Policy paper

Towns Fund monitoring and evaluation strategy: executive summary

Published 2 December 2021

Applies to England

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Cities and Local Growth Unit, DLUHC and BEIS

Executive summary

A £3.6 billion fund to regenerate towns and high streets

The Towns Fund was announced by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) in July 2019, with total funding of £3.6 billion. The Towns Fund comprises of two funds:

  • Town Deals – aiming to drive the economic regeneration of towns to deliver long term economic and productivity growth. In September 2019, 101 towns in England were selected to develop Town Deals.

  • Future High Streets Fund – aiming to renew and reshape town centres and high streets. In December 2020, 72 places in England had been successful in funding applications.

Struggling places face a range of problems

There are over 1,000 towns and over 6,000 high streets in England – some are prospering whilst others struggle. The Covid-19 pandemic is likely to have exacerbated this situation. Evidence suggests that struggling places face persistent challenges that make it difficult for them to change, including:

  • Disconnection – transport and digital connectivity infrastructure are out of date, insufficient or not suited to local needs.
  • Land use and buildings are not suited to modern demands – specific physical assets require rehabilitation/remediation; many places are not designed for mixed use, leading to vacant properties, unused spaces and low density/isolated housing; properties are often unsuited to the post-industrial economy.
  • Low skills and business support – residents do not consistently have the relevant skills and knowledge required for higher-skilled, higher-paying roles – this can sometimes be explained by the decline of particular industries in places (particularly relevant for post-industrial places); also, potential entrepreneurs do not have the relevant resources or support to start businesses locally, restricting the number and quality of jobs available.
  • Limited strategic, local economic management – some local authorities have lacked the specific funding and capacity to develop and implement economic development plans in response to the long-term economic challenges in their local areas.
  • These problems contribute to other issues in these places, including poor health, low social mobility, inequality, depopulation, crime, and low levels of pride.

The Towns Fund promotes a range of different interventions to address these problems

The problem analysis highlights the role that ‘place’ plays in explaining fortunes of struggling towns and high streets, and the Towns Fund seeks to address these by focusing primarily on capital investment to deliver the physical infrastructure, and changes to land and building use, that many of these struggling places need.

The Town Deals interventions are focused specifically on urban regeneration, planning and land use, skills and enterprise infrastructure, transport and digital connectivity.

The Future High Streets Fund interventions are focused on urban regeneration, planning and land use and transport.

The Fund’s monitoring and evaluation provides an opportunity to learn about what works for the benefit of future local growth programmes

The evaluation of the Towns Fund comprises 4 key components.

Monitoring: used to ensure financial and output targets and milestones are achieved, ensuring funding meets agreed terms, and understanding how project delivery is working.  Local authorities will be providing monitoring data on a 6 monthly and annual basis for the duration of their projects to enable learning and to help manage risk and uncertainty.

Process evaluation: aims to understand how the two different application and funding processes have worked, learning lessons for future local growth funding programmes; and how the different types of projects were delivered by different areas, sharing lessons to enable changes to be implemented through the lifecycle of projects.

Impact evaluation and supporting research: aims to use counterfactuals (a method of evaluation to determine impact of an intervention) to estimate the extent to which economic, social and environmental outcomes have changed as a result of the Towns Fund – for the fund as a whole, as well as looking at the impact of specific interventions. It will explore specified outcomes: whether local economies have improved; quality of life and well-being, resident incomes, business profitability, employment, visitors/footfall and perceptions of place. It will explore success factors in places, local decision making, and how this contributes to Levelling-up.

Value for money evaluation: aims to assess the impact of expenditure on economic regeneration – following Green Book principles. This will indicate whether inputs were economic (least cost for relevant level of quality/success), efficient (value of outputs or outcomes in relation to total cost of inputs), and effective (outcomes achieved in relation to total cost of inputs).

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