The Levelling Up White Paper arrived last month as one of the most heavily-trailed pieces of policy to be proffered by a government in years.
As is so often the case, what the paper was supposed to do in terms of the government narrative around its formulation and release is quite a different thing to what it could reasonably be expected to do in the context of British politics in 2022.
The document does not, in fact, clear a path to a radically transformed UK. What it does instead provide is some useful traction for localists in the constant push-pull of central government relations and present a reasonable theory of inequality and development – marred by a fatal flaw.
In filling the void at the centre of the levelling up agenda with a holistic theory of economic development and geographic disparity; in expanding and nuancing the language of local growth and, most importantly; in its wholesale acceptance of the underlying argument made for years by advocates of locally-led economic growth, the Levelling Up White Paper has provided ample ammunition for those of us who seek to chip away at the structure of the most centralised nation in the Western world.
As a perennial issue in British public policy, regional inequality has been refuted from many angles, with arguments that the current state of affairs is either inevitable, desirable or that the failure of governments to alleviate it prove the challenge unassailable. The great strength of the White Paper is that it manages to push back the arguments that redressing the balance is some kind of Sisyphean task (successive UK governments failing to do something does not, in fact, mean that the thing in question is impossible).
The cyclical and complex nature of the problem as the paper lays it out presents a defence against the fatalistic, ‘twas ever thus’ analysis of regional inequality. The paper also finally provides us with official UK government acknowledgement that, yes, inequality does exist within regions, even in London and the South East which, for many, are not particularly fantastic places to live.
Were the paper to end after its first section, perhaps with a commitment to a programme of devolution in order to empower local leadership, there would be very little to criticise indeed. Yet this is barely a third of the content, with a cavalcade of bullet-points progressing through the paper – to join the six ‘capitals’ and four ‘policy goals’ of the early sections come twelve ‘missions’, as the caveats given to empowering local leaders begin to take up more paragraph space than the actual evidence presented that local leaders should be empowered.
The fatal flaw with the paper begins to emerge with the lessons taken from the potted history of regional development put forward in chapter 2. The general historical overview given by the White Paper is reasonable enough. Since at least the inter-war period, when traditional industries began to decline, successive UK governments have led major initiatives to reduce inter-regional inequality. These policies have had some positive long-term effects, notably the revitalisation to a certain degree of the UK’s regional cities. However, as a result of a complex combination of factors, none have gone far enough.
These conclusions all exclude an analysis of the essential nature of the key actor: UK government. The paper recognises the problems with longevity, coordination and local empowerment which have plagued previous attempts to redress regional inequality. What it fails to recognise is that the problems with central government’s approach are deeper than simply requiring a newer, better top-down policy regime.
For all its analysis, the section the paper does not consider is the glaringly obvious: the fundamental inability of the British government to focus on more than one thing at once, nor the lesson about short-termism and political cycles that is quite clear in the marked inconsistency of the Government’s approach. In the five years of the Mayoral Combined Authorities in Manchester and the West Midlands, we have seen two different governments, three different Prime Ministers, a wholesale shift of focus from ‘Just About Managing’ to ‘Levelling Up’ alongside a full 180-degree reversal in the entire approach of the Conservative party to regional inequality.
Even since the paper’s publication, the Ox-Cam Arc, never fully integrated into the governance of the region, and more a Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities initiative to create a top-down spatial plan, has been scrapped less than a year after it was the flagship in the fleet of regional development.
The obvious conclusion, that the kind of policy regime identified as necessary to achieving levelling up would be better vested in local leadership through devolved powers is entirely missed. Instead, by the end of the chapter, the White Paper ends up preaching local empowerment while demanding, granular, real-time data on outcomes fed directly to Whitehall, which must oversee the competence of all local leadership at once. Here we go again.
Joe Fyans is head of research at Localis