Pride in Place

Ashley Fox Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

My hon. Friend is completely right. The opportunity to invest through this in local community services and youth services is absolutely huge, and putting local mums in the driving seat is always a good thing.

[Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)]

I welcome the fact that south Bridgwater has been included in this programme. These funds come on top of the £23 million allocated to Bridgwater under the last Government’s town deal. Parts of Highbridge in my constituency are equally deserving of funding, so can the Minister advise whether there will be any further rounds of allocating funding in this Parliament?

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

I think the hon. Gentleman is asking me to do the Chancellor’s job, which I shall not be able to do. We think that this is an exciting way of investing in our communities, and that there is a huge opportunity for us to leverage in additional investment. We are very keen to talk to social impact investors and philanthropists about how we can invest. There is also a lot of interest among the business community—local businesses and business improvement districts—in bringing this together. If we get this right and the funding in place leverages in additional funding, we will have shown that this is a way of operating that we can then roll out across the country.