The Regional Growth Fund

Book excerpt: This report on the government fund to support private sector jobs and growth in places that rely on the public sector, the Regional Growth Fund, finds that the initial £1.4 billion investment could result in some 41,000 more full-time-equivalent private sector jobs in the economy than without the Fund. However, there was scope to have generated more jobs relative to the amount of grant awarded. The Fund has not optimised value for money because a significant proportion of the funds were allocated to projects that offer relatively few jobs for the money invested. The report concludes that applying tighter controls over the value for money offered by individual bids and then allocating funding across more bidding rounds could have created thousands more jobs from the same resources. Rigorous evaluation will be required to quantify precisely the Fund's overall employment impact. More than two thirds (28,000) of the 41,000 additional jobs are expected to be delivered indirectly, for example through knock-on effects in companies' supply chains or the wider economy. The average project will last at least seven years. However, it is not clear how much of the Fund's boost to the private sector will be sustained in the longer term. It has also taken longer than expected to turn conditional offers of grants for projects into final offers. Therefore, despite the government's intention to get projects up and running quickly, only around a third have so far received final offers of funding