Cash guarantee for Preston community schemes

Community and voluntary groups in Preston have been told they will not be left in limbo after it emerged government cash earmarked for local projects will take longer to come through than first expected.

Preston City Council has agreed to pay out the grants it intends to distribute from the authority’s tranche of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) – before the plans have officially been given the green light by ministers.

A recent meeting of the full council heard that it will be sometime in June or early July before the programme the council has drawn up for how it intends to spend its £2.4m share from the government cash pot will be approved.

Council leader Matthew Brown said the wait risked putting some of the organisations in line for the funding “under some threat”.

To that end, the authority has opted to underwrite the full cost of the programme until the cash from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) is released.

A report presented to councillors described the establishment and delivery of the various schemes within the space of a single year as already being “exceptionally challenging” – even without a delayed start.

By issuing the money at its own risk, work on the authority’s programme – some of which will be delivered by the third-party groups awaiting the funding and the rest undertaken directly by the council itself – can begin immediately.

Details of Preston’s UKSPF projects for 2025/26 have not yet been published, but previous schemes have included energy efficiency upgrades, improving broadband access in less well-off communities and running skills programmes for the unemployed.

Asked by Liberal Democrat opposition member Mark Jewell for reassurance that the Labour-run authority had tried to “offset” its liabilities in handing out the grants before getting the nod from MHCLG, Cllr Brown said: “We wouldn’t be doing this if we thought there was a big [chance] that that money would be put at risk.

“We’ve got to balance the fact that we want to deliver stuff – [and] we’ve got community organisations that potentially could be under some threat if we don’t actually deliver this funding.

“There’s a little frustration we’re having to wait for formal confirmation, but there is no indication from the department [that] we are not going to get this money, because it was formally announced.”

The city council will now underwrite grant funding agreements totalling just over £1.5m and grant funding letters to the tune of £305,000. The remaining programme

expenditure of £640k is for internally-delivered projects, around £160k of which will be spent within the first quarter and so will also have to be underwritten.

Councillors were also told that Blackpool Council – acting on behalf of the Lancashire Combined County Authority (LCCA) – had agreed Preston’s programme “with no queries”.

Strategic planning and delivery of the UKSPF was controversially shifted to the LCCA as part of the county’s devolution deal, to the annoyance of district councils like Preston, which had been responsible for it previously.

Overall for 2025/26, Lancashire as a whole has been allocated £21.7m in UKSPF cash.