People in the north have said the Government's levelling up programme just highlights how inequality exists between the regions.
The programme introduced by the Conservative government in it's 2019 manifesto looked to reduce the economic imbalances between areas and social groups. But a recent YouGov survey revealed 74% of people don't actually understand what levelling up is - including one in four people who have ever even heard of it.
The North in Numbers podcast tells the human stories behind various statistics for the north of England with the latest episode getting to the bottom of levelling up and what it means for the people working in some of the Government's strategy targets.
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Andy Westwood, Professor of Government Practice at the University of Manchester, said levelling up shows an inequality in the UK and how the north-south divide has only widened thanks to recent events. Professor Westwood said: “Austerity, Brexit and covid have all come together to create a cumulative effect over the last 10 years. Whatever one thinks about each of those individual things, together they’ve made those inequalities grow.”
One of the key areas of inequality the Government is trying to tackle is education as school children in the north continue to underperform from a very early age. Pepe Di'lasio, headteacher of Wales High School in Rotherham said his school is more than 50 years old and is in desperate need of investment.
Mr Di’Iasio said: “Anything that we’re seeing coming into education at the moment is based upon 12 years of underfunding. If we’re not careful what we end up doing is getting us to a level that we should have been at several years ago, and it could seem like a plaster over what is a significant wound.
“I sincerely hope that levelling up is something that will make opportunities for young people better, certainly here in Rother Valley. If we can do that, that will be brilliant and have knock-on effects across the region which will be incredibly positive. So I’m aspirational, I’m upbeat, but we want to see it arrive, don’t we.”
Another crucial element of the levelling up agenda is transport. Figures from IPPR show that over the last 10 years, the north has received £515 less per person than London in transport spending, and this is reflected in worse public transport options and greater car use.
Gareth Dennis, a railway engineer based in York, said: “Public transport across the north is pretty crippled compared to what it could be. You turn up at a railway station in the M25, whether it’s London overground or the tube, and a train will turn up so quickly that you don’t really need to care about the timetable.
“Across the north we have quite spread out suburban areas that have a pretty sizable population, and they’ve got a poxy little station with a bus shelter that has a train maybe every hour, and in lots of cases it’s even worse than that.”
Mr Dennis is particularly unhappy about the scrapping of the eastern leg of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail in favour of the new Integrated Rail Plan - which he calls “dismal”. However he thinks progress can be made in levelling up transport if the government does what it promises and devolves power to the regions.
One of the 12 missions in the government’s Levelling Up White Paper, on empowering local leaders, sets out the intention that every area that wants one should have a devolution settlement in place by 2030. Meanwhile, another mission focuses on increasing pride in place, in part through engagement in local culture - which is again an area where the north is falling behind in some ways.
Katy Shaw, Professor of Contemporary Writings at Northumbria University and Director of Creative Communities at the Arts and Humanities Research Council, said: “The north has always been a cultural powerhouse, and we are famed for much of our culture both in the UK and across the world. But we have some real restrictions and limitations on that.
“We’re falling behind largely because of access, and that’s access both in terms of things like hard infrastructure, so transport and getting to culture and arts and heritage organisations, but also soft infrastructure, like digital connections. And we’ve also got issues of representation, so when you think of who produces culture, who consumes culture, and also the kinds of people and accents and worlds that you see on the stage and you read on the page, there’s huge disparities still between north and south.”
Professor Shaw welcomes the recent shift of funding that has seen an increase in cultural investment outside of London, but thinks more is needed in terms of metrics to measure the success of levelling up in this area. While there are several concerns raised in the episode about the proposed delivery of levelling up, the general consensus is that it is a much-needed strategy - and that current plans at least make a good start.
Jonny Webb, senior research fellow at IPPR North, said: “The good thing about the levelling up agenda is regardless of whether we do see these outcomes achieved over the next decade, what it has done is put into the centre of our political discussions the importance of thinking about inequalities between places. I think we’ll now see politicians take it seriously and try to make efforts to close some of these divides. So even if it doesn’t happen in the form of this White Paper, I’m optimistic that we will see some progress on this.”
