The programme's investment priorities

UKSPF provides funding for three core investment priorities:

Communities and place

• Strengthening our social fabric and fostering a sense of local pride and belonging, through investment in activities that enhance physical, cultural and social ties and access to amenities, such as community infrastructure and local green space, and community-led projects
• Building resilient, healthy, and safe neighbourhoods, through investment in quality places that people want to live, work, play and learn in, through targeted improvements to the built and natural environment, as well as innovative approaches to crime prevention

Supporting local business

• Creating jobs and boosting community cohesion, through investments that build on existing industries and institutions. Investments ranging from support for starting businesses, to visible improvements to local retail, and hospitality and leisure sector facilities.
• Promoting networking and collaboration, through interventions that bring together businesses and partners within and across sectors, to share knowledge, expertise, and resources, and stimulate innovation and growth
• Increasing private sector investment in growth-enhancing activities, through targeted support for small and medium-sized businesses to:
  • undertake new-to-firm innovation
  • adopt productivity-enhancing, energy efficient and low carbon technologies and techniques
  • start or grow their exports

People and skills

• Boosting core skills and supporting adults to progress in work, by:
  • targeting those with no or low-level qualifications and skills in maths
  • upskilling the working population, yielding personal and societal economic impact
  • encouraging innovative approaches to reducing adult learning barriers (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland only). In England, this is delivered through the Department for Education’s Multiply programme)
• Reducing levels of economic inactivity through investment in bespoke, intensive life and employment support that is tailored to local need.

Investment should facilitate the joining up of mainstream provision and local services within an area for participants, through one-to-one keyworker support, improving employment outcomes for specific groups facing labour market barriers

• Supporting people furthest from the labour market to overcome barriers to work by providing cohesive, locally tailored support, including access to basic skills
• Supporting local areas to fund gaps in local skills provision to support people to progress in work, and supplement local adult skills provision for example, by providing additional volumes; delivering provision through wider range of routes or enabling more intensive/innovative provision, both qualifications based, and non-qualification based

This should be in addition to provision available through national employment and skills programmes.

Page last updated: 29 June 2023