Levelling up reports highlight growing gaps between North East and London

Growing gaps in life expectancy and living standards between the North East and richer parts of the country show that the Government’s much-vaunted ‘levelling up’ project has so far failed, two new reports claim.

A study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that progress on levelling up in the UK has been “glacial” and even gone backwards on some issues, citing the six-and-a-half year gap in health life expectancy between the North East and the South East as one of the areas in which it has failed. Meanwhile, separate research from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said the gap in living standards between the London and the South East and the North East has grown during the period when levelling up was supposed to be closing that gap.

Levelling up was one of the Conservatives’ key election pledges during the 2019 election and is widely thought to have helped it win seats in former Labour strongholds in the North East. In 2022, the Government published its Levelling Up White Paper, which set out how it intended to “spread opportunity more equally across the UK” and described levelling up as “a moral, social and economic programme for the whole of government”.

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But in a damning assessment, the IFS said that progress on levelling up had been poor in areas such as education, employment and life satisfaction. The organisation said that the next Government will need to have a long-term strategy with consistent delivery if it is to make real strides, though it acknowledged that the pandemic and the war in Ukraine had made the task of levelling up more difficult.

Christine Farquharson, report author and associate director at the IFS, said: “The February 2022 Levelling Up White Paper was a substantial piece of careful thinking about the challenges of reducing regional inequalities in the UK, and should heavily inform the thinking of any future government interested in reducing inequalities between places. But on many of the metrics that the White Paper sets out, progress towards levelling up has been glacial.

“In key areas such as employment, primary school attainment and self-reported life satisfaction, the country’s overall performance has got worse even as gaps between areas have widened. Clearly, a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis have made the last five years an exceptionally difficult time to level up. But if these missions are to be achieved by 2030 as intended, then the next parliament will be decisive.”

Meanwhile, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said that a combination of “insufficient central government resources and the slow disbursement of relatively small pots of money has meant that progress on the 12 main Levelling Up missions has been feeble.”

A number of schemes in the North East have received levelling up funding, including the Gateshead conference centre and improvements to the Grainger Market in Newcastle. But figures released earlier this year showed that only 10% of the funds provided to reduce inequality had so far been spent on making a difference on the ground.

The Conservative manifesto restated the party’s commitment to levelling up through “delivering stronger communities and safer streets, unleashing the power of the private sector to unlock jobs and opportunity for all and boosting local pride”. The Labour manifesto accused the Tories of “empty promises to ‘level up’” and pledged to make “breaking the pernicious link between background and success” a defining mission for Labour, setting out pans to tackle economic insecurity, poverty and inequality.