Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what criteria his Department uses to assess whether a fund should be (a) competitive or (b) allocated on the basis of need.

In designing funding programmes, MHCLG works closely with a range of stakeholders in and outside government to identify the most appropriate method for distributing funding, considering a wide variety of different approaches. Our focus is on ensuring that public funding gets to where it is needed most, and that it is invested in high quality interventions that maximise value for money for the taxpayer.