Town’s Portas bid fails

Published on 27/07/2012 08:36

STOWMARKET town centre has missed out on a cash boost of up to £100,000 after being snubbed for Portas-Pilot scheme funding.

But town centre manager Sharon Brown said although she was disappointed the town missed out on the money, there were plenty of exciting new schemes on the table.

The Stowmarket Town Centre Partnership (STCP), which organised the bid, is now looking to apply for new funds from a £5.5 million pot set up for unsuccessful Portas-Pilot towns.

And a new scheme, to help young people in the town to get Saturday work has just been approved for funding by the STCP.

Sharon said: “Of course it would have been nice to get some extra money, it is disappointing.

“But the bid seems to be dependent on how many empty shops there are in the towns.

“That is one of the criteria.

“There are a few empty shops in Stowmarket but they do tend to get snapped up pretty quickly.

“Funding for the Saturday staff scheme has been approved, we are funding it ourselves and will be releasing more details in September when the schools go back.

“We have many other schemes on the horizon – we are launching a new website so people can find out information in Stowmarket and are running a Stowmarket Summer Music event every Saturday in August.”

Stowmarket Mayor Anne Whybrow said there were other towns less well off than Stowmarket that needed the money more.

She said: “In looking at different ways of putting together the Portas -Pilot bid we came up with lots of ideas to encourage shoppers into the town.

“But we are looking at ways to all businesses, not just retail, involved in the town.

“I was speaking to somebody the other day who had just come down from Nottingham and they said ‘you think you have a recession down here, you should see what it is like up there’.

“There may be other towns that need the money more.

“We will be watching what the other towns have done with their bid money and will learn from that.”

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Town’s Portas bid fails

Top stories

News