Didobi appointed by London Borough of Tower Hamlets to provide Levelling Up Fund monitoring and evaluation support

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets (LBTH) has appointed Didobi to provide support for creating a baseline and delivering on-going support for the monitoring and evaluation elements of its Levelling Up Fund (LUF) Bid with the Department for Housing, Levelling Up and Communities (DHLUC).

The LUF, announced by Government in the March 2021 Budget, seeks to invest £4.8 billion in high-value local infrastructure across the UK, focusing on the needs of individual places and the strategic case for investment. LBTH’s Regeneration Team identified an opportunity to work together with Transport for London (TfL) to bring forward a bid to Round 1 of the LUF focused on improvements within the Whitechapel District Centre, complementing existing programmes of work: LBTH’s Whitechapel Road Improvements Programme (WRIP); and TfL’s Whitechapel Property Repair Project (PRP).

LBTH and TfL submitted their bid in June 2021, and were successful in receiving £9.3m; £1,072,087 for the PRP, and £8,264,913 for WRIP. Combined with funding secured via the Council’s Capital Programme, the WRIP now has an overall budget of £10,722,623.

As part of the LUF funding agreement, the Council and TfL will be required to submit quarterly monitoring returns, covering programme, financial and evaluation, with the latter based upon a set of output and outcome measures identified within the application.

Didobi will work with the Regeneration Team in creating a framework within which the baseline data for the LUF monitoring can be established, and enable the Council to collect subsequent data to allow for regular updates. It is also hoped that the framework can act as a legacy platform to enable data collection once the WRIP has been completed, in order to further assist the Council with future monitoring and evaluation.