City changes plans for £20m levelling up cash

The replacement of the Old Tram Bridge between Avenham Park and Penwortham is financially secure

Preston will not lose any of the £20m it was awarded in levelling up cash - in spite of changing how it plans to spend it.

The government has approved a request from the city council to cancel one of the seven regeneration projects that formed part of its bid for the funding in 2022.

Last year, the authority decided to ditch a controversial blueprint for an overhaul of Ashton Park - in the face of both public opposition and spiralling costs across all of its Levelling Up Fund schemes.

Councillors voted to reallocate the £9.7m earmarked for the revamp - which included a new 3G football pitch, sports pavilion and car park - across the remaining six projects.

Upgrades to parks across Preston will go ahead, including Moor Park

However, the scale of the change - involving almost half the total amount originally allocated to the city by the previous Conservative government - meant the council had to ask the new Labour administration for permission to move the money around.

Theoretically, the entire cash pot could have been taken back by ministers - a prospect the Labour-led authority previously cited as justification for pressing ahead with the Ashton Park plans, even as concerns among locals grew louder.  

Last February, deputy council leader Martyn Rawlinson appealed to members not to "risk all that money" by changing course.

By July, however, ballooning bills for all of Preston's levelling up projects forced a rethink, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

The Ashton Park plans were ultimately shelved in order to save other schemes from what was a £5m shortfall, caused by what the town hall said were rocketing construction costs.

The city council formally asked the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to give the green light to the changes and the authority has been advised its so-called "project adjustment request" has been accepted.

That means the six other projects - the replacement of the Old Tram Bridge between Avenham Park and Penwortham, a new segregated east-west city centre cycle lane along Queen Street and Avenham Lane, public space improvements to Friargate South and Cheapside, and a series of sport-related and other upgrades to Moor Park, Grange Park and Waverley Park - are now financially secure.