UKSPF Community-Led Employment Support

The UK Shared Prosperity Fund (“UKSPF”) is a central pillar of the UK government’s  Levelling Up agenda and a significant component of its support for places across the UK. The three priority areas under UKSPF are:

• Communities and Place
• Supporting Local Business
• People and Skills

Under the priority area of People & Skills, £3.35m has been allocated to deliver the community-led employment support strand, which will be delivered through a call for projects.

The types of activity we are looking to fund are (but are not limited to):

• Engagement with economically inactive and socially excluded individuals to understand challenges into employment.
• Support economically inactive and socially excluded individuals to help them to access key worker services and employment.
• Tailored support for individuals that could include personal coaching, confidence building, CV writing, interview techniques, work searches, identifying suitable jobs within sectors and understanding training and development requirements for such job opportunities.

• Working with LCR partners such as Jobcentre Plus and employers to help individuals identify future career opportunities which could lead to sustainable employment.
• Focused support for young people, inactive women, people with disabilities or people from minority ethnic groups

It will be important for applicants to demonstrate how their project aligns with key strategic objectives for the LCR and as outlined in the Liverpool City Region Plan for Prosperity and the Social Value Framework (please see the Supporting Documents Section of the Application Guidance for more information on this).

Consideration of alignment with other city region wide programmes should also be demonstrated. All bids must outline how they will provide additionality to existing services including the Ways to Work and Households into Work Programmes.

Applications are open from 13/11/23 and deadline for submission is 5pm on 12/01/2024.

We will also run 2 online, Q&A sessions which will provide the opportunity for those looking to submit an application to ask questions in an open forum. Following these we will update our FAQs docs.

The dates for these are:

• Monday 11^th December, 12-1pm, on Teams
• Wednesday 13^th December, 10-11am, on Teams

If you would like to attend either of these sessions, please email [email protected] for a link to join the session,

You can download the application from the from the Supporting Documents section below.

If you would like this application form in another format, please email [email protected]

Applications will need to be returned to the LCRCA via email on [email protected] in advance of the application deadline which is 5pm on 12/01/2024

Following the deadline for submission, The LCRCA will respond to you within ten working days with the next steps.

If you are awaiting a response on your application and it has been more than 10 working days, please check your spam/junk folders first before contacting the team.