UK government has ‘mixed scorecard’ on levelling up admits adviser

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Most Britons “haven’t seen much fruit” from levelling up and regard it with a “so what?” attitude, an adviser to the government on its flagship policy admitted on Monday.

Andy Haldane, chair of the levelling up advisory council, said ministers had chalked up a “mixed scorecard” to date on their aim to reduce regional inequality and boost opportunities across the country.

Speaking at the Institute for Government think-tank on Monday, he said: “If you ask most people across the UK right now, have you felt the fruits of having been levelled up, they’d say ‘no’, or ‘not really’, or perhaps most optimistically ‘not yet’.”

There may be “one or two places” that have received targeted funding which have felt some benefit from the levelling up policy, “but for the vast majority of people in terms of outcomes, so far it’s a ‘so what?’,” he said.

Former prime minister Boris Johnson’s promise to “level up” Britain — particularly poorer swaths of the North and Midlands where residents had voted for Brexit in droves — was at the heart of the Conservatives’ 2019 general election campaign, which saw the party win an overwhelming majority.

Reviewing progress of the flagship policy, Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist and an FT contributing editor, said it may have been “too high” a bar to expect significant reforms to have taken root just 18 months after the publication of the government white paper on levelling up.

“We always knew levelling up would take many years, if not many decades to make good on. That’s why we set missions out to 2030,” he said.

However, he insisted the government had made “some progress”, including launching a levelling up bill in parliament which, once passed, would “hardwire in that longer term ambition” to rebalance the nation. The legislation is currently in the Lords.

He also cited “trailblazer” devolution deals in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, as well as the announcement last week of the first UK investment zone in South Yorkshire, which will focus on advanced manufacturing.

In addition, he said, accountability and transparency have improved with the creation of the Office of Local Government, which is “hopefully a step forward when it comes to scrutiny of local government decision-making”.

Haldane concluded that there has been “some action, some progress, more than is given credit for” on levelling up, “but nonetheless when it comes to outcomes on the ground, less than the public probably expected”.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities was contacted for comment.