It was among the Victorian heritage of Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry, two and a half years ago, that Boris Johnson first made the pitch.
Days after first entering Number 10, the Prime Minister had travelled 200 miles north, to promise precious hope to communities that had watched their industries and civic pride erode, their power diminish and their children’s prospects dwindle.
He would, he said, ‘level’ them up.
What did it mean? According to his former adviser, Dominic Cummings, there was no thought behind it. Yet for the PM, a man disinterested in policy but - back then, at least - formidable on campaigning, it became a catch-all pitch to people from Bury to Bishop Auckland, whose votes he needed to win. And he did.
What it meant afterwards remained unanswered and in that vacuum, the term ‘levelling up’ has since become all things to all people (apart from the large percentage of the public who haven’t heard of it).
For the PM it has become a slogan to shield behind in any storm; for think-tanks, PR firms and lobbyists it has become a veritable industry. For those who have been arguing for years that government should be taking sustained action to close regional divides, it must mean nothing less than a rewiring of the British state.
But there was no official explanation as to what the government thought it meant, or how it would be achieved, until this week.
Stop-start
Michael Gove’s resulting plan is a long way from the primary-colour picture Boris Johnson painted two years ago.
His very long levelling up white paper is padded out with a treatise about Renaissance Florence and the Roman Empire - 'some kind of hubristic high water mark for a specific kind of policy making', according to one northern regional policy expert, or ‘intellectual bollocks’, in the words of another - and yet, even at 332 pages, it is as significant for what is missing as for what is included. Parts of it are enraging.
That doesn’t make it uninteresting, or completely irrelevant. But it is deeply conflicted about its own level of ambition.
For many who have been pushing this agenda from outside of London for years, a lot of under-the-bonnet analysis in the plan is broadly right.
This isn’t the headline-grabbing stuff, but it is important, and many northern officials and experts spoken to for this article - in fields such as local government, education, academia, science and transport - hope that this makes it a statement of intent at least; a starter for ten.
The paper recognises, for example, that the constant churn of attempts to improve lives outside London, going back to the 1920s, have been too short-term, too centralised, too ‘stop start’ and ultimately ineffective.
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“By some counts, there were almost 40 different schemes or bodies introduced to boost local or regional growth between 1975 and 2015, roughly one every 12 months,” it notes.
Better, rigorous local data is now needed in order to work out what is or isn’t working, it concludes, not least because there is ‘poor institutional memory’ in Whitehall of what has been tried before.
As the National Audit pointed out with impeccable timing on the same day the white paper was launched, Gove’s own department had not been checking whether any of the local growth strategies it had deployed since 2010 had actually been working.
(The NAO refers to ‘wasted opportunities’, as well as ‘unclear objectives and poor monitoring and evaluation’. That followed the parliamentary spending watchdog's scathing criticism of the Towns Fund in 2020.)
But the paper looks like the beginnings, believe many officials spoken to for this article, of keeping track. It includes an outline of a devolution framework, long-missing, and an acknowledgement that local areas cannot plan for the long term - or attract private investment - when they have to constantly bid into a crazy hotch-potch of Whitehall funds.
Similarly, its ‘12 missions’ - a list of key structural things it wants ‘levelling up’ to have meant by 2030, including narrowing the productivity and life expectancy gap between places in areas such as this and the South East - have been cautiously welcomed.
“I think it sets a framework,” says one senior local government official. “Which is welcome, because let’s be honest, we haven’t had one.”
Another, outside Greater Manchester, agrees that it provides some ‘clarity’.
A senior education official here agrees the 12 missions are effectively trying to establish a platform - a first step.
“It’s boring to the general public,” they say. “But it gives us a broad basis to work out what should be happening here.”
If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, or how you’re going to measure whether you achieved it, then there’s a good chance your policy won’t have much effect, they point out. Communities will still struggle and good public money will be poured down the drain.
That means also more accountability for figures such as Andy Burnham, they believe, for the targets are also a way to see whether or not devolution - where it exists, or might exist - is delivering.
Nevertheless, the level of ambition demonstrated within the different policy missions is strikingly varied.
On skills, pointed out Manchester University’s Professor Andy Westwood on Wednesday, the target of 200,000 more people a year gaining high quality qualifications - 80,000 of them in the lowest-skilled areas - is ‘pretty modest’.
“That just about replaces some of the learners that have been lost over the last decade,” he noted on the Northern Agenda podcast.
Yet one of the most significant missions, which promises rises in pay, employment and productivity in every region of the UK within eight years and a globally competitive city in each, is the opposite: completely unachievable, according to economist Dr Nicola Headlam, who ran the government’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ programme under Theresa May and is blunt about just how hard it is to get this stuff done.
