Conservatives find Money for Sunak’s Constituency but not for Crawley

Last week the Government announced the second round of Levelling Up Fund bids and once again Crawley missed out, with the Prime Minister’s own constituency–one of the wealthiest in the country–receiving £19m in capital funding.

Honestly, this didn’t come as a surprise, Crawley has repeatedly been at the bottom of the list when it comes to Government funding under the Conservatives…literally in some cases, with the town being put in the lowest possible category on the priority list for for Levelling Up Funding. This was despite the Government billing the funding as being part of the national recovery effort from COVID and Crawley’s economy having suffered the biggest hit in the country.

The formulas Government departments use for rating bids is always deliberately opaque, this isn’t a surprise as it makes them easier to fiddle. I recall one council chief executive telling me that it was well known that the Government decided council funding by starting with a list of councils they wanted to prioritise and then devising the formula which would deliver that result.

Clearly, when you look at the constituencies which get funding and which don’t it is clear that there’s cronyism at play here. What is more remarkable is that as a seat with a Conservative MP, you might have assumed that Henry Smith might be able to lend some weight to getting the town the support it needs. Time and time again, the evidence is that either Mr Smith isn’t putting in the effort to try to secure a win for Crawley or he simply doesn’t have the clout within even his own party to get funding allocated. Either way, the result is the same: so long as he’s our MP things simply won’t ever get better.

It’s even more of a shame when you know what the funding would have been used for. Since before the time I joined the council, people have been complaining about different parts of the town centre, wanting to see them improved and to create a better environment to attract the retail, hospitality and leisure businesses residents want to see in their town centre. Had we been successful, our £10m bid would have done exactly this, regenerating The Martletts, The Broadway and the Broadwalk.

Still, as a town and as a community we will soldier on and hope for the day when we have a Government, or at least an MP, who genuinely cares about more than just our votes.