Labour look set to stick with the term levelling up. Here’s why that’s a good thing.
Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner have set out today Labour’s position on levelling up. The headline from the announcement is that they have adopted the term, a phrase very much associated with Boris Johnson, rather than scrapping it. From the perspective of actually achieving something with the policy, this is a good thing.
There are issues to take with the phrase. From a politics perspective it was a term coined by the other side. And the phrase isn’t to everyone’s taste, with a criticism being that it doesn’t actually make any sense.
In some ways it doesn’t matter what it’s called. The problems it is trying to tackle, which have been around for a very long time remain whatever slogan the policy is given.
But if the name were to be changed, it would spark another round of arguments about how it should be defined. Instead of doing something about the problem, it would set the mission right back to square one. As a reminder, it took over two years for the Conservatives to define what they actually meant by levelling up.
So pragmatism is actually really important here, and thankfully that seems to have won the day.
But the biggest takeaway is not that Labour have adopted the term levelling up, but that they’ve broadly endorsed the diagnosis in the Levelling Up White Paper (Rayner and Starmer saying that ‘much of the analysis in it was good’). This hopefully means that, should they win the election, they will set about trying to fix the problem, building on the work so far, rather than starting all over again. And this would be a far better outcome for the UK economy.
A second significant point about the piece is that it has the potential prime minister’s backing. The delivery of levelling up cannot be done by the levelling up department alone. Instead, it requires a mission approach with buy-in from across government. Levelling up secretary Michael Gove recognised this, and emphasised it in the white paper. The lack of progress raises questions about how successful he has been in achieving it.
The attack by Labour today on Sunak underlines this requirement. They claim that, as chancellor, Sunak did not believe in levelling up (Boris Johnson said the same). This shows the importance of not just having the leader’s backing, but having the chancellor’s backing too, if the project is to be a success. There’s no reason to suspect that Rachel Reeves isn’t aligned but her buy-in will have a big influence on the scale of backing levelling up is given.
A final significant point is the intention to require places with mayors to come up with local growth plans. In principle this is a good idea. It isn’t though the first time that local areas have been asked to do this – we’ve had Strategic Economic Plans and Local Industrial Strategies since 2010. They all took a lot of time to do. And despite asking for them, central government paid little attention to what was produced (many local industrial strategies never even saw the light of day due to the change in prime ministers). As we’ll set out in a paper we’ll publish in April, this does nothing for incentives (which ultimately dictate results).
So if such plans are going to work this time, the following needs to happen: national government will need to be explicit about its strategy so it’s clear what the local plan is playing in to; it will need to be clear what a local plan will unlock in terms of resources; and it will need to be credible – local areas will need to be persuaded that the plans won’t be junked when national politics changes, so making the time, effort and cash put into writing one worth the bother.
The good news at least for places is that all their previous work shouldn’t be lost. If they were actually long-term plans, then the previous versions they have written should be as relevant today (with some tweaks) as they were the day they were finished. It will be revealing in itself which places feel the need to rewrite their plans.
Labour’s explicit backing of levelling up has been a long time coming. While the approach set out in the white paper wasn’t perfect, it was pretty good. It appears that pragmatism has won out over politics. And this is a good thing if we are going to narrow decades-long gaps across different parts of the country.
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