Eight schemes vying for Growing Places funding

A FUND to kick-start stalled development schemes in Coventry and Warwickshire has been oversubscribed.

The Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership (CWLEP) was awarded an allocation of £12.8m from the Government’s Growing Places Fund. Eight schemes have put themselves forward for investment funding of more than £20m.

Denys Shortt, chair of the LEP, said the schemes would be assessed in the next two weeks.

“We are really pleased that we have had such a good response,” he said. “We will be looking at the schemes in real detail over the coming days to ensure we can produce the best results to boost the economy of Coventry and Warwickshire.

“We have conducted this process in a different way to some areas by undertaking a great deal of work before accepting submissions and we believe that will deliver investment faster and more effectively.

“The programme is designed to kick-start projects which could otherwise be stuck. The eight applications would involve other investment of more than £250 million, so we are talking about some key strategic schemes.”

The projects will initially be assessed by a technical group and then the CWLEP Growing Places Appraisal Panel will meet later in the month to score and approve which projects should then move to the due diligence stage.

Projects which applied had to be as ‘ready-to-go’ as possible, and to have, or had to show, a reasonable expectation of gaining planning consent by September this year with work ideally starting on-site by the end of 2012.

Sumbitted projects had to be predominantly employment focused and of benefit to the local economy.