Councils, Make Your UKSPF Funding Go Further

After being announced in the 2024 Autumn Budget, the UK Shared Prosperity Fund has finally come into practice for UK councils. The government has allocated £900m in funding for 2025-2026 which may sound significant but is a decrease from the amount allocated in the past three previous years.

When you break down the funding by region, there’s around a 2% decrease in funding in most areas of the UK. This means councils are going to need to stretch their funding even further in 2025.

With careful planning and smart investment, it’s still possible for councils to deliver meaningful, long-term outcomes for communities across the UK. In this article, we’ll explore practical ways councils can maximise the impact of their UKSPF funding and ensure every pound delivers measurable value.

The challenge for councils: Doing more with less

UK councils are already facing budget reductions and financial challenges. According to the Local Government Association (LGA), councils in England face a funding shortfall of £2.3b in 2025-26, rising to £3.9b in 2026-27. This £6.2b gap is driven by inflation, rising demand, and increased service costs — particularly in children’s and adult social care, SEND transport, homelessness, and staffing costs linked to the National Living Wage.

Eighteen councils are already reliant on exceptional financial support to balance their budgets. The LGA has stated that this is unsustainable and warns that further cuts could trigger widespread financial failure and the collapse of essential local services.

This means councils will need to think outside the box when it comes to making their money go further as they need to be doing more with less. To make the most of this reduced allocation, councils must think strategically and prioritise impactful projects. They will need to explore co-funding opportunities, and leverage partnerships with local businesses, voluntary groups, and universities.

How to make your UKSPF funding go further with Beauhurst

Beauhurst’s platform offers councils a strategic edge by turning local business and investment data into actionable insights. Here we outline several practical and impactful ways councils can use the platform to get the most from their UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

Map and segment local business ecosystems

You can use the Beauhurst Advanced Search tool to identify high-growth businesses and industry strengths within your region. This is easy to do with a search across companies in your local authority, and using our Signals data including Growth or Innovation.

This will show you all of the high-growth companies in your local area. From here you can either export the data to dig deeper into industries, specific locations, or other analysis. Or you can use our ‘Statistics’ tab to get a quick and easy oversight.

Using the ‘Statistics’ tab, you’ll get an overview of things like funding going into these companies, top industries, company sizes and stages of evolution, foundations and cessations, and a summary of the financials of these companies. You’ll even have access to exclusive ESG data including founder gender and age data and how many companies hit one of our ESG Signals.

You can also use Beauhurst to pinpoint underserved industries or other gaps in business support — such as rural microbusinesses, minority-led startups, or industries with high growth potential but low visibility. Want to know how? Reach out to one of our team and we can walk you through it.

Proactively identify at-risk businesses

Spot businesses showing signs of distress — such as CCJs, recent downsizing, or liquidation and insolvency — and intervene early with tailored support using our Risk Signals.

This can help you reduce the risk of local job losses and commercial vacancies as you can act fast with targeted interventions for struggling firms.

Create communities and events for similar businesses

Using Beauhurst’s industry or growth data, you can curate themed networking events or mentoring programmes to support the community. For example, using the Advanced Search function on Beauhurst, you can identify companies in your local authority in any particular industry or growth stage. Here we’ve searched for companies in the ‘Music’ and ‘Music venues, galleries and museums’ industries. This way you can target and then bring together similar companies for events and shared cultural experiences.

You can also foster cross-sector innovation by connecting complementary industries, like creative tech with manufacturing, or healthtech with academia.

The Beauhurst platform can also help you to find key speakers or experts for events by identifying key people at companies of interest. On each company profile is a ‘People’ tab, which shows directors, shareholders, founders, and senior team members at the company. Here you can find detailed information on company founders and directors who may be interested in speaking at community events.

Find and signpost external funding opportunities

Another great use for Beauhurst is to identify which businesses in your area could be eligible for national and international grant programmes, R&D tax credits, innovation competitions, or venture capital funding.

Once you have your search set up for your location, you can search across a number of different avenues to find eligible businesses. For example, you could narrow your search further by selecting industries which are frequently targeted by specific grant and R&D support schemes, or which could be eligible for other initiatives or support schemes.

You can also look for companies that have previously secured grants, raised equity funding, or are actively involved in research and development. Applying Growth or Innovation Signal filters — like whether the company has attended an accelerator or received a R&D grant — helps identify dynamic, innovation-driven businesses.

And you can encourage co-investment and private sector match funding by targeting investors already active in your region or sectors of focus. You can do this by looking in the ‘Statistics’ tab under ‘Fundraisings’. Here you can see all the most active funds in the region by both the number of rounds participated in and amount invested.

Benchmark impact and success

You can also use Beauhurst to track the progress of local businesses supported through UKSPF-funded initiatives by monitoring indicators like headcount growth, revenue increases, or successful funding rounds.

The platform allows you to compare your region’s performance against similar localities to understand what’s working and where to improve, and download these results. That means you can provide clear, data-backed reports to stakeholders and government departments, proving the value and return on investment of your UKSPF activity and any other fund-related activities.

Take funding action into your own hands

Councils don’t need to navigate UKSPF delivery alone. With Beauhurst’s data and insight, local authorities can act with confidence, investing in the right people, places, and ideas to generate real economic impact. Our BeauhurstImpact platform is specifically designed for councils to make the most of our data.

Explore how BeauhurstImpact can support your UKSPF strategy today by booking a demo with one of our experts. Or take a virtual tour of the platform and see what Beauhurst has to offer.