In September 2026, the UK Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) published the final outputs from the place-based evaluation of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF), one of the largest evaluation studies ever commissioned in the UK.
The UK Government launched UKSPF in April 2022, providing £2.6 billion to local authority areas to be invested by March 2025. Funding was available to each local authority area in the UK, with local decision-makers working with communities and delivery partners to deliver local interventions targeted in three thematic areas: Communities and Place, Supporting Local Business, and People and Skills. This aimed to enhance local economic and social prosperity, and to increase life chances.
MHCLG appointed a consortium comprising Ipsos, Technopolis, Ecorys and Wavehill to conduct a series of case study evaluations to examine which delivery mechanisms each local area used, and to understand the specific local barriers and enablers to success. This would help national-level policy makers understand in which contexts different delivery approaches, or different interventions, were most likely to be successful.
Technopolis led nine different case study evaluations focused in the South East of England, the East of England, and the East Midlands. The nine areas covered a range of different contexts including small coastal towns, areas with significant deprivation, and rural areas. We also examined a range of different interventions including cultural festivals, business training programmes, and cycle hire schemes.
From our nine case study areas, there were a series of learnings on what enables effective local intervention delivery. These included:
- Using delivery partners who already have experience in working in the local area – they can better tailor interventions to suit local needs, and can draw on local networks to encourage greater participation.
- Working closely with local stakeholders (e.g. community groups, utility companies, healthcare providers) in all stages of intervention design and delivery. These relationships help better ensure that interventions complement existing provision, while data and knowledge sharing also makes it easier to identify community members most in need of support.
- Complex and time-limited funding programmes such as UKSPF need dedicated management resource to ensure interventions are delivered on time, and within budget.
- Providing local areas with as much flexibility as possible on when they spend monies (e.g. moving budgets between financial years) and how (e.g. splits between revenue and capital costs).
- The study team also learnt a series of methodological lessons too. These concerned:
- The importance of involving local decision makers in evaluation design. This helped find ways to ensure that data collection was not burdensome to delivery providers or to those receiving support.
- Having standard strength of evidence tests that all researchers could use across all study areas. This ensured there was s consistent analytical approach, making it easier to develop aggregate findings across all study areas.
- Spending time within the local communities. Spending time in-person in the case study areas helped us better understand the local context, ensuring that we could better tailor our data collection tools.
- All the published case study evaluation evidence is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/uk-shared-prosperity-fund-place-based-evaluations.
- For further information on this study, or to discuss an evaluation or support for local policy and investment, please contact cristina.rosemberg@technopolis-group.com