About your Council

Riverside with Worcester Cathedral

In 2020 the Government selected Worcester to be one of the 101 towns across the country to benefit from a share of the £3.6 billion Towns Fund. Each location was asked to draw up a Town Investment Plan to bid for up to £25 million.

The aim of the fund was to deliver long-term economic and productivity growth, and support recovery from Covid through:

Urban regeneration, planning and land use: ensuring towns are thriving places for people to live and work
Skills and enterprise infrastructure: driving private sector investment and ensuring towns have the space to support skills and small business development
Connectivity: developing local transport schemes that complement regional and national networks, as well as supporting the delivery of improved digital connectivity.

The City Council submitted a Town Investment Plan (TIP) to Government at the end of January 2021, setting out a vision for the city and proposals for how a potential £27.9m investment could deliver long-term economic growth and support Worcester's recovery from COVID.

Read the Worcester Town Investment Plan

A Worcester Towns Fund Board oversaw the development of the TIP. The Board included representatives from local businesses, community groups, arts organisations and the education sector. The Board made recommendations to the City Council, which signed off the final submission. The City Council acted as the accountable body, responsible for receiving the founding and co-ordinating delivery of the TIP.

The Board and the Council actively engaged with Worcester’s residents and businesses to develop the TIP. The Board examined ideas that were submitted to the Town Fund website and fed them into the TIP.

The TIP was approved by the Council’s Policy and Resources Committee in January 2021.

The Council was awarded £19.6m, and revised the original plan before gaining Government approval for the following projects:

Project	Agreed funding (£ milllion)
Community Skills	1.960
Severn Centre for Health & Well Being	2.500
Shrub Hill Regeneration	10.000
Heritage and Riverside Destination	0.640
Active Travel	4.500
Total	19.600

The business cases for these projects were approved by the Council’s policy committees at the following meetings.

Over the past five years these projects have been delivered and the majority have been completed as detailed in a report to the Policy and Resources Committee on Tuesday, 30 June, 2026

The total programme including funding from partners totals £53m.

The one project that is yet to be completed is the Shrub Hill Regeneration. The Town Investment Plan project to install a new active travel link between St Martin's Quarter was completed in early 2026, whilst the refurbishment of Isaac Maddox House to provide new office accommodation in this empty heritage building is continuing, managed under a project board consisting of City and County Council Councillors and officers. More detail on the project and the wider Shrub Hill Quarter regeneration is available on Worcestershire County Council's website.

The Town Board held its final meeting in June 2026.

Agendas and minutes of the Town Fund Board

www.worcester.gov.uk is visited by around 50,000 people who live or work in and around Worcester every month. This makes it a standout method for local and national organisations to promote themselves to the people of Worcester.

Allowing advertising on the website enables Worcester City Council to generate income from national and local advertisers, which is then re-invested in improving council services.

Worcester City Council uses Google AdSense to deliver advertising across its website.

Website advertising policy

As part of the its long-term goal of reducing costs, Worcester City Council has permitted the use of controlled advertising on its website www.worcester.gov.uk.

Google AdSense network is deployed for delivering advertising on the Worcester City Council website.

Please take a moment to read Google’s privacy policy.

General principles

The placement of advertisements within the site will be coordinated to make sure they do not compromise the prime purpose and functionality of the website.

The Council reserves the right to refuse to promote or to remove any individual advertisement which, in the opinion of the Council, is considered inappropriate.

All adverts must adhere to the codes of conduct laid down by the Advertising Standards Authority and must not conflict with the Council's aims and priorities. The Advertising Standards Authority's Code includes provisions that marketing communications:

must be legal, decent, honest and truthful
must not bring advertising into disrepute and, in addition, must not bring the Council into disrepute
must conform to the Code
must respect the principles of fair competition.

Advertising will also be subject to the Code of Practice on Local Government Publicity and the requirements of the Financial Services Authority.

The promotion of any advertisement on the Council's website should not be seen as an official endorsement or recommendation of that advertiser's products or services.

The Council is not responsible for the quality or reliability of the product or services offered within any advertisement. The Council would never knowingly run an advertisement that is misleading, offensive, untrue or fraudulent.

The Council does not accept responsibility for errors, omissions or for any consequences arising when visiting third party websites by following advertising link.

Most products and services may be promoted on the Council’s website; however, some specific categories and services are prohibited as defined below.

This list is not comprehensive and may be changed at any time.

An advertisement will not be accepted if it, in the reasonable opinion of the Council, it:

is inappropriate or objectionable
may result in the Council being subject to prosecution
promotes gambling
promotes payday loans
refers to tobacco or similar products
might be deemed inappropriate for children, for example, violent films, pornography and so on
appears to influence support for a political party/candidate
appears to conflict with the Council’s wider promotion of healthy and active lifestyles
appears to promote racial or sexual discrimination, or discrimination on the basis of disability, faith, gender or age
is the subject of a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority and upheld by such Authority as a legitimate complaint.

The above list is not exhaustive, and the Council retains the right to refuse advertising on the grounds that, in the Council’s opinion, it is inappropriate or it conflicts with services already provided by the organisation.

