The forthcoming white paper means that any detail was unlikely. But the reaction to the speech shows a growing impatience with the levelling up agenda.
Boris Johnson last week gave a rare speech to sketch out what he described as the ‘skeleton’ of the levelling up agenda. It received criticism from many quarters for its lack of detail, including today by MPs on the House of Commons BEIS Select Committee. But we really shouldn’t have been expecting anything specific.
Given that the Levelling Up White Paper is due in the Autumn, it surely would have been a surprise if the Prime Minister had set out any detail at this stage. Neil O’Brien, who is leading on the white paper, is currently working out what the detail of the policy is. To set out anything specific now would either have made his work irrelevant, or at least very much constrained what it is that the white paper will say.
There were a couple of hopeful things to draw from the speech too. The first was the Prime Minister once again identifying the problem of the underperformance of many of the UK’s large cities. “Imagine if we could level up – not just lengthening London’s lead around the world. But closing the gap between London and the rest of the UK’s great cities. That would increase the national GDP by tens of billions”, he said. As Centre for Cities has shown, conservative estimates of the underperformance of the UK’s large cities costs the economy just short of £50 billion a year.
The second was the recommitment to devolution. In its manifesto the Conservative Party committed to doing a white paper on English devolution, but appeared to have got cold feet on this over the last year – it dropped this commitment and replaced it with the Levelling Up White Paper instead. The concern was that this meant that there would be no further progress on devolution. But the Prime Minister’s comments – inviting places to come forward to set out what further devolution should look like – show that this isn’t the case.
This is of course giving the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt. There are two broader problems that have stoked the criticism of the speech. The first is the timing. It is quite remarkable that by the time the white paper is published it will be two years since the term levelling up was first used. That’s two years to actually define something that was a key part of the manifesto that the current Government was elected in on. While the pandemic offers some mitigation, there was enough resource within Government to be developing the agenda even while other parts of Whitehall battled with Covid-19.
The second is that the Government has also played fast and loose with the definition of levelling up. The prime minister’s speech was reflective of the wider strategy of the Government in recent months, which is to badge as many policies as possible under the levelling up banner, from crime to chewing gum removal. So he should not be surprised that the speech has been widely criticised for being vague. This might have been acceptable in January 2020. In July 2021 it is not.
While it may be politically expedient to continue to avoid defining what levelling up means, and may well help the Conservative Party at the next election (the results in the Hartlepool and Batley and Spen by-elections suggest increasing popularity of the Government in Red Wall areas), this lack of focus will mean that we will get no closer to increasing prosperity for the people in these places. Good strategy defines its goals, then sets a number of clear actions as to how these goals will be achieved. We are still waiting for both.
If the Levelling Up White Paper is to have any longevity, then it must do both of these things. If not then it will likely go the same way as the industrial strategy and many ill-defined government policies before it when the administration inevitably changes. Policy has been attempting to deal with divides across the country for 85 years. There aren’t as yet any signs that it’s about to crack the problem.
In advance of the Government’s forthcoming Levelling Up White Paper, this briefing sets out what the levelling up agenda should aim to achieve and a strategy for achieving it.
Levelling up the economy should be about helping struggling places, but policy must recognise its limitations in how much it can do for different places.
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