‘Masterplan to radically improve UK’
Levelling Up paper’s pledges on mayors and inequality, but doubts over funding
MICHAEL GOVE has set out plans for “root-and-branch” reform of the way the UK is governed in an attempt to deliver on levelling up – but has been warned many of his key targets for progress this decade are “highly unlikely to be met”.
The Levelling Up Secretary has based his plan to reduce regional inequality around 12 national “missions”, covering areas including economy, housing, education, transport and culture with targets for dramatic improvements by 2030.
More mayors are to be created under a new framework for devolution deals, with extra powers handed to existing ones, while the system for council bidding for Government funds is to be simplified.
Levelling Up Directors are to be appointed and based in regions across the UK to help coordinate efforts at a local and national level.
The Levelling Up White Paper promises that responsibility for spending the UK Shared Prosperity Fund – which is the post-Brexit replacement to EU structural funding – will fall to local leaders.
Mr Gove’s plan said it was a “21st century recipe for a new Industrial Revolution”. Funding for schemes announced in the plan comes from allocations previously set out in the spending review, rather than new pots of cash.
Mr Gove said boosting business activity in poorer areas towards the national average would dramatically improve the UK’s economy by “tens of billions of pounds each year”. The plan describes itself as a “critical stepping stone” in the Government’s ambition of “ensuring that geography is no longer destiny”.
Shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy said the plan
amounted to “ministers scurrying around Whitehall shuffling the deckchairs, cobbling together a shopping list of recycled policies and fiddling the figures”.
But the White Paper’s ambitions were given a cautious welcome by Yorkshire’s Labour mayors Dan Jarvis and Tracy Brabin – although both said more funding would be required to deliver on what it has promised.
The targets for 2030 include making public transport connectivity “significantly closer” to the standards of London, having a “globally-competitive city” in
Targets are largely in the right areas but many... are unlikely to be met. Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson.
every area of the UK and cutting the gap in healthy life expectancy between the poorest and richest areas. The Government also aims to have 90 per cent of children leaving primary school meeting expectations in reading, writing and maths – up from 65 per cent in 2019.
Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson said while the White Paper laudably recognised the scale of the challenge there were major doubts on whether its medium-term ambitions were deliverable.
He said: “The targets are largely in the right areas, but many look extremely ambitious – that is to say highly unlikely to be met, even with the best policies and much resource. There is little detail on how most of them will be met, and less detail on available funding. There is something for everyone, and hence little sense of prioritisation: ambition and resource will be spread very thin.”
He added: “Meeting the core ambition of simultaneously improving education and skill levels and availability of high paying jobs in poorer regions will prove extremely challenging. Without that, levelling up will not happen.
“It will require the level of focus that has gone into this White Paper being developed and maintained over decades.”
Levelling Up Minister Neil O’Brien, who is originally from Huddersfield, told The Yorkshire Post the plan represented “the biggest ever transfer of power from Westminster in modern times”.
He said: “The publication of the Levelling Up White Paper is our masterplan for putting right the geographical inequalities that exist and radically improving the UK. By levelling up, we will make life in Yorkshire better, and in doing so, grow the economy and ensure we flourish as a country.”
YORKSHIRE’S MAYORS have cautiously received the Government’s “step in the right direction” with the Levelling Up White Paper, but say more funding is needed to make sure they have the “tools to do the job.”
Dan Jarvis and Tracy Brabin both described Michael Gove’s 332-page publication as “positive” yesterday but had reservations about how the big promises could be achieved.
The Levelling Up Secretary based his plan around 12 national “missions” covering areas including economy, housing, education, transport and culture with targets for dramatic improvements by 2030.
Setting out the contents of a much-anticipated White Paper, Mr Gove told MPs it would “make opportunity more equal and to shift wealth and power decisively towards working people and their families”.
“We need to allow overlooked and undervalued communities to take back control of their destiny,” he said.
“Because we know that, while talent is spread equally across the United Kingdom, opportunity is not.”
Mayor of South Yorkshire Dan Jarvis said the announcements could mark “the start of something significant” if Ministers are willing to “put real resources” into partnership with the region.
Mr Jarvis, who also serves as MP for Barnsley Central, said: “The Government’s Levelling Up White Paper is a step in the right direction but without the means
to achieve the positive ambition it sets out.”
He believes that “mayors and local authorities will still largely be left to fight each other for funding pots ultimately controlled by Whitehall” without more cash promises.
He added: “Without the funding needed for real change, the Government’s promises of levelling up will remain hollow.
“This White Paper gets some things right, but two long years after the election the Conservatives fought on the promise that levelling up would be their ‘defining mission’, many
people across the country will be left asking themselves – is this it?”
In West Yorkshire, Mayor Tracy Brabin similarly said “It’s positive that the Government recognises the urgent need to level up across the nation but the money
it promises is nowhere near enough.”
Speaking after the announcement, the former MP for Batley and Spen said: “Our talent and potential can match anywhere in the country.
“But the ambitions of today’s White Paper need to be backed up by further commitments from the Treasury.
“The Government have made countless promises over the last decade to strengthen regional economies.
“We’ve had the Northern Powerhouse, we’ve had local industrial strategies, all of which have asked local areas to chop and change their priorities.
“The test for this White Paper will be whether they deliver on their promises to empower local leaders, simplify funding, and give us the freedoms and flexibilities we need to deliver for our communities.”
In all, the White Paper includes 12 national “missions” to be achieved by 2030 to be enshrined in a flagship Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill.
They include a promise that public investment in research and development outside the
“greater South-East” of England will increase by at least 40 per cent; more than 90 per cent of children will leave England’s primary schools meeting the expected standards in reading, writing and maths and the gap in healthy life expectancy between will have narrowed between the highest and lowest areas.
Boris Johnson made “levelling up” a key theme of his 2019 election campaign, but the Covid-19 pandemic and the hit it caused to the nation’s finances have complicated efforts to develop the strategy.
The test will be whether they deliver on their promises. West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin.