Heeley Trust had proven they could transform their local area. Despite an overwhelming evidence base for their project, Whitehall said no.

Andy Jackson was running a Covid vaccine pop-up centre in Sheffield when the alert popped up: bids had opened to apply Levelling Up funding. Pots of cash totalling £1.7bn overall were up for grabs, for projects that could help revitalise “left behind” areas. If anyone could prove their track record, it was Heeley Trust. 

The charity launched in 1997, with the smog of deindustrialisation in Sheffield still lingering. Steel had declined, and areas near former factories including a southern suburb of the city, Heeley, had followed suit. 

Communities that were once prosperous and industrious had withered. “There was no plan, and there was land that wasn’t repurposed. It was derelict and grassed over. People were really fed up, with a decade of nothing happening. So local people said ‘we’ve had enough – we want to take this land on and do something positive’”, Andy tells me. 

Andy, who was born and raised in this part of Sheffield, joined up with other concerned locals. They went door to door, signing up people from across Heeley to help design a new park. Once they’d successfully reclaimed the abandoned land, volunteers went on to plant 10,000 trees and 16,000 bulbs in a year. 

By 2001, they had made a “big change” in the heart of the neighbourhood. Instead of dereliction, a beautiful environment that people had a stake in and direction over had emerged.

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Building Bigger

That was the start – Day 1, as it were. But they had bigger plans. “You have to start to animate the space and create a community from that. So we launched festivals and events, theatre in the park – huge days bringing everyone together,” the Heeley Trust’s manager adds. 

They sent newsletters to everyone – celebrating how the place was on the up. It was a declaration: “We’re not poor in the way people are saying. We are rich. We have no money, but we have talent and ideas. And we want power to do more,” Andy beams. 

The council granted them a 125-year lease on 3.5 hectares of land – putting it into community ownership, with no maintenance funding from anywhere. “The day you stop cutting the grass, you’ve undone the work. So raising 125 years of funding to clear the littler, paint benches, repair damage – it’s a challenge,” Andy says. They looked for income. The buildings around the park were the answer. 

“We said to the council: let us take on the [neighbouring] derelict buildings, bring life in, and charge rent to cover costs and contribute to the running of the park.” 

The Grade II listed school buildings were utterly neglected, he says. They had an independent valuation of minus £3m. After ten years of negotiations, including re-writing their business plan several times, they got it. They rebuilt the site in 10 months. 

After five years of using that building as a co-working hub and art studios, Covid came along. The Trust reworked itself as a community vaccination hub. That’s when Andy heard about the Levelling Up opportunity. 

There was a golden ticket if you went through your MP. They’d done the structural surveys, and got quotes from contractors. They even had potential tenants booked in, waiting for the development to actually get started.

Thankfully their MP, Louise Haigh was supportive – and MP sponsorship was crucial to Levelling Up bids. They negotiated with Sheffield City Council, who had to approve the bids too. Then things started to get immensely complicated.

“There were so many institutional barriers. There was the need for the council to sign it off. We needed a Treasury Green Book assessment” – complex economic modelling by an economist, at a cost of thousands of pounds. They had to prove “land value uplift” calculations, assessing how much more the site would be worth if the works got funded. 

All of this required outside help to complete it. The council was submitting three bids for this first round – and the Heeley Trust project for restoring more derelict buildings was one. They appointed consultants to help with their bids. 

Thousands of pounds were spent on contractors – as well as countless in-house staff hours – to get the bid to the door. And then, it slammed shut. The council appeared to get cold feet, demanding more modelling and assurances about project risk, despite hundreds of pages of reports backing up the case. In Andy’s eyes, the requests were so onerous it effectively shut the bid down. 

So that was it. After months of careful engagement and planning, the community group was chucked us out of the process. 

2022 soon came around and the delayed bidding results were in. Andy Jackson hadn’t been “too upset” about missing out in Round 1. He thought Sheffield wouldn’t get any money. In the end, Sheffield was given £37m to redevelop brownfield land, while plans to cut journey times to and from London got funding. 

It was an impetus to push the council for full support for its next bid in the second round of Levelling Up bidding. More than 520 bids were put in for the second round of the government’s £4.8bn Levelling Up Fund announced last March. They wanted projects that could be completed in just a year. 

The plan was to completely redevelop a largely abandoned, heritage heart of the neighbourhood. Right at the heart of Heeley sits a massive Victorian school. Heeley Trust had already restored one building, and needed to do another two, plus renovate the Victorian chapel and acres of land. All would be refurbished to a high standard. 

They had evidence to show they could do it. They’d won four RIBA architecture awards for Phase 1 restoring the old school building, and were looking at the rest of the site being at that level. 

New bus stops, and landscaping for a new communal garden was part of the plans. Plus purchasing a GP practice to establish a new health and wellbeing centre, and working alongside the council to revive the original home of the John Ruskin art collection in the heart of Sheffield. In total, 50,000 sq feet of Grade II listed buildings were set to be renovated. 

The income from the renovated buildings – home of new co-working spaces – would deliver the health centre, community festivals, and much more. Fully costed. 

Heeley Trust went for it. “We had loads of support from our MP. The council really helped us in Round 2. It was the best funding bid I’ve ever written. Consultants were engaged. The council put money in to develop a Treasury Green Book case this time.”

They had economists come in to crunch the numbers. “We had to provide tons of stats – rents paid, churned through black box models…We learnt that for every pound going into the development, £2.46 came out in benefits to the economy and community,” Andy says.

It was one of the best cases of Gross Value Added the economist had ever seen, with other public infrastructure projects typically running more like £1.50 for every £1 investment. They were asking for £17.5m. The final assessment was that it would have a £56m positive impact on the local economy.

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Whitehall Dither and Politics

They had to meet a “really tight” summer deadline. No such deadlines applied to Whitehall, where officials said they’d announce the results in the autumn. Autumn became winter, then Christmas passed. 

Then at the end of January this year, the hammer blow landed. Nowhere in Yorkshire got any cash. Rishi Sunak paid more in Fixed Pen