Nicholas Soames – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the HM Treasury

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nicholas Soames on 2014-04-28.

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he will make it his policy to consolidate departmental funding streams into a single national infrastructure fund; and if he will make a statement.

Danny Alexander

The Government believes that there is a powerful case for giving local business and political leaders the levers they need to create jobs and drive growth. In ‘Investing in Britain’s Future’, the Government accepted Lord Heseltine’s recommendations to devolve economic power to Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) through the creation of the Local Growth Fund (LGF) with over £2 billion of budgets from skills, housing and transport for 2015-16. An area’s allocation from the LGF will be available to be spent on the priorities LEPs and their partners have determined in their strategic economic plans.

The Government allocated capital funds between programmes at Spending Review 2010 and Spending Round 2013 on the basis of a zero-based review of the economic returns of every central government capital programme, with investment being targeted increasingly at economic infrastructure. Once allocated between programmes, funds were moved into the appropriate departmental budgets to allow departments to deliver those programmes.