Stronger Towns Index for English Local Authorities
A brief which investigates the way in which funds from the Government's Stronger Towns Fund were allocated.
CeLSIUS developed a Stronger Towns Index for English local authorities (LAs) based on productivity, income, skills, deprivation measures and proportion of people living in towns.
We compared this to the towns that were invited to bid for a Town Deal and identified 29 LAs containing towns which were invited to apply for funding but which were not in the top 100 ranking LAs. One local authority we identified as highly ranked (10th) whose towns were not invited is Swale, in Kent, which suffered extremely high rates of Covid-19 in Autumn 2020.