The 45 towns in England that will share just over £1bn from the Towns Fund were announced in Wednesday's Budget.

There has been some criticism of the towns chosen.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: "If you end up with a list of 45 areas where the funding is going in and 'by coincidence' 40 of them are where there is a Conservative MP, I think people would be saying, 'What's going on here? This looks fishy.'"

BBC News analysis found 56 constituencies would benefit, as some of the 45 towns cover multiple constituencies.

Of those, 47 have Conservative MPs, including 14 gained from Labour at the 2019 election.

The other nine have Labour MPs.

Following concern about the lack of transparency in that process, the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report setting out how the shortlist had been compiled.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) officials took a ranking of English towns by an Office for National Statistics (ONS) index of deprivation and then further ranked the 541 most deprived.

Officials concluded the shortlist met Treasury rules for managing public money. But it is clear there was considerable government divergence from the formula devised by the civil servants.

In a report on the process, the Public Accounts Committee of MPs said they were "not convinced by the rationales for selecting some towns and not others". It added that:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56283199



Cash for cronies .....

They have mostly conservative MP's because labour lost the election. That was because Corbyn was so utterly useless and Boris Johnson delivered what the public wanted.

Everyone knows labour run councils are the worst in the country, the answer is simple, don't vote labour.

they have mostly conservative mp's because labour lost the election. That was because corbyn was so utterly useless and boris johnson delivered what the public wanted.

Everyone knows labour run councils are the worst in the country, the answer is simple, don't vote labour.

Hi

Cheadle and Southport are both Millionaire Country.

We do not know exactly how the 45 winning towns were chosen from the 101 invited to apply.

But there were:

• 19 of the high priority
• 21 of the medium priority
• 5 of the low priority

And the 5 low-priority towns, Cheadle, Leyland, Morley, Southport and Stocksbridge are all in constituencies with a Conservative MP.

The most striking choice was Cheadle.

True .....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56283199

They have mostly conservative MP's because labour lost the election. That was because Corbyn was so utterly useless and Boris Johnson delivered what the public wanted.

Everyone knows labour run councils are the worst in the country, the answer is simple, don't vote labour.

Labour accused the government of using public money “to serve their own party’s needs” after Sunak’s own Tory constituency of Richmond in Yorkshire, and those of other cabinet ministers (see below), were put in the top tier to receive money from a new fund.

The chancellor rejected this, saying: “The formula for the grant payment for the new fund is based on an index of economic need, which is transparently published by MHCLG [the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government], and based on a bunch of objective measures.”

Labour said the levelling up fund not only now had Sunak’s local authority in tier 1, but also areas represented by the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick (Tory, Newark), the Welsh secretary, Simon Hart (Tory, Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire), the Scottish secretary, Alister Jack (Tory, Dumfries and Galloway), and the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis (Tory, Great Yarmouth).

Sheer coincidence .....