New Mayor of London scheme offering £70 million for local improvements
The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has announced that £70 million is being made available for schemes across London through the Good Growth fund, in partnership with the Greater London Authority Regeneration Team and London Economic Action Partnership.
This seems like a great chance for Greenwich Council to obtain funding for left-behind parts of the borough such as Plumstead High Street, Lakedale Road, Plumstead Gardens, Abbey Wood estate, Woolwich Common shopping parade, Charlton station area, east Greenwich and Greenwich Peninsula walking links and others.
Schemes can cover one or more of these categories:
- Develop civic infrastructure
- Back small business
- Secure and create workspace
- Drive innovation
- Build skills and employability
- Deliver community-led regeneration
- Enhance public space
- Share culture
Greenwich Council have a pretty poor record when it comes winning bids to improve streets and parks. Now we know of the shambles at their planning and parking departments this possibly gives an insight into why. Highways aren’t much better.
Various funds have been and gone with no awards to Greenwich borough, such as the Outer London Fund, Mayor’s Regeneration Fund, various London Enterprise Partnership funding rounds and more.
As I’ve covered before, compare Erith in Bexley Borough to Plumstead in Greenwich borough. Both secondary centres in their boroughs (to Bexleyheath and Woolwich respectively) yet Bexley secured £16 million in the past two years for various improvements by putting in £4 million.
Greenwich flogged off local assets to fund the library upgrade with zero external funding, and the planned station area upgrade is due to Housing Zone funds – which just about every borough receives.
This scheme requires the authority to provide match funding. They are requesting that the match funding component is mostly made up of previously unallocated money such as Section 106, council core funding or other private sector contributions.
Greenwich has some of the country’s highest Section 106 income due to very high levels of new home building. They should be able to leverage that into at least one winning scheme, and possibly more.
The deadline for bids is the 4th September. Announcements of winners commence in October.
