Over the past few days, Boris Johnson has avowed that he is “getting on with the job” and “delivering for the British people” and other such bromides. Yet what kind of job the prime minister is doing and just how he is delivering was revealed in unsightly detail in a report on Wednesday from the Commons public accounts committee. It examines his flagship policy of levelling up, and in particular the government’s £4.8bn fund – and it makes for deeply worrying reading.
Last November, Mr Johnson’s minister for levelling up, Michael Gove, awarded the first tranche of cash – with no principles for what a winning bid should look like. Instead, the department plucked out its winners, then retrofitted the criteria to suit. Nor did it evaluate the effects of its grants. The committee chair, Meg Hillier, describes the government’s approach as “gambling taxpayers’ money on policies and programmes that are little more than a slogan”. Worse still, Mr Johnson’s administration has done this before, with its £3.2bn towns fund. That involved handing out public cash to projects largely based in Conservative-held seats – leading one leading political scientist to blast the scheme in an academic paper as “pork barrel politics”.
