Levelling up: How can Britain’s inequalities be fixed?

In association with BAE Systems

Last year, the government finally defined its levelling-up plan with a White Paper, a massive document of more than 300 pages. It featured 12 quantifiable ‘missions’ in areas such as health and education outcomes, housing, life expectancy, transport and skills.

Today, it’s clear that those left behind are central to Britain’s political landscape: first they voted for Brexit in 2016; then they switched to the Tories in 2019, delivering Boris Johnson a thumping majority.

The government has shown that it’s serious about keeping these voters onside. There is now a statutory requirement to report annually on progress towards the targets, allowing voters to monitor and hold accountable this administration — and any future one. The government has, in other words, put its own feet to the fire.

Much needs to be done, though, if these 12 aims are to be achieved. As Professor Vernon Bogdanor writes, the difference in skills and education quality across the country couldn’t be starker. The buzzword of ‘levelling up’ has parked the Tories’ tanks on Labour’s lawn — and Katy Balls explores the fall-out. The Spectator’s chairman Andrew Neil interviews the Permanent Secretary for Levelling Up, Andy Haldane. And James Kirkup examines the differences in life expectancy and obesity in different parts of the UK.

I hope you enjoy the supplement.

Ben Lazarus, Editor

Illustrations: Natasha Lawson and iStock

Vernon Bogdanor

Education must be at the heart of the levelling-up agenda

Talent, Boris Johnson has said, is equally distributed across the country, but opportunity is not. If you live in St Albans, you are nearly three times more likely to have a degree than if you live in Barrow-in-Furness. If you’re male and live in Westminster, your life expectancy is ten years higher than a bloke in Glasgow. Life in Britain, states Michael Gove, has become a postcode lottery. GDP per capita is lower in the north-east, Yorkshire, the East Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland than in the former East Germany. Reunified Germany has done better at levelling up than we have. This productivity gap is primarily the result of a vast difference in skills between regions. A worker in Blackburn takes five days to produce what it takes someone in Milton Keynes just three.

Sir Roger Carr

Levelling up at home will support Global Britain abroad

The notion of levelling up appeals to our sense of fairness and is a mission everyone can applaud. The government’s excellent White Paper and the wide-ranging programme of Bills announced in the Queen’s Speech are substantial developments which business can get behind. Clearly, levelling up requires government and business to work together. Companies that have weathered the pandemic have a responsibility to help our economy and support those most in need. Businesses should prioritise investment in education, skills, training and new technologies to create opportunities and drive productivity in those communities that are further behind others. Successive UK governments have attempted to redistribute the wealth and opportunities in London and major cities.

Katy Balls

The next battleground: why levelling up is key to the next election

The levelling up agenda didn’t start with the 2019 election campaign. Instead, it began in 2016 with the Vote Leave slogan, ‘Take back control’. This was the point at which Labour frontbenchers started to grow concerned that the Conservatives were parking their tanks on Labour’s lawn. ‘It suggested that we are on your side – and these people are not,’ says a member of the shadow cabinet. Government policy plans developed from there. The ‘Take back control’ and ‘Levelling up’ slogans aided the realignment of politics in the two general elections since the EU referendum, which have seen the Tories win swathes of seats in the Midlands and North that rarely voted Conservative in the past.

BAE Systems

Advertising feature: BAE Systems: Building a better Britain

At BAE Systems we help defend the nation by protecting and serving those who protect and serve us. We do this by being performance-driven and values-led. Our focus on performance means that as a successful business, we are able to make a significant contribution to the economies and societies in which we operate. An independent report by Oxford Economics showed that we made a contribution to the UK’s GDP of more than £10 billion in 2020. We delivered almost £4 billion in exports and employed 143,000 people in the UK directly and indirectly through a network of 5,000 suppliers with whom we spent £3.8 billion in 2020. This included nearly £700 million with suppliers in the country's most deprived local authorities.

Andrew Neil

‘I want to rewire Whitehall’: Andy Haldane in conversation with Andrew Neil

Andy Haldane is the Permanent Secretary for Levelling Up and was previously the chief economist at the Bank of England. He spoke to Spectator chairman Andrew Neil about his hopes for the job during a joint Spectator and BAE event earlier this year. Andrew Neil: The government has written this ambitious White Paper on levelling up. But is there the political bandwidth to deliver it, given all that’s currently happening? Andy Haldane: The government has lots to contend with. But what levelling up has in its favour is it’s a rare example of something that aligns politically, economically and socially. Take the money side of things. If we can achieve what we’ve set out in the Levelling Up White Paper it should boost our economy by up to £100 billion per year.

James Kirkup

The scandal of Britain’s health inequalities

Take a train from London King’s Cross to Newcastle and your journey will span 245 miles and several years of a child’s life. According to the most recent estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), a baby boy born in the north-east of England in 2020 is likely to enjoy just 59.1 years of good health before starting to slide into infirmity, then death, at 77. A boy born in the south-east at the same time has a healthy life expectancy of 65.5 years and a total life expectancy of almost 81. It’s a grim fact of national life that people in poorer places live shorter, sicker lives than those in richer ones. This should be a scandal, the sort of thing that grips political attention and demands remedy.

The Spectator

Levelling up by numbers

Some 42% of the public understood what levelling up meant. But this varied in different nations, with people in Wales and Scotland reporting the lowest understanding: 31% and 29% respectively. Amazon estimates that some 11.6m Britons require digital skills training to bring them up to speed Education The think tank ResPublica has some useful background on skills inequalities in the UK. Its research shows that: The UK still has nearly 6.5m adults (or 15.4% of the adult population) who are not qualified above level 2 (i.e. GCSE). There are stark geographic disparities. For example, the proportion of people without any formal qualification in Richmond Park is 1%. In Dudley North it is 20%. However, there are also disparities within regions.

Jo Lappin

Business is key to levelling up

For the government’s levelling up mission to succeed, the voices of businesses must be heard and understood. Of course public service investment and devolutionary change are essential to the levelling up project, too. But in every community, it is business leaders who will be making some of the most significant and visible contributions. For they will be raising living standards by training new generations into skilled roles, creating well paid jobs and pioneering new markets, as well as funding the public sector through tax contributions.