Angela Rayner, secretary of state for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said Labour’s Plan for Neighbourhoods “puts local people in the driving seat of their potential” (photo: MHCLG/Wikimedia Commons).

Criticism for Tories as Labour launches Plan for Neighbourhoods

The Labour government this week announced the Plan for Neighbourhoods, a £1.5bn fund to be dispensed to 75 deprived towns and areas, including Hastings, Rother and Eastbourne, to “foster stronger, better connected and healthier communities across the UK.” Nick Terdre reports.

Each of Hastings, Rother and Eastbourne will receive £20m from the £1.5bn Plan for Neighbourhood funds to be dispensed over 10 years, with the aim of seeing “their high streets revived, community hubs saved and public services transformed and strengthened,” in the words of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

The Plan for Neighburhoods is in fact the new name for the Conservative government’s Long Term Plan for Towns first announced in 2023. In Hastings it got under way last year with the formation of a town board charged with drawing up a long-term plan for the town and identifying the projects which would benefit from the funding.

But apart from some capacity funding to allow preparatory planning to proceed, the £940,000 which Hastings was meant to receive in 2024/25 did not come.

Instead the MHCLG told HOT that, “The Long-Term Plan for Towns was an unfunded commitment, for which the previous administration had no plan as to how that promise would be delivered. Our Plan for Neighbourhoods programme delivers on the Chancellor’s confirmation of funding at the Budget.

“This government is committed to making good on what places have been previously promised. It’s the repeated breaking of promises that undermines trust in our democracy.”

The first tranche of funding is now due to be released in April. “We are organising a meeting for the Hastings Board to discuss taking the plans forward,” the spokesperson said.

“For years, too many neighbourhoods have been starved of investment, despite their potential to thrive and grow,” Angela Rayner, secretary of state for Housing, Communities and Local Government said.

“Communities across the UK have so much to offer – rich cultural capital, unique heritage but most of all, an understanding of their own neighbourhood.”

“We will do things differently, our fully funded Plan for Neighbourhoods puts local people in the driving seat of their potential, having control of where the Whitehall cash goes – what issues they want to tackle, where they want to regenerate and what growth they want to turbocharge.”

While the Long Term Plan for Towns was one of the Sunak government’s cluster of levelling-up initiatives, the Plan for Neighbourhoods forms part of Labour’s Plan for Change. It will be administered through neighbourhood boards which bring together “residents, businesses and grassroots campaigners to draw up and implement a new vision for their neighbourhood.”

But whether the Hastings Board will be around to administer the funding in coming years seems unlikely, given the government’s decision to abolish borough and district councils in 2028 as further stages of its devolution policy are implemented.

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