Only £33m, out of a headline figure of £1.6 billion, will be made available to towns in the south west to alleviate the impacts of Brexit.

That’s the second smallest amount with only the east of England region getting less at £25m, and represents just 2.06 per cent of the total figure.

Towns in Oxfordshire, in the south east, will be able to bid for a share of £37m,

will the West Midlands and the north west get the lion’s share of funding with £212m and £281m respectively.

The government said local councils will be expected to bid for money through their local enterprise partnerships, and it’s to be used for increasing employment or training opportunities or improving infrastructure.

It is not known whether Swindon Borough Council plans to apply for money as the news was only announced by the government yesterday.

A spokesman for the Swindon and Wiltshire LEP said that it would wait for bids for the money from the two local authorities.

But opposition politicians are not impressed at the amount available. Leader of the Labour group on Swindon Borough Council Jim Grant said: "This is a pathetic attempt to bribe MPs in northern and midland constituencies in exchange for votes over Brexit. These towns - and indeed many parts of Swindon - have been in need of transformation funding for over a decade but have, until now, been totally ignored by the Tories. It’s not even a very good bribe. Northern Ireland with a population of 1.8 million got £1 billion. England with a population of over 55million only gets £1.6bn. This is less the figure the Tories have stripped from councils since 2010. As I say it’s pathetic."

Green MEP for the south west, and the party’s Brexit spokesman Molly Scott Cato said the south west was missing out because it had plenty of Conservative MPs: “This new fund is a cynical attempt by Theresa May to bribe Labour MPs to support her dodgy Brexit deal. I hope Labour MPs in the constituencies being targeted by the government will recognise the money being offered is politically motivated, will not make up for years of crushing austerity and are loose change compared to funds that will be lost if we leave the European Union. EU funds are worth around £6bn to England and around £12bn to the whole of the UK, with Wales and the South West the two regions receiving the highest allocations between 2014-2020.

"Areas such as the South West with loyal Tory MPs will miss out as they don’t need a bung to be persuaded to back Brexit. So not only will my South West constituents miss out on this pot of money, more significantly they are set to lose millions in EU funding that has been awarded to projects which boost industrial innovation and support rural infrastructure.

“Cornwall in particular has received almost half a billion euros from the EU in the current funding round. The government promised to replace this with a Shared Prosperity Fund but more than two years on and with just four weeks until we are due to leave the EU we have no more detail than those three words.

“The EU is often accused of being undemocratic, but EU funding comes free of any political motive; it is arrived at through a formula which identifies where in Europe the need is greatest. By comparison, the Tories are playing politics with people’s lives, using bribery in a hugely undemocratic attempt to shore up their rotten Brexit disaster.”