Could stronger local government hold the key to levelling up down South?

Author
Ian Mean
Director of Business West Gloucestershire | Vice Chair of GfirstLEP | Business West
15th July 2021

Two years after he entered Downing Street and introduced his much-heralded levelling up plan for the country, Boris Johnson today gave us a half term report on how it was going.

What we got, in my view was a skeleton of the policy with a lot more flesh needed to be put on the bones.

He talked about the “glaring imbalance” of our communities in terms of health and education and said that our economy was poised to recover “like a coiled spring”.

This was vintage Boris rhetoric, and he told his audience at a Coventry battery plant that his levelling up plan was “not a jam, spreading operation. It’s not robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s not zero sum, it’s win-win.”

He pledged that investing more in the North and Midlands would not mean that the South was “levelled down” as a result.

“It is vital to understand the difference between this project and levelling down”, he said. “We don’t want to decapitate the tall poppies.

“We don’t think you can make the poor parts of the country richer by making the rich parts poorer.”

What were the new announcements in this speech? Not a lot.

But what did attract me was his thoughts on local leadership - he wanted to encourage more of it from councils wanting to drive through their own projects.

Boris said this brand of more active local leadership was the “ketchup of catch-up”.

He talked of more mayors for counties, just like the regional mayors and I detected a nod to the forthcoming local government review which is due out shortly.

I believe that review will give a lot more authority to local district councils to drive their own projects and enable them to receive more government money to do so direct from Whitehall.

Levelling up is an admirable aspiration, but as he said himself, it is a “huge undertaking”.

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