LEVELLING UP – REALLY?

My article in this week’s Cornish Guardian looks at the recent Spending Review. It is as follows:

In their 2019 manifesto, the Conservative Party pledged that it would “share prosperity across the country” and address “longstanding economic challenges in parts of the country.” The document stated that the “Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has set out an agenda for levelling up every part of the UK … in the 21st century, we need to get away from the idea that ‘Whitehall knows best’ and that all growth must inevitably start in London.”

In recent months, this levelling up agenda to “reduce regional disparities” across the UK has been an almost constant refrain from senior Conservatives, while a number of their MPs have set up a thinktank to boost "Britain's lagging areas.”

Given such public pronouncements, it is little wonder that so many people are disappointed at the content of last week’s Spending Review.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer did reveal a new “levelling up fund” worth four billion pounds, but added that “any local area” would be able to bid for projects. It seems nonsensical to me that a fund designed to combat regional inequalities is not targeted at poorer areas with a lower economic performance.

Helen Barnard, the director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was particularly condemning. She told the media that: “Remarkably for a much-hyped statement on levelling-up opportunity across the country, the chancellor’s words ring hollow as weaker local economies will be getting less money than previously in the aftermath of the pandemic.”

It is my view that if the UK Government is serious about regional inequality, it needs to do more than come up with one-off “levelling up fund,” that actually contains less money than is being spent on individual transport projects in and for London. An estimated £19 billion is being spent on the latest Crossrail project in the capital, plus over £80 billion on the HS2.

The Government needs to live up to its promise by looking much more seriously at how it can to rebalance the economy away from London which one MP, a few years ago, described as "a giant suction machine" draining the life out of the rest of the country.”

In his statement, the Chancellor also mentioned the UK Shared Prosperity Fund – which will replace EU structural funds – and pledged that, across the UK as a whole, it will at least match EU receipts. It was disappointing that he did not specifically promise that Cornwall – one of the two poorest parts of the United Kingdom – would receive at least as much investment that it would have expected to receive from structural funds.