2021 Autumn Budget: Are we any closer to knowing what levelling up looks like?

Since the world was plunged into the Covid-19 pandemic nearly two years ago, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has seen his popularity levels soar in the opinion polls.

Playing the role of the country’s knight in shining armour, the Chancellor rode to the rescue as other Cabinet Ministers floundered in the face of adversity. Among a large part of the voting population, he is credited with spending hundreds of billions of pounds to support jobs, public services, and businesses. However, the backdrop to the Autumn Budget delivered today was very different.

As pandemic restrictions have eased, the furlough scheme has ended, and many other emergency measures have been wound down. Even before the Chancellor took to the despatch box, many political commentators had been expecting him to deliver a Budget couched firmly in the tradition of fiscal prudence, with the handbrake applied to Government expenditure.

However, it was not to be. Having received a quick telling off from the Deputy Speaker for pre-briefing virtually the entire Budget to the media, the Chancellor delivered a Budget straight out of the Johnsonian playbook. Whilst parts of the speech were devoted to espousing the benefit of fiscal prudence, the Chancellor alighted on an optimistic theme with some increases in expenditure to match.

Amongst the raft of announcements, was an increase in the minimum wage, additional money for the NHS and a commitment to securing the UK’s status as a technology ‘super power’. A 50% discount in business rates for retail, hospitality and leisure, was also announced, and the Chancellor committed the Government to reversing one of its more controversial pandemic policies and restore the UK’s aid contribution to 0.7% of GDP by 2024/25.

There was, inevitably, a touch of clever accounting, with many of the announcements constituting packaged up version of previous commitments. For example, the £6.9 billion committed to transport, actually only represented a £1 billion uplift on previous announcements. Sunak is not immune to employing the tricks of his predecessors.

Nonetheless, new measures were announced, and crucially, perhaps voters can now begin to visualise what ‘levelling up’ actually looks like.

Levelling up:

When it came to levelling up, the Chancellor prefaced his announcement by stating, “for too long, location of birth has determined your future.” In pursuing a levelling up agenda, the Government says it is seeking to address this and spread opportunity across the country, and ensure postcode does not inhibit progress.

To put this into practice, the Chancellor announced a number of measures:

·       £1.8bn for the remediation and development of brownfield land sites.

·       £1.7 bn for local councils in deprived areas to spend on improving local infrastructure.

·       £11.5bn for an Affordable Homes Programmes.

·       £300m for a locally-led grant awarded to combined mayoral authorities.

·       £6.9bn for investment into transport infrastructure.

·       £5bn to remove unsafe cladding from buildings.

·       £5bn for a London-style transport system in Greater Manchester, Liverpool and West Yorkshire.

·       £5m for the delivery of new small green spaces across the country.

The emphasis on brownfield land development is likely to be welcomed by traditional Tory voters who were concerned that previous Government proposals might precipitate a potential acceleration in the greenfield development in their traditional heartlands. Quite where these developments will occur, though, remains to be seen.

Spending in the north of England, mainly on transport infrastructure, will be seen as a reward for those who voted for the Conservatives in 2019, particularly for Red Wall voters who will need to turn up for Johnson and Sunak in 2023 or 2024, if they are to be re-elected.

And for many, the £5bn commitment to the cladding crisis will be welcome, but questions will continue over whether it will be enough.

There were some notable absentees from today’s Budget proceedings, notably Labour leader, Keir Starmer, who can’t seem to catch a break but he can certainly catch COVID. There was little in the Budget for those wishing to see planning reform and planning digitisation pursued in this Parliament. And the 180,000 affordable homes financed through the £11 billion announced in the Budget will not go far in helping the country meet the identified need of 300,000 new homes per annum.

Given the optimistic tone, flashy projects and eyewatering figures announced in the Budget it is clear Boris Johnson still holds the power in this Government. The fiscal doves won out against the fiscal hawks with more attempts to the funnel money to the regions of the UK that turned blue for the first time in 2019.  The course has now been set by the top two men in Government as they head towards the new election, with a focus on levelling up through housing, transport, and infrastructure. The question now is, can they deliver?