{"id":683868,"date":"2026-07-10T08:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T08:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/683868\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T08:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T08:08:11","slug":"inflation-costing-city-deals-35m-a-year-watchdog-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/683868\/","title":{"rendered":"Inflation costing City Deals \u00a335m a year, watchdog says"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are four deals: Belfast City region, Derry City and Strabane, Mid South West region and Causeway Coast and Glens.<\/p>\n

The Belfast deal was first announced in 2019 and was formally signed off in December 2021<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Only it has projects which are actually operational, while the Mid South West (MSW) deal has not yet been formally signed and its governance arrangements await final approval.<\/p>\n

The Audit Office found that by 31 March 2025, less than 5% (\u00a358m) of the central government capital funding had been used across all deals.<\/p>\n

This is forecast to rise to only 8.5% (\u00a3113m) by March this year.<\/p>\n

Each deal is supposed to be delivered over a 15 year period with the Audit Office warning that time constraints could potentially place funding at risk.<\/p>\n

It said this issue is “not currently recognised and formally managed as a strategic risk across deal risk registers, despite a potential risk to funding if delivery does not accelerate.”<\/p>\n

The report also raises concerns about the long term financial sustainability of deal projects.<\/p>\n

The deals cover construction and set-up costs but the project promoters, typically local councils, must underwrite future operational and maintenance costs.<\/p>\n

There is a strategic risk that these long-term financial commitments may become unsustainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are four deals: Belfast City region, Derry City and Strabane, Mid South West region and Causeway Coast…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-683868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}