Disclaimer

Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the content of the advertisements contained in this publication, Worcester City Council cannot accept any liability for errors or omissions contained in any of the advertisements provided by an advertiser. Worcester City Council does not accept any liability for any information or claims made by the advertisement or by the advertisers. Any inclusion of Worcester City Council’s name on a publication should not be taken as an endorsement by Worcester City Council.

Feedback

Your feedback will help us to continually improve our services. If you wish to provide us with any feedback or comments about the advertising on the website, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Behavioural targeting, cookies and privacy

Cookies are small text files which identify your computer to our server. They are widely used on the internet to make websites work, or work more efficiently. We send these to your computer for the following reasons:

to tailor the website to your browser
to help us analyse the use of the website
to allow applications on our website to work correctly - for example, making sure that we know when you have logged on or off and which part of an application you are accessing.

Google AdSense uses cookies to help serve the ads that it displays on the websites of its partners, such as websites displaying Google ads or participating in Google-certified ad networks. When users visit a Google partner's website, a cookie may be placed on that end-user's browser.

Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to our website or other websites.

Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to our sites and/or other sites on the Internet.

We do not use cookies to store any personally identifiable information about you. We will not make any attempt to find out the identities of people visiting our website without their prior permission.

If we want to collect personally identifiable information through our website – for example when you request a service from us - we will tell you beforehand. We will make it clear when we collect this information and will explain what we intend to do with it.

Disabling advertisements and cookies

You can choose to prevent advertisements and their associated cookies from displaying or being stored on your device at anytime by clicking on the ‘Cookie’ link in the footer of this website and setting the ‘Advertising Cookies’ option to ‘off’.

Worcester City Council has conducted a review of polling districts, polling places and polling stations in accordance with the Representation of the People Act 1983 (as amended by the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013).

The conclusion of the 2019 review can be can be found below and at the Guildhall, Worcester.

Worcester City Council undertook a Corporate Peer Challenge (CPC) in April 2025.

The Local Government Association (LGA) led process involved senior councillors and officers from other authorities, visiting Worcester to give an external perspective and an independent view of the City Council’s way of working.

pdf Their report (669 KB) delivers a positive and strong view of the Council and offers constructive suggestions for some further improvements can be made.

The CPC Team spent four days on site at the City Council and were also taken on a familiarisation tour of the city centre.

They heard a range of feedback and concluded that the Council is ‘well led’ politically and managerially.

The CPC Team also repeatedly heard positive messages from stakeholders about the Council’s role as a partner and commended the way that all political parties have worked together for the benefit of the city.

Their LGA report says that Worcester City Council has a ‘huge amount to be proud of’ and they also commented that the authority is ‘ambitious’ for the city.

The report says that the council is working on some ‘very impressive’ projects and highlights its collaborative working on the Shrub Hill regeneration and The Arches project.

The CPC report adds that the City Council has a ‘caring and collaborative’ culture and its staff feel committed to the authority.

It commends the positive joint working between Council staff and Councillors. Also, the collaborative working was praised between Councillors across political parties.

Read the Corporate Peer Challenge report

Following publication of the CPC report the Council was required to produce and publish an Action Plan within five months of the time on site. The Action Plan was agreed by the Policy and Resources Committee on 16 September 2025.

Read the CPC Action Plan

As part of the CPC process the CPC Team held a progress review in January 2026 to assess progress made to address the recommendations of the original report.

The CPC Team found that the City Council has shown ‘strong engagement’ with the recommendations made in the CPC Report.

The CPC Team said that they ‘heard consistent evidence’ that the City Council has ‘maintained momentum’ on its CPC Action Plan ‘despite the significant and competing demands’ presented by Local Government Reorganisation (LGR).

The progress review found evidence of ‘strengthening relationships and maturing partnership focused ways of working’, including in culture and economic development as the City Council prepares for life beyond its current structure.

Read the CPC Progress Review

Worcester City Council is committed to being transparent in all the work that we do, and is keen to promote the principles of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI), the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR), the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). These pieces of legislation give individuals the right of access to information about the council and information about themselves that the council holds.

Information About Worcester City Council

We publish a lot of information about the work we do and the services we provide. Our Guide to Information gives details of the information that we make publicly available, and also how to request information from us.

We are obliged to make much of the information we hold available to the public under the FOI act and the EIR act. We do this either by publishing it on our website or providing it to individuals upon request

Examples of information that is available on our website that we receive regular requests for include:

Information About Me

Under the GDPR and the DPA 2018, you have the right to know how we process you personal information. Our Privacy Notice pages give full details of the different reasons we may hold your personal information and how we use it.

You have the right to request access any of the information we hold about you, by making a Subject Access Request. You will need to complete a ‘ pdf Subject Access Request (130 KB) ' form and submit it with proof of your identity.

Information about Worcestershire County Council

Many services within Worcester City are provided by Worcestershire County Council who are a separate authority and are responsible for the following:

Adult and Children’s Social Care
Transport and Highways
Births, Deaths and Marriages
Schools and Education
Libraries, Archives and Archaeology

If you are interested in information regarding any of these services, please direct your request to Worcestershire County Council.

View our published information Submit an information request Request an internal review