Political grand designs: Is levelling up going nowhere?
(Illustration | Tracy Worrall)
7 min read
The concept of levelling up has been tried under many different names and by governments of all stripes. So how can ministers ensure this current attempt to achieve equality across our regions doesn't go the same way as those of its predecessors?
Levelling up is the latest version of a policy-making phenomenon I like to call the Big Old Idea. It’s when a minister announces a grand plan, with great fanfare, as if it’s completely new, when actually it’s been addressed by every one of their predecessors.
In every government department, there are some policy problems that are perennially being announced as Big Old Ideas, without any reference to the efforts the department has been making – sometimes for generations – to solve them. In the Home Office, it’s fixing the broken asylum system. In education, it’s boosting the status of vocational education. In health, it’s focusing on prevention instead of just treatment. In welfare it’s helping people with long-term health conditions get off disability benefits and into work.
How does it happen? Usually, ministers start off with only a superficial knowledge of the issues their department covers. They then get a certain number of months into the job and start to see where the system-level problems lie. Feeling the weight of this new, fuller, understanding, they don’t want to just be a tinkerer. So they give a speech promising to fix the underlying system problems.
The problem is that the speech never says: “There are complex problems in this department that my predecessors have tried and failed to fix for decades. So I have looked in detail at the efforts they made, learned from the difficulties they faced, and came up with the beginning of a plan to try a new approach. Hopefully, over time, this will start to make a difference.”
Instead the speech says: “It’s a disgrace that no-one fixed this before, but I’m great so I will.”
Levelling up had been promised in precisely this way for years. When Boris Johnson pledged it in his manifesto, did he mention the successes and failures of the Michael Heseltine-led regeneration projects in the 1980s and 1990s? Did he talk about the strengths and weaknesses of John Prescott’s efforts – the Northern Plan – regional growth corridors, or the Lyons review on the relocation of government departments? Did he evaluate the impact of another deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, with his Regional Growth Fund? Or his party colleague George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse?
No. Levelling up fed a populist, anti-government narrative that no-one had tried before, because no-one cared about the North, or towns, or coastal areas, because politicians only care about London. That might have helped win an election, but it causes lasting harm to the policy agenda because it makes change sound easy, and undermines the case for the investment, and the patience the problems actually deserve.
The Levelling Up White Paper started an important corrective process to add substance and much-needed humility to the process.
The government’s plans are – now – built on detailed, thoughtful analysis of the economic imbalances that have plagued our country for generations. The white paper’s approach is grounded in a rich understanding of why, where and how previous attempts to resolve our problems have failed, or stalled. For the first time, they seem to understand the way in which social and economic factors work together, and want to address deep, structural inequalities of education, skills, opportunity, health, wellbeing and more.
And yet the populist rhetoric that brought this agenda to life still risks undermining it completely. The level of seriousness in the white paper isn’t reflected in the commitments made by the Treasury, or by the political narratives the government continues to use.
The Levelling Up White Paper started an important corrective process to add substance and much-needed humility to the process.
Many commentators have centred their criticism of the Levelling Up White Paper on its lack of fiscal commitments. Turning to the reunification of Germany as a comparable example of an attempt to rebalance an economy, they have made the case that for levelling up to succeed, we will need vast fiscal transfers between richer and poorer areas, for decades if not for generations.
But our government doesn’t want to admit the reality of how expensive levelling up will be. In the long term, of course, we will all benefit from greater productivity across our regions. But we have seen similar political arguments about funding international development aid or supporting growth in poorer European Union member states fall on deaf ears. It’s a story that needs to be proactively told, time and again, to persuade people to take the short-term hit of paying now for benefits later.
Politics cannot resolve serious, long-term problems, unless our leaders are honest with us. You cannot level up the country on the cheap and we should not try. But you cannot take billions from one part of the country and send it to another without people noticing either, and we should not try.
When Johnson won the 2019 General Election, he made a clear commitment not just to “level up”, but to “unite the country”. Many people think of those as separate agendas, but for me, they are one and the same. For levelling up to work, it has to be built on unity of purpose and identity within and between the nations of the United Kingdom: between those who will pay now, and those who will benefit later.
That unity of purpose is within our reach. Different parties have different names for levelling up. But if you focus on the stated goals of the plan instead of whether it will work, you realise that the white paper could be the start of a new, multi-decade political consensus: a recognition that place and community matters; that markets left alone lead to undesirable outcomes; and that top-down diktats don’t work.
Labour agrees on all of those points. Both parties are trying to reduce inequality – between people and between places. Levelling up builds on an intellectual framework that includes community wealth building (from the left) and the new social covenant (from the right). It builds on work by the Centre for Towns (founded by Labour MP Lisa Nandy) and Onward (founded by Conservative MP Neil O’Brien). It builds on deep economic analysis from non-partisan actors like Andy Haldane, head of the government’s new Levelling Up Taskforce, the CBI, and the Resolution Foundation.
Despite all of this, government has barely even tried to build the lasting public consensus for levelling up. Instead it has resorted to culture war snark about richer areas, pitting Primrose Hill against Pontefract and Hampstead against Hartlepool.
Throwing away the opportunity for national consensus for a few cheap barbs at the opposition isn’t just bad politics. It’s bad policy too, because the only way to take the political sting out of the cost of levelling up, is for our parties to work together on it. Divisive framing destroys the chances of a real conversation with the public about the long-term changes we need to make, and how we, together will manage the trade-offs.
It means the most likely future for levelling up is to fail, and be recycled as another Big Old Idea by another government in years to come. If we want to aim higher, we need to start telling the truth, stop pretending that change will come quickly or cheaply, and build consensus between parties, communities and places for patient investment. That really would be a big new idea in our politics – and it might even succeed.
Polly Mackenzie is chief executive of Demos and an ex-director of policy to former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
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