The public know what it will take to level up their area, but most aren’t confident that the Government will achieve it.
The most interesting development from last week’s Government reshuffle was Michael Gove’s appointment as the new Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
The breadth of the newly named department could put it at the forefront of this Government’s domestic agenda and I hope that Gove and his new team of ministers will give levelling up a boost ahead of the white paper’s publication this autumn.
A boost is much-needed. It has been almost two years since the Prime Minister won his majority and realigned the Conservative Party northwards on a promise to level up left behind cities and towns across the UK, and yet we aren’t much clearer about how he plans to do this.
To get a deeper understanding of the public’s views on levelling up, Centre for Cities worked in partnership with ITV News and FocalData to poll people across the country in three key areas:
Below is an outline of the main findings.
First some good news for the new Secretary of State: In a sign that the Government’s message discipline is working, when asked whether they understand what levelling up means, 42 per cent of the public said they did. On the face of it this may not sound particularly high, but when you consider that knowledge of Government policy outside of ‘the bubble’ tends to be low, getting four in ten people to say they understand what levelling up means is pretty good.
Looking across Great Britain, understanding of levelling up varies significantly in different nations and regions. In Greater London, just over half of people polled (53 per cent) said they knew what levelling up meant. Understanding was also high across the North and Midlands – the regions where levelling up is most needed. Interestingly, public understanding of the levelling up agenda is also higher in cities and largest towns (45 per cent) than in rural areas (38 per cent).
However, understanding of levelling up is lowest outside England, with people in Wales and Scotland reporting the lowest understanding of it (31 per cent and 29 per cent respectively). This presents a challenge to Government efforts to prove the value of the Union in the face of nationalist sentiment in these nations.
Public understanding of levelling up is also lower in Red Wall seats won by the Conservatives at the 2019 general election. Less than half of respondents (47 per cent) said they understood what levelling up means, compared to 53 per cent who did not. Clearly the Government has work to do in these areas before the next election.
Despite relatively high public understanding what they think levelling up means, people across the country are less confident that the Government will actually achieve it. Overall 42 per cent of respondents across Great Britain lack confidence that their area will be levelled up.
Higher shares of people in Scotland (57 per cent), Yorkshire and the Humber (51 per cent) and North West England (49 per cent) and Wales (48 per cent) say that they are ‘not confident at all’ that their area will be levelled up. This presents a big challenge for the Conservatives to both bolster their support in the North and strengthen support for the Union outside England.
People living in Conservative-voting former Red Wall seats are also more likely to lack confidence in the Government’s ability to level up their area. Almost half (49 per cent) said that they are not confident that their area will be levelled up, with just under 4 per cent saying they were very confident in the Government’s plans. Again, this presents the Conservatives with a political challenge that they will need to solve before the next election.
Interestingly, there is also an urban-rural divide when it comes to confidence in the levelling up agenda, with significantly higher shares of people in rural areas lacking confidence that their areas will be levelled up (47 per cent) than those in cities and large towns (38 per cent).
When asked what people want from the levelling up agenda, the highest share of people ranked better job opportunities in their area as a very important priority (48 per cent). After this, people ranked regenerating their town centre (38 per cent) and upgrading local transport infrastructure (35 per cent) as important priorities.
While the polling found little difference between the priorities of people living in cities or large towns and those living in rural areas, better employment prospects and local transport links are slightly more important to city dwellers, while improving local town centres is more important to those elsewhere.
Interestingly, despite the prominence that the Government has given to moving departments out of Whitehall as part of levelling up – the Treasury to Darlington, Housing and Communities to Wolverhampton – this ranks low on the public’s list of priorities. Overall just 11 per cent of people cited this as ‘very important’ while 36 per cent of the public cited it as ‘not important.’
The public’s prioritisation of good jobs over relocating civil servants shows that their instincts are right about what it will take to make levelling up work. However, creating new good private sector jobs, or moving existing ones around the country, is very difficult and will likely take decades to do properly. This is why the Government prioritises policies it can do more easily such as relocating civil servants.
Despite the difficulty of creating new good private sector jobs, however, it is still the aim for levelling up and Centre for Cities has been urging the Government to prioritise it by:
You can read our flagship briefing So you want to level up? here and all of our work on levelling up here.
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.
This briefing uses the theory of economic complexity to show how the economies of Britain’s cities and large towns have developed over time and sets out the implications for how the Government should approach its levelling up agenda.
This report outlines how Mayors provide the Government with the opportunity to develop a new effective set of regional economic development policies to level up across the country and contribute to increasing the UK’s rate of economic growth.
Levelling up should improve standards of living across the country and help every place to reach its productivity potential, with a focus on improving the performance of the UK’s biggest cities as a means to address regional inequalities.
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