Leicester City Council Community Renewal Fund Programme

Leicester City Council’s Community Renewal Fund (CRF) portfolio consists of five projects including:

• Positive Communities – a voluntary and community sector partnership of 12 local organisations working to support people into employment and developing new skills development.
• A community ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) scheme – aimed at improving language skills to help people into employment.
• The ‘She Inspired Business Playbox’ project – which works to support women into employment and business.
• Leicester Accelerator – a range of support programmes including use of digital technology, mentoring for businesses and grants delivered by a partnership of seven business support organisations led by East Midlands Chamber of Commerce.
• Leicester Textiles Renewal – an integrated support programme for skills, support for innovation and encouraging best practice within the city’s textile and garment industry.

Leicester was part of the government’s top 100 “priority places” and had previous experience overseeing European funding projects such as European Social Fund (ESF) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Once the CRF was announced, Leicester City Council proceeded quickly with a full launch targeted at business, employment and skills organisations across Leicestershire, giving information as soon as it was available. The council used a combination of direct communication and third-party dissemination through the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) skills partnership alongside community organisations, the Chamber of Commerce, and local universities. Leicester City Council set up a number of workshops after the launch covering key aspects such as the bid criteria, the application form, and a question-and-answer session to try to encourage as many good quality applications as possible. These sessions were also uploaded on the website for potential applicants that couldn’t attend. A central email group was also established for the submission of questions. The team used their prior experience of running European programmes to interpret the guidance provided by central government. 

An independent assessment team was established comprising council staff from across different teams including finance and legal. A separate appraisal team assessed applications across the four key categories of business, skills, employment, and communities. To ensure a common approach to the scoring of bids, a manager oversaw all of the appraisals and to avoid a conflict of interest, they were not involved in any of the council’s own bids.

The portfolio of successful projects awarded through Leicester City Council meets their local economic agenda and ties in well with their overall priority plan. The council has a strong green agenda and supported the projects with sustainability outcomes. The proposals which did not make the shortlist did not meet local strategic needs well and did not strongly align with the CRF themes. Some projects were targeted around supporting our most disadvantaged individuals such as ethnic minorities and women.

Lessons learned from the process

The City Council followed the guidance closely and submitted a shortlist worth £3million. This was in line with government guidance but resulted in a recasting of project budgets to ensure the overall portfolio met criteria. Since the total fund was announced, and a number of places received over £3million, it appears that this was not as strict as the original criteria suggested. Due to the tight time frames, the council were not able to do an in-depth analysis of the budgets or value for money assessment.

The communication channels put in place were tried and tested given close relationship with the LEP and other networks. However, through this approach they did receive applications from organisations they hadn’t worked with before, so they were able to extend their reach with the voluntary and community sector which was a positive outcome. Some of the projects generated a lot of partnership activity. For example, one project involved collaboration between 12 different partners – a positive outcome for collaboration and partnership working. The council also identified applications which linked with current projects and funding streams.

The council found the application documentation simple to navigate but felt that the launch documentation and guidance could have been more detailed. For example, Annex A could have been released at the launch to ensure all outcomes could be captured and the FAQs could have been updated more frequently.

Leicester City Council built on the DLUHC funding agreement template, adding in additional contract terms specific to the City. Some of the outputs and outcomes were requested to be changed following assessment of the definition document which was provided at the same time as the contract. Details from the draft contract had to change because of this which meant that proposed outcomes in some of the projects had to be reconsidered. This gap between draft and final contract has also added to the time pressures of CRF delivery but despite this, they were the first council in the East Midlands to get all contracts signed by partners and into delivery.

Similar to the bidding process, Leicester City Council is working to ensure that there is no conflict of interest or bias towards internal projects. They have set up clear parameters for both internal and external partners and the project management team is separate to the delivery team. Having such a division appears to be working well as the internal delivery team has experience of delivering external projects. Building on this experience means that the CRF team can spend time supporting smaller voluntary sector organisations and projects with multiple partners such as the Positive Communities project involving 12 different organisations. This project has introduced a full customer relationship management system (CRM) and has been successful in getting people signed up to the service offer. Having a clear database and division of roles has helped with getting delivery under way in this instance.

Leicester City Council has also been working to build on other programmes and funding whilst delivering their portfolio. The Leicester Textiles Renewal project is also funded by the city council and the Textile Academy to provide support and upskilling to maintain the city’s garment industry. Clear exit plans are also in place for all of the projects, for example the pre-ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) scheme feeds people into existing ESOL lessons.

Lessons learned from the process

One aspect of Leicester’s approach which is working particularly well, allowing them to capture key lessons, is the convening of regular combined project meetings. These meetings have been useful for successful project management on such short projects and provide Leicester City Council with an opportunity to continue to capture learning internally, whilst sharing best practice. They have also created their own output and outcome forms as well as payment forms to capture the relevant information. Project visits are regular and have helped to confirm delivery is running efficiently and targets are being met. To encourage further collaboration, an awayday is being organised with representatives from all of the projects where they can identify commonalities, discuss outcomes and the evaluation. Leicester City Council is also part of a regional group with other local authorities. This group shares examples of best practice and clarifications received to individual questions from DLUHC.

Although there is time allocated at the end of the projects for evaluation, the council is making sure that projects capture outputs and outcomes throughout the delivery, to streamline the evaluation process. As there are two types of outputs – grant funding agreement outputs as well as tracking the number of clients registered – there has been confusion amongst some delivery partners surrounding the language. In the future, more clarity around outputs and outcomes would help streamline the evaluation.

• The internal expertise and resource to facilitate similar processes in the future is likely to need additional capacity and resource. They were successful at getting the right processes in place, particularly in terms of communications but could have ensured greater due diligence ahead of their submission.
• Leicester City Council were able to adapt and react quickly and are keen to continue this when approaching the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF).
• They are already considering how delivery partners can build on existing projects to more directly help the local economy through the UKSPF programme.
• The evaluation process is considered central to ensuring innovative projects can come forward in future to address Leicestershire’s low wage economy.
• Clearer definitions and terminology would be beneficial as there has been confusion between outputs and outcomes.
• One reflection from Leicester City Council was that peer-to- peer learning sessions throughout the process where partners can guide the conversation work well.
• Leicester City Council reflected that they could have submitted a larger portfolio and included more projects in their bid as they initially assessed proposals against government’s £3m upper limit. The council was disappointed to find out they could have funded more projects and outcomes had they included more projects in their shortlist.

• The provision of templates would have been useful