No government can afford to lose too many friends. So when we found out last week that nearly 80 per cent of all levelling up fund bids had been rejected, including our own, I was more than a little surprised and disappointed.

Conservative MPs up and down the land were upset too. The government had encouraged them to promote their local levelling up bids. Now important projects across the country are left without vital funding.

It is bad enough for a government when it is repeatedly hit with negative headlines but it is really bad when they can’t even do positive stories properly.

The levelling up funding debacle has underlined what everyone now knows; this government is tired, it has no ideas to improve the country and it is failing the British public. We need a general election now.

It has also shown how broken the current system of government funding for local areas is. This is not new, and it is not just the Conservatives who are to blame. At the moment, local councils have to compete against each other to get funding and then civil servants in Whitehall decide who gets it. This has recently included two rounds of levelling up funding, bids to become an investment zone, access to the “shared prosperity fund”, and grants to build more affordable housing.

This needs to change. Each of these bids takes time and money to put together and often leads to nothing in return. More and more local leaders are pointing out how flawed this is.

Even the Conservative Mayor for the West Midlands has attacked the ‘begging bowl’ culture around local government funding. Local councils need to receive more funding and then be given the freedom to spend it in a way that they know will deliver for residents. The system of going to Whitehall with a begging bowl needs to end so that the whole of the UK can truly be levelled up.

  • Peter Taylor is the Elected Mayor of Watford