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”.
Reducing the gulfs in wealth and income between different parts of the UK is a worthy goal, although Mr Johnson clearly thinks more about its electoral possibilities than its economic difficulties. The former head of his very own government taskforce for levelling up, Andy Haldane, admits that the gap in incomes within any one region is larger than the gulf between them. Consider how a TV producer in Salford may be earning far more than a shop assistant in Burnley, and as much as their counterpart in Shoreditch – or more, once housing costs are factored in. Similarly, talking of rich London versus the rest of the UK completely ignores how much poverty there is in the capital. Local economics is far more important than regional economics, even if it is trickier to turn into a political catchphrase.
London’s dominance also dates back centuries. The leading regional economic historian Peter Scott has written that, as far back as 1700, London “was the largest city in western Europe … and was wholly exceptional among British cities”. It had a population of about 575,000, while Norwich, then England’s second city, had only 30,000. When the entire country deindustrialised sharply under Margaret Thatcher, only one English city enjoyed the political will and financial firepower to turn itself into something new – and it was not Sheffield or Liverpool. Similarly, David Cameron starved the north-east of cash for infrastructure, even while shovelling funds towards the south-east. The project Mr Johnson claims to have embarked on is really about undoing the legacy of his predecessors.
Changing that course even a little requires more than a slush fund of a few billion and some good wheezes. The most important thing any government could do is rethink the role of the private sector to embed it in specific places and to direct credit and capital to make that happen. Since the banking crash there has been a lot of talk in Whitehall about using the banking system to funnel money into areas and industries of strategic importance – but very little action. The other vital task is to think locally rather than just regionally – about Wakefield as well as Leeds, say. This is both more radical than anything promised by Mr Johnson, and more nuanced. Sadly, it is an agenda that most likely awaits another prime minister.
