Scarborough: Uncertainty over future regeneration funding after MP tells councillors it has been 'paused' until the Budget
Scarborough and Whitby MP Alison Hume said she and other MPs from affected towns had lobbied Local Growth Minister Alex Norris.
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Hide AdShe said: “It’s obviously disappointing that the Government has had to pause the Long Term Plan For Towns funding whilst it considers how best to prioritise public spending.”
She said Mr Norris “is in no doubt of the critical need for this funding in Scarborough if we are to deliver regeneration, economic growth and job creation”.
Councillor Heather Phillips, Conservative executive member for corporate services, said the MP’s announcement dropped like a grenade during an update on Thursday. She said: “I honestly do hope it will happen. We have a lot of changes within the town centre that are needed to improve the town for everybody.
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Hide Ad"We need some confidence from central government to do this. The mood music from Westminster is that levelling up is not their priority.
"They are not terribly fans of it.”
It comes as it emerged that plans for a technical skills and innovation centre, one of the nine projects in the town awarded £20m in March 2021 under the previous government’s Town Deal programme, has hit the buffers.
Scarborough Town Board, which is charged with delivering the projects, was unable to find a delivery partner for the project, known as FabLab. A sum of £1m has been reallocated to the £11m West Pier project, while another £200,000 which has been left over, will be offered in grants to businesses to address the digital skills gap.
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Hide AdFabLab was originally earmarked for the eyesore former Comet building, which would have been replaced with high quality digital workspace.
Chair of the Scarborough Town Board David Kerfoot said they’d looked at several sites for FabLab, including Pavilion House, but the sums hadn’t stacked up. He said: “Everybody was really in favour and strongly behind it, but in the end we couldn’t get a delivery partner who would ensure that we would get a clear path for delivering what we wanted. We had two bodies interested in taking it forward; in the end it wasn’t going to work from a revenue point of view from their perspective.”
One was Hull-based digital hub and business incubator C4DI, who’d “have been absolutely perfect”.
Mr Kerfoot said the money would have been lost if they hadn’t made the decision to reallocate it, and the extra £1m would help the West Pier project as building costs had risen, along with inflation.