The Towns Fund (£2.35 billion) is at the heart of the government’s ambition to level up places which have historically lacked investment and opportunity – paving the way for delivering over 700 projects across England.
The Department for Levelling up, Housing, and Communities (DLUHC) understood that to build stronger and more resilient local economies and communities, towns would need a delivery partner to support them.
Between May 2020 and July 2022, we helped communities across four cohorts develop a vision for their local areas and secure Town Deal offers to realise them. The towns also received support on business cases for agreed projects. Overall, we helped these communities win over £2.6 billion of committed funding from central government across more than 770 different projects.
We played a lead role in three key areas:
“Grant Thornton have been instrumental in providing specialist strategic advice across the programme and other workstreams they’ve led on, including monitoring and evaluation, and attracting investment. Their work has been highly commended, across DLUHC and by colleagues in other government departments. Feedback from towns has also been excellent.”
Louis Mayhew, Funding Delivery Portfolio Office, Cities and Local Growth Unit, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities
We delivered upskilling workshops and guidance on several issues: from theory of change to logic models, reflecting on COVID-19, and using data to make the case for investment – attracting private sector interest and developing revolving funds.
Towns received advice on potential delivery models, and developed a procurement approach to ensure the purchase of goods and services that drive value for money.
We also played a lead role in developing two key pieces of work for DLUHC: the programme-wide monitoring and evaluation framework; and a soft-market testing exercise on an investment fund for towns.
Throughout this two and half year engagement, over 30 experts from our real estates and assets, public service advisory, tax, and audit teams supported this project. Our regeneration development and housing team assist decision making in pursuing your objectives.
