Levelling up: Is it just jargon?

If pushed, could you describe what the Government’s “levelling up” agenda is? If you have just done it, are you really convinced by your answer? If the answer to those two questions is yes, fair play, you can stop reading here. Your powers of deduction are comparable to that of Sherlock Holmes. If you answered no to those two questions, read on.

Having delivered Brexit, levelling up has become the centrepiece of the Government agenda with a department in Whitehall renamed to reflect it and a political heavyweight, in the form of Michael Gove, sent in to head it up. However, the term remains slightly esoteric despite multiple attempts by numerous government ministers to define it.

Most recently, the new Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, told the Conservative Party Conference on 4th October the following:  

The breadth of this definition poses both an opportunity and a problem for the Government. From a communications perspective, the catch-all nature of the term provides a hook upon which the Government can hang its every measure. More money for housing? Levelling up. More money for high streets? Levelling up. Tax cuts? Levelling up. National spare room database? Levelling up.

Whilst the last one is slightly facetious, you get the point. As a narrative device, levelling up works beautifully, and the Government will repeat it ad infinitum until the next election. It was Peter Mandelson who offered the following advice on political communications:

“It is only when you’re sick of hearing yourself repeat the same message over and over again that your audience is just beginning to get it.”

The Prime Minister and Gove clearly come from the Mandlesonian school of communications.

What about the substance? As the Centre for Cities state on their website, there is “confusion about what it is that the Government wants to achieve through levelling up”, and that is where the problem lies. Levelling up seems to be something of a soup of policy in which a new flavour is added every day. Depending on the day of the week, it might refer to saving High Streets and towns across England. On another day, it might refer to housebuilding in the north. On another, tax cuts for working people. This has manifested itself in financial terms as the Levelling Up Fund, the Towns Fund, the Welcome Back Fund, to name just three that are currently available with some link to the Government’s core agenda.

With the Budget due on Wednesday, Rishi Sunak will attempt to define it again and perhaps new money, or, more likely, money previously announced and rebadged will be included for headline-grabbing purposes.

However, the risk is another announcement will further muddy the waters with too many objectives and, ultimately, too many potential failures, being parented by the levelling up agenda.

The potential ramifications of this are considerable. Aside from delivering Brexit, the Prime Minister and Chancellor promised former Labour voters in so-called Red Wall seats they would focus their energy on “levelling-up” areas that had felt left behind by the decline of manufacturing and the subsequent social disintegration that accompanied it. But, come 2023 or 2024, how satisfied will the voters be if this agenda remains as communications-centric and policy-light as it is now?

The appointment of Gove suggests the Government agrees, but his rhetorical elegance will need to be backed up by some refining of the policy parameters that have been set to date.

Lookout on Wednesday as to what the Chancellor announces in the Budget. If you can answer the two questions from the first paragraph of this article by the end of his statement, Sunak would have done a mighty fine job. In all likelihood, the collective head-scratching of political observers is likely to continue. 

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