Is this last chance saloon for levelling up?

By Beth Park

As another week goes by in parliament and ‘party-gate’ continues to dominate headlines, you could be forgiven for forgetting about the long-anticipated (in our industry, at least) levelling up white paper.

You could also be forgiven for thinking that the Secretary of State has forgotten about it too. In a letter of response to Clive Betts MP and Darren Jones MP, written in December and published earlier this week, Michael Gove said that work was “progressing well towards a publication in the new year” but made no commitments to a specific date. And almost three weeks into January, there’s still no sign.

In the meantime, IPPR North has been getting to work on publishing their ‘State of the North’ report for 2021/22, which they say, “highlights the gap between promises and reality on levelling up”. The research found that for every job created in the North of England, almost three were created in London and the South East. There has also been criticism of the scrapping of ‘flagship’ projects such as the eastern leg of HS2 from Birmingham to Leeds and the downgrading of high-speed rail between Leeds and Manchester. A Government approach of “over-promising” and “underdelivering” on levelling up was the message from the think tank’s interim director, Arianna Giovannini.

The response from the Department for Levelling Up is that the analysis from IPPR North is “misleading as it focuses on just one part of our investment to level up the north of England.” The spokesperson pointed to the likes of the £4.8bn Levelling Up Fund, record infrastructure investment amounting to £96bn, £12bn in affordable housing and the £2.6bn Shared Prosperity Fund.

But is it all too little, too late? It’s perhaps telling that last week, Tees Valley’s Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen, said that the PM needs to focus on the levelling up agenda now, in order to save the party’s ‘red wall’ seats at the next election. “Before the next election comes around, people need to see with their eyes concrete evidence that they were right to back this government,” commented Mr Houchen. “They do need to see progress, and this means steel going up to deliver new factories, spades in the ground for new energy infrastructure, and cranes in action as new bridges are built over our waters.”

This all comes back to an urgent need for Government to define what ‘levelling up’ means, in a way that people can understand, and which actually has a tangible, positive impact on their day-to-day lives. And whilst being a proud northerner myself, perhaps this also means being clear that ‘levelling up’ doesn’t just apply to the North of England, but to many of other towns and cities across the UK which have been forgotten or left behind. In this sense, the IPPR’s report probably is too focused on measuring the success of the agenda by looking at one specific geography.

The levelling up white paper in and of itself won’t achieve this - as Ben Houchen says, people need to see progress in action for themselves. But the ‘dither and delay’ around its publication isn’t particularly helpful, and time is fast running out to deliver on its promises and avoid those communities being overlooked for another electoral cycle.