Following the recent release of the details of the Rural England Prosperity Fund (REPF), we asked Charlotte Gore, Partner in our agribusiness team, to explain how the fund will work and her thoughts on it being operated by local authorities.
The REPF will be available from 1 April 2023 and funding will run through to March 2025. It is a top-up to the £2.6bn UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) and will be replacing EU Structural Funds.
The REPF allocation comes partly as a response to the Delivering For Rural England Government report which looks at how the Government is ‘rural proofing’ its policies and is the second such report. It sets out a range of statistics on how rural areas compare to their urban counterparts. Overall, it finds that, although there have been some areas of improvement, rural areas are lagging on many ‘opportunity’ indicators and have a significant productivity gap compared to large towns and cities.
The REPF supports the aims of the government’s Levelling Up White Paper and Future Farming Programme and will fund capital projects for small businesses and community infrastructure which in turn will help to improve productivity and strengthen the rural economy and rural communities. It will support activities that specifically address the challenges rural areas face which include lower productivity rates, poorer connectivity, and poorer access to key services.
The fund will be operated by Local Authorities (LAs) which is a different approach to previous grant schemes. All LAs will get some funding and will be awarded based on a formula. It was initially feared that much of the money would be allocated to post-industrial areas or struggling coastal communities with little going to rural areas, but the REPF money is ring-fenced so will boost the rural allocation.
It seems likely that the REPF money will be channelled through the same grant system as the main UKSPF, but it is looking like there may be a dedicated rural ‘strand’. Each LA must produce a ‘Local Investment Plan’ for the UKSPF. These need to be approved by Government which should start to happen from this autumn. Hopefully, we will start to see grants appearing in local areas over the next few months.
It is effectively a replacement for the previous LEADER and Rural Growth programmes under the Rural Development regulation that ended last year, but it will provide capital grants for the same sort of projects:
- Farm diversification, including tourism enterprises
- Support new and existing rural businesses to develop new products and facilities that will be of wider benefit to the local economy
- The conversion of redundant farm buildings for other uses
- Food processing and marketing ventures
- Boosting rural ‘connectivity’ through broadband projects
- Community projects such as village halls, public access etc to provide essential community services and assets for local people and businesses to benefit the local economy
To be eligible for the funding projects must be in a rural area. For Rural Fund purposes, rural areas include towns, villages and hamlets with populations below 10,000 and the wider countryside as well as market or ‘hub towns’ with populations of up to 30,000 that serve their surrounding rural areas as centres of employment and in providing services.
The projects also need to take into consideration how investments contribute to net zero and nature recovery objectives including the UK’s commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, wider environmental considerations, such as resilience to natural hazards and the 25 Year Environment Plan commitments.
Further details on the application process are awaited, but the fund is worth considering if you are planning a rural diversification project next year.
Click here to read our article “Rural Diversification: Where do I start?”
