Targets to reduce inequalities across society by 2030 are to be enshrined in law as part of long-awaited levelling up proposals to be published today, amid new rows over funding for the government’s headline policy.
Michael Gove will promise to “call time on the postcode lottery” of inequalities across Britain, setting 12 legally binding “missions” to improve health, living standards, transport, crime and wellbeing by the end of the decade.
Announcing the government’s levelling up strategy, the communities secretary will say that every area of England will have the chance to create a “London-style” metro mayor as part of what he claims is the biggest shift of power from Whitehall to local areas in modern times.
The levelling up white paper comes with Boris Johnson desperate to shift the public debate away from lockdown parties and on to what he says is the guiding aim of his premiership.
However, critics warned that the government is not clear about how it will achieve its 12 “missions”, which include everything from cutting crime to boosting skill levels in “left-behind” regions, and that there is insufficient funding behind the plans. Labour denounced it as a series of slogans.
The new levelling up targets include increasing taxpayer-funded research and development outside London and the south-east by 40%; boosting “perceived wellbeing” in every part of the country and improving “pride in place”, defined as “people’s satisfaction with their town centre and engagement in local culture and community”; and bringing local transport connectivity across the UK “significantly closer to the standards of London”.
Gove said: “For decades, too many communities have been overlooked and undervalued. As some areas have flourished, others have been left in a cycle of decline. The UK has been like a jet firing on only one engine. Levelling up and this white paper [are] about ending this historic injustice and calling time on the postcode lottery.”
Ministers will give government departments a legal duty to report on their progress against the missions – an approach used by Tony Blair’s government in tackling child poverty, and subsequently rejected by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.
Gove hopes this approach will help to force Whitehall departments to work together towards a coherent set of objectives. It may also give his department bargaining power in future tussles with the Treasury.
However, shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy said there was little substance in the new plans. “Ministers have had two-and-a-half years to get this right and all we have been given is more slogans and strategies, with few new ideas.
“High streets will only thrive when people have money in their pockets to spend. We need good jobs, decent wages, genuinely affordable housing and action to deal with the unfolding cost of living crisis so people can spend on their high streets and young people no longer have to get out to get on.”
Gove was handed the levelling up portfolio by Johnson in last autumn’s reshuffle. Downing Street believes achieving tangible progress will be key to holding on to the former Labour “red wall” seats outside London and south-east England, which the Tories won in 2019.
Gove’s department was beefed up significantly, with Johnson’s levelling up adviser Neil O’Brien, the MP for Harborough, made a junior minister. Gove has also been advised by the former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane.
One person who had been briefed on the plans said: “The 12 missions are … targets about how you measure success and they’re all over the place. One is about raising life expectancy and it literally had ‘by X’ in the draft when I saw it.”
They said Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, had “pretty much killed off all the big ideas in the white paper over the last few months” and that the announcements amounted to incremental progress rather than a radical policy shift.
Another said Gove and his officials had been managing expectations by telling local leaders “this is a start that outlines the direction of travel” rather than promising significant new money and powers.
They added: “It sounds like Michael Gove wants to move in the right direction but there is not an awful lot of money. Whether that is because the Treasury has refused or whether there’s internal politics at play, we don’t know.”
Sunak has already announced a total of £11bn to be spent on a series of levelling up funds – some of which will be allocated by Gove’s Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC).
Fresh questions about the department’s ability to deliver on the government’s ambitious promises are raised in a new report from the National Audit Office (NAO), which criticises it for failing to monitor past expenditure effectively.
“DLUHC has a limited understanding of what has worked well in previous local growth programmes due to a lack of consistent evaluation or monitoring,” the NAO said. “By failing to conduct evaluations, DLUHC has wasted opportunities to learn lessons to inform future interventions, and it does not know whether previous policies achieved their aims.”
A third person briefed on the hefty white paper described it as “solid” but warned that it is focused on spatial inequalities – narrowing the gaps between the best and worst-performing regions – rather than, for example, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. “It’s levelling up places: it’s not levelling up society,” they said.
Gove will announce a raft of other specific policies, encompassing everything from extending the decent homes standard to include private rental properties, to scrapping rules that mean the majority of public funding on housing ends up being spent in London and the south-east.
The government will also fund improvements in 20 new towns and cities, including Wolverhampton and Sheffield, though Nandy has already criticised those plans as reheated.
As part of what he is claiming will be a “devolution revolution”, Gove will say the government has already begun talks on new “county deals” with nine new areas including Durham, Hull and east Yorkshire, and Devon.
Some Tory MPs have already privately questioned the makeup of the proposed new metro mayoral regions, however, with the one for the east Midlands – expected to centre on Nottingham – causing particular disquiet.
