Stronger Towns Index
CeLSIUS developed a Stronger Towns Index for English local authorities (LAs) in order to investigate the way in which funds from the Government's Stronger Towns Fund were allocated.
Policy brief
Oliver Duke-Williams, Jemima Stockton and Nicola Shelton
CeLSIUS has 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. We identified 29 LAs containing towns which were invited to apply for funding but which were not in the top 100 ranking LAs.
We also identified 44 LAs in our which were high ranked but not invited were in the East and West Midlands and many were near larger conurbations. 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.