At any other time - without Brexit, Covid, the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis - the Government’s Levelling Up agenda would surely be generating more headlines.
Improving regional economies to provide more opportunities for people living in places like the North East, while stopping London and the South East from overheating, is a prize that has eluded Governments for decades.
There has been a feeling among many that, like the Northern Powerhouse before it, levelling up was a good slogan but not much more - wheeled out by Ministers when anything positive happened in the North and used as a stick to beat them with when things went wrong.
