Council Leader urges UK Government to deliver £20m Town Fund to Wrexham

The Leader of Wrexham Council has said people locally would be “extremely disappointed” if £20 million of funding allocated to the city was “stopped or put at risk in anyway.”

Over the weekend we reported the concerns that the £20m towns fund appeared under threat, as last week Nation.Cymru reported how “Regional aid projects worth £80m affecting four locations in Wales have been suspended by the UK Labour government pending a review of how the scheme will operate”.

The towns fund was part of a £3.6 billion fund investing in towns as part of the former Conservative government’s plan to “level up our regions”.

Last October the then UK government announced that Wrexham would be amongst 55 cities across England, Scotland, and Wales selected as part of a “long-term investment plan for towns that have been overlooked and taken for granted”.

According to the UK Government at the time “local people would be put in charge, and given the tools to change their town’s long-term future” via the ‘ten-year endowment-style fund’.

Wrexham Council, which will be responsible for delivering this fund by working with interested parties, with broad investment themes including: Safety and Security; High Street; Heritage; Regeneration; and Transport and Connectivity.

Work locally has been underway for several months preparing for the funding to be administered to projects in the city centre – along with the creation of a Town Board and boundary map for the funding.

However with rumours that the Uk Government are to pull the plug on the project, we queried Wrexham Council on whether it had been made of any potential change.

On Tuesday Wrexham Council confirmed the associated ‘plan submission deadline’ had been suspended.

Councillor Mark Pritchard, Leader of Wrexham Council, told Wrexham.com: “We’re aware that the plan submission deadline has been suspended, but Wrexham’s plan was submitted on the previously indicated date and we await an update from the UK Government.

“This is a large amount of money that was promised to Wrexham, and we all need to work together with the UK Government to ensure this funding is delivered.

“This is really important to our city, and both myself, the board and the people of Wrexham would be extremely disappointed if this funding was stopped or put at risk in any way.”

As we have previously reported the Town Fund would be £20m paid in equal amounts over 10 years, and is 75% capital and 25% revenue.

Thus in the first year Wrexham would have received £2m – with £250k of that already taken up by Wrexham Council in ‘capacity funding’ and ‘…is advanced from the revenue element of the programme’.

The funding had been criticised at the time as being anti-devolution, with the funding direct from Westminster to the local council, and local decision making on where it would be spent thus bypassing Cardiff entirely.

The council appear to have been banking on the revenue element of the cash to possibly help part fund CCTV and the City of Culture bid among other projects, possibly meaning a sharp rethink of some council budgets in an already tight context.