THE UK Government has defended the geographical spread of the most recent round of Levelling Up fund. 

Ministers have been criticised that the bulk of the £2bn of spending last night has been handed to the relatively affluent South East.

While the money is meant to help deprived areas level up, some of the projects announced are in relatively affluent areas, including the town of Catterick Garrison in Rishi Sunak’s wealthy Richmond constituency which is receiving £19 million to regenerate the high street.

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According to analysis, 52 Tory constituencies in England benefit – more than twice as many as those represented by Labour MPs.

Unsurprisingly given they have 44 of the country's 59 constituencies, of the ten projects announced in Scotland, the majority are in SNP constituencies.

However, there are two in Conservative areas, including £18 million for Alister Jack's Dumfries and Galloway's constituency to turn redundant spaces and buildings “into exciting new cultural and leisure opportunities.” 

Another, £20m will be spent in former Scotland Office minister David Duguid's Banff and Buchan constituency, to help transform Peterhead’s Arbuthnot House into a new “museum, library and cultural hub”, while an aquarium in Macduff will be modernised and expanded.  

Despite seven applications, there were no successful Glasgow bids. 

The council had asked for help funding the M8 Garden Cap, the People's Palace and Winter Gardens, as well as regeneration projects in Drumchapel, Easterhouse, Maryhill and Possilpark.

Susan Aitken, the SNP leader of the council hit out at the decisions taken by the Whitehall department. She said even applying for a share of the cash had come at a "significant financial cost to Glasgow."

"This is not Levelling Up," she said. "It’s the exact opposite and does precisely what Rishi Sunak was caught on camera promising his base support – taking money from deprived urban areas to give to wealthy towns.

"Even after that embarrassment they’ve still gone ahead and blatantly targeted resources away from our most socially and economically challenged communities.

"Any claim that this process will address inequalities has been proven to be an utter sham.

"We know because a UK official fed back to us that Glasgow submitted superb bids including restoring the People’s Palace, providing better transport connectivity to the country’s biggest hospital, and improving local town centres across the city.

"Any of these would have supported the levelling up of communities immeasurably more than the £19m the Prime Minister awarded to his own constituency.

"In fact, while the Tories will expect us to be grateful, this whole process has come at a significant financial cost to Glasgow.

"Based on the evidence of these outcomes we’ve major concerns that this process has been seriously skewed and I will be raising this with the UK Government immediately."

Glasgow MP David Linden, said: “If levelling up is truly about lifting up areas which have been left behind and impacted by deprivation, then overlooking Easterhouse makes no sense whatsoever.  

"Over and above the decades of austerity inflicted on us by Westminster Governments we didn’t vote for, Easterhouse itself was recently subject to the Jobcentre cuts in that part of the local shopping centre which remains mothballed, and from which this bid would have benefited.

“It’s clear from looking at the funding distribution that the South East of England – not somewhere normally associated with poverty and deprivation – has done remarkably well.  

"Frankly, it looks less like levelling up and more like topping up the obscene levels of wealth in that part of these islands”.

Speaking to Times Radio, Mr Gove said: “I think more of the money is going to Labour-led local authorities than to Conservative-led local authorities and that’s because the money’s been allocated according to a set of objective criteria and on the basis of deliverability.”

Asked about the South East receiving larger sums of cash, Mr Gove said: “It’s simply untrue that the levelling up fund is concentrated disproportionately on London and the South East.”

He said London and the South East together constitute a quarter of the country’s population, but that per capita “the biggest winners are those in the North West”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If you look at it in terms of the amount of money allocated per person, then it is the case that it’s the North West, the North East, Wales, which do best of all.”

Concerns over favouritism were heightened by leaked footage of Mr Sunak at a summer garden party in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, telling Tory members how as chancellor he had channelled funding away from “deprived urban areas” to “make sure areas like this are getting the funding they deserve”.

Mr Gove said he did not think it was “quite right” to infer a tilt away from funding for the North from Mr Sunak’s comments, arguing he was simply pointing out that areas in the South East also need investment.

“There are areas of deprivation in London and in the South East, particularly along the Kent coast, that we do need to invest in,” the Levelling Up Secretary said.