‘Opaque’ Government must clear levelling up doubts, says top peer

■ Baroness calls for local government funding fix ■ ‘Difficult to identify’ what is being tackled

THE Government must act to define what it wants to achieve through Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda or the people whose lives Ministers have promised to improve will get lost amid infrastructure schemes, the chair of a Lords committee has said.

Baroness Hilary Armstrong heads up the House of Lords Public Services Committee, set up last year to examine how to reform public services so that they work more effectively.

Recognising the intertwined nature of strong public services and delivering on levelling up, the former Minister said it would be impossible to achieve any kind of levelling up without fixing the issue of local government funding.

Her committee is midway through an inquiry into finding out what levelling up – a phrase first used by the PM before the 2019 election – actually means.

After hearing evidence from experts, Labour peer Baroness Armstrong said: “What we want to do is come out and say to Government, these are the things that really matter, and we want to see these things addressed and measured so that we really can find out whether what you’ve been doing works in terms of levelling up.”

But she said the issue the Government faced was that it had so far been “opaque” over the allocations of funding and resources, and therefore what it hoped to achieve. “[Levelling up] is only difficult to measure if you’re not clear about what you’re trying to do,” she added.

“And that is our problem, but the Government has taken a more opaque set of criteria to agree distribution of money to tackle levelling up and that means it’s much more difficult to identify what is it that they are tackling, what is it that they’re trying to change and level up, and how do we hold them accountable to that, when they are using very opaque criteria.”

Many Tory MPs, when asked what levelling up means, will point to an equality of opportunity – so that a child brought up in Bradford has the same chances as one from Buckinghamshire.

But Baroness Armstrong said we “haven’t heard much of that from the Government”. She added: “From the Government, it’s been mainly projects and infrastructure, town centre development, economic development now.

“All of our people are saying economic development is important, but we had a very interesting session where people talked about what is it that prevents people in poorer communities getting decent jobs and what is becoming clear is mainstream public services have a real input into that.”

“What we need are thriving communities with their own personality, all the way through the country.”