any pretence to care about levelling up the north.

I’m deeply concerned about the continued use of competitive funding pots, and the time and capacity this Government has made local authorities waste in writing unsuccessful bids: pitting local authority against local authority to put together an attractive bid, in the hope that they might be successful, is a completely unsustainable method of enabling levelling up.

A fragmented, inefficient, and underwhelming system which just serves to highlight to lack of an actual Government strategy to grow our economy and tackle years of neglect for our regions. This falls far short of the economic transformation we so desperately need.