The Government has devised a £2.6bn UK Shared Prosperity Fund which will replace EU structural funds and provide levelling up opportunities for three priority areas: Communities and Place, Supporting Local Business and People and Skills. Funding will be assigned to every lead local authority in England, Wales, Scotland, and the funds will be allocated using a formula rather than through competition. Payments will be made at the start of the financial year for 3 years until 2025.
Northern Ireland will also receive the UKSPF but funding is set to be paid directly to project deliverers in advance, on a 6 monthly cycle. This will be subject to objectives and spending being achieved accordingly.
Local authorities have been encouraged to select some of the 42 key objectives from the UKSPF intervention list split into the three priority areas to prioritise for investment. Many of these objectives will require the measurement of location behaviour changes before, during, and after the period of funding. Place Informatics has extensive data for over 2,300 town centres across the UK at a town centre, street, green space, and business level.
Data sets include footfall, visitor origin, demographics, and location usage.
Below we discuss in detail which key objectives would be supported by Place Informatics location data sets and why.
| Communities and Place |
E3 Creation of and improvements to local green spaces, community gardens, watercourses, and embankments, along with incorporating natural features into wider public spaces. How we can help: Place Informatics green space footfall data provides the base line data required at the beginning of the project including footfall volumes, visitor postcode origins, visit frequency, time of day of visit, and how long visitors stay at a green space. Additionally, we can analyse precise movement flows across any green site and provide clear visualisations using the latest density mapping and vector flow technology. |
E6 Support for local arts, cultural, heritage and creative activities. How we can help: Place Informatics event performance management tool provides the ability to measure the change in visitor behaviours for any event held in your town centre, green space, or heritage location. Data sets including year on year and month on month footfall changes, visitor origins by postcode and event activity by hour of day. |
E14 Funding to support relevant feasibility studies. How we can help: Place Informatics data sets are extensively used by local government to understand baseline behaviours back to 2019 (pre covid). Data sets include extensive demographic information including age, affluence, expenditure, social grade, and dwelling. |
| Supporting Local Business |
E16 Investment in open markets and improvements to town centre retail and service sector infrastructure, with wrap around support for small businesses. How we can help: Place Informatics measures footfall and visitor behaviour for town centre markets across the UK. Our demographic density heat mapping helps local businesses understand the desires and preferences of potential customers on their street and directly outside their premises. In addition, we help local businesses identify where potential customers who are not currently using the town centre are located and what would attract them into the town centre. Use our data sets to attract relevant new businesses and help existing tenants to target their marketing campaigns to increase footfall. |
E17 Funding for the development and promotion (both trade and consumer) of the visitor economy, such as local attractions, trails, tours, and tourism products more generally. How we can help: Place Informatics is the UK’s largest provider of UK tourism and visitor behaviour data. Our data sets include visitor home origins providing a deep understanding of which postcodes in the UK contain the highest volume of tourists visiting town centres, attractions, heritage, beaches, and green spaces. Use the data to identify the gaps in the current tourism offer and measure the success of targeted marketing behaviour based on up to date and accurate visitor behaviour patterns. |
Please fill in the form here, if you would like to discuss your data needs for projects under the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