“The economy one is so off-the-world impossible, I don’t really know what to do with it, because we haven’t been going in any of those directions for 40 years,” she said.
“It’s absolutely for the birds at the moment.”
Nevertheless, both agree that government did need to define its broad goals. And for Prof Westwood, it is also one way for Gove to at least try and force Whitehall’s notoriously siloed and territorial departments onto the same page.
“A lot of what Gove is trying to do here is bring different parts of government together. And that’s fiercely difficult to do.”
The ghost at the feast
That fierce difficulty is clearly legible between the lines of the white paper.
“While there’s a lot of economic analysis in this 350-page blockbuster, you’re not sure how much of it is shared by the Treasury,” added Prof Westwood.
“The Treasury is the ghost at the feast, as it were, both in terms of the money but also that ideology and that input.
“And I really, really wonder what Rishi [Sunak] thinks about this.”
Ahead of the paper’s publication, the Daily Telegraph reported that Gove had tried to establish a manufacturing strategy as part of his plan - but had been knocked back by the Treasury, traditionally reluctant to intervene in the market.
There are whispers of such battles in the paper. It mentions the need to ‘go further’ on manufacturing, which, as the influential think-tank Onward pointed out in August, holds huge opportunities to revive former industrial areas that still have larger than average proportions of people employed in the sector even now, in skilled jobs that tend to be higher paid, in communities that are proud of their manufacturing heritage.
There is also reference to the need for ‘further’ action on the decline of the high street; Gove is said to have tried and failed to get an exemption on business rates for high street firms.
But it isn’t just the Treasury. Ultimately the entire ‘policy’ section of the paper - essentially the ‘how’ of levelling up - doesn’t match the paper’s own analysis of the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ in the section before.
It is a mish-mash of proposals, largely reheated, that provide an insight into which Whitehall departments were willing to make an effort or relinquish spending.
“My first impression,” says one Greater Manchester official, “was this is just a summary of everything each department’s already doing that could broadly be badged as levelling up.”
Aside from the Treasury, one of the biggest question marks in that regard hangs over the Department of Health and Social Care. After a pandemic that has brutally exposed the levels of geographic health inequality in this country - divides that have played out in deadly fashion - the white paper promises to narrow the gap in healthy life expectancy by 2030. (It is an absolutely crucial mission. A woman in Surrey can expect nearly 70 years of healthy life. In Oldham, she will get just 58.)
Yet there is perishingly little to explain how that will change.
Tellingly, the first policy listed under the health inequality goal refers to the building of new hospitals, rather than any measures designed to keep people out of them. Some promises have little to do with regional divides; others pledge derisory amounts of money.
The DHSC has not published its own white paper on health inequality as yet, leaving a gaping hole in place of a strategy.
One health official provides this verdict.
“From a health inequalities perspective the levelling up white paper is a rehash of previous announcements,” they say.
“Plus I’m sure the Medicis and the Florentine Renaissance are the hot topic of conversation down the food banks.
“Instead we have this: ‘The government will set out its strategy to tackle the core drivers of health inequalities through a new White Paper on Health Disparities published this year…’”
Public health funding, meanwhile, faces a likely real-terms cut over the coming three years, with no clarity on how it will be allocated geographically; government’s own social care strategy stands to penalise less asset-rich pensioners outside of the South East.
Many departments appear to have just pasted in whatever was open on their desktop, including the ‘National Spring Clean’ - a scheme that would use prisoner rehabilitation to remove graffiti and litter. That appears in the section on crime and quality of life. It is emblematic of the mismatch between some of the deeper thinking in the paper and the dismissiveness evident in some of Whitehall’s suggested solutions.
In places like Greater Manchester, which have among the highest levels of deprivation in the country and have seen some of the most disproportionately brutal council and police cuts since 2010, working out why places have become dirtier and less safe is not rocket science.
‘Helping government to think’
And yet.
There are departments that do appear to have got on board, such as the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's decision to spend all its financial uplift outside London.
And one area of spending in which Gove did have some wriggle room was research and development, after a substantial increase in that area at the last Budget - and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which oversees it, seems to have stepped up more than others.
This is an area of spending that in the past has been so heavily skewed towards the dreaming spires of the South East that a report by the think-tank Nesta last year concluded everywhere else was missing out to the tune of £4bn a year. It was a pattern that neatly mirrored regional economic imbalance, it found, noting that the UK is a huge outlier in the way it spreads - or doesn't - this investment, which, used right, could lead to good new jobs in places that need them. So by 2030, the government now intends to spend 40pc more of the overall pot outside of the existing 'golden triangle' of London, Oxford and Cambridge.
Many in the sector believe that is really not as ambitious as it should be. Manchester University physicist Dr Richard Jones, who co-wrote the Nesta report and whose thinking has been influential on government in recent times, admits it is a pretty ‘undemanding’ target.
But, he says, there is reason for hope.
“I think it’s really welcome that the role of R&D for levelling up has been recognised,” he says, “because that’s not always been the case in the past.”
Promises to divert some specific Ministry of Defence and health research spending out of the South East are particularly welcome, he adds.
“There’s a lot of work to be done to transform the statements of intent into mechanisms. It’s very welcome that UK Research and Innovation [the body that brings together the agenda] has a new strategic goal to support levelling up - now the job is to convert that into how they adapt their funding system.”
For Greater Manchester, which ahead of the white paper did its old trick and tried to provide government with a ready-made solution (‘helping government to think’, in the words of one council official) in the form of its Innovation GM strategy, the paper gets some ambitious plans off the starting blocks.
Innovation GM is hard to explain in a sentence, but broadly it aims to bring together government R&D funding with private sector investment, local investment, universities and, crucially, the right training.
It is the skills part of that, according to those spoken to for this article, that is likely to form the basis of further devolution discussions between Greater Manchester and the government, also promised in the white paper. If the system here could match up the right training with R&D funding and potential new employers, those behind the plan, including Dr Jones, believe that could provide some hope for communities - such as in and around Rochdale and Bury - in need of better-quality jobs.
In the meantime, £30m has been granted to get the show on the road.
That is not, he says, ‘a nothing amount of money’.
“It’s not enough money to transform the economy, but it’s enough to start the business of working out how the economy can be transformed.”
‘You can’t keep smashing everything up and wondering why nothing works’
That pragmatism is shared by many others spoken to for this article.
For those far more familiar than the Prime Minister with the problems faced by the communities he was addressing two years ago, often any sense that at least someone in government has grasped the intrinsic nature of them feels like a step forward.
“Overall I’d give it seven out of ten, which is more than anything since Osborne,” says one northern council chief executive, welcoming some strategic clarity provided by the document, if not its mish-mash of Whitehall proposals. But in the next breath, they point out that despite being architect of the Northern Powerhouse, Osborne had also ‘obliterated the council budgets that have now meant so much levelling up is needed’.
Their observations are a testament to just how frustrated those outside of Whitehall are, after years - decades - of similar strategies, often killed off in infancy or contradicted by other policy.
Dr Nicola Headlam, now out of government and working as an economist in Manchester, points out the paper is littered with ‘dead strategies’. “I know, because I was trying to do them."
Places in Europe that have managed to transform themselves, such as reunified Germany, have done so via decades of determination, with everyone pulling in the same direction, she notes. (The same is true of city centre Manchester.)
“You can’t keep smashing everything up and wondering why nothing works…You do it, it’s written into your constitution, you get on with it.”
It is also hard - arguably impossible - to take an agenda seriously when government continually forms policies that run directly counter to its stated aims, from the cuts to the Integrated Rail Plan to the council tax rebate proposed by the Chancellor in order to reduce energy bills, which as the Times reported on Friday, stands to benefit asset-rich homeowners in London far more than people in Rochdale. That contradiction, along with the many previous failed strategies, is partly why so many people are inclined to dismiss it out of hand.
It had, fundamentally, been drawn up back to front. November’s three-year Budget was set before government’s flagship domestic strategy had been drawn up, leaving Gove to, in the words of his shadow Lisa Nandy, ‘scurry around Whitehall’ asking for departmental pledges.
“They complain about local government being incompetent and inefficient - but local government has to produce a medium term financial plan which marries with priorities,” pointed out one senior local government figure on Wednesday.
“How did they create a three year comprehensive spending review without having a strategy in place until today? Is there anything more dysfunctional than that?”
The answer is probably yes - Downing Street.
Prolonged chaos in Number 10 is the backdrop for a mission that requires decades of focus, imagination, consensus and laser-like determination.
However much of a fixer Michael Gove might be, there could hardly be a worse moment to get such an important agenda off the ground. George Osborne talked about fixing the roof while the sun was shining, but the roof is currently on fire.
“I believe the Secretary of State was prevented from being as radical as he could have been,” adds Dr Headlam, “because is there a worse time to launch something that’s both difficult, long term and expensive than when you’re not entirely sure you’re going to make it through the day as a government?”
