5 promises that Levelling Up should make – and keep

1 Invest in people 
We have a poverty problem. It’s not a food poverty problem, a bed poverty problem, a fuel poverty problem or a period poverty problem, there is simply not enough money in people’s pockets, even if they are in full-time work. People across the country, even in the South, are failing achieve a basic level of human dignity, i.e. eating toothpaste to quiet a hungry stomach, as Business secretary Kwasi Kwateng was told last week. If Levelling Up doesn’t tackle poverty, then you will have failed. Many of those in poverty are working. You know this. Stop pretending you don’t. The All-Parliamentary Party Group for ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods revealed that people in England’s most deprived neighbourhoods work longer hours but live shorter, unhealthier lives, costing an estimated £29.8bn per year in lost productivity. Covid gave the government the opportunity to try out something nearing a Universal Basic Income. The cost of energy and food is spiking. Think again about how you support people not just into work, but into dignity.

2 Devolve and delegate 

You need to trust people. As a politician this may be particularly tricky for you. That’s ok. The first step is always the hardest. But you can’t deliver this alone. Levelling Up is about devolution as much as it is about Universal Basic Income. You cannot be everywhere at once. You cannot know what it is like to be a single mother with three kids trying to make childcare and a full-time job stack up with awful public transport in a Northern town. But you can ensure two-thirds of civil servants working on Levelling Up are not based in London, as reported by The Guardian this week. And what are your friends at the Department for Work and Pensions doing, still retraining ballerinas as cyber experts? What about the Department for Transport – fiddling with the number of announcements on the tannoy? Both departments are integral to Levelling Up. Get them working with you to implement changes that enable productivity. And don’t let the paranoid nationalists in your party deflect you from the Heseltinian vision of proper devolution. It will be ironic if the Conservatives turn out to be the big statists all along. 

3 Insulate Britain 

Housing using isn’t going to get you out of this hole – not the way we do housing. It has been said in previous recessions that investment in housing makes a quick return because you can build it faster than major infrastructure. The problem with this argument is that it relies on sites that are ready-to-go and have all their enabling infrastructure. These sites are in buoyant places where housing will be built anyway, and you’ll only inflate prices in hot markets – just as you’ve done with Help to Buy, a £29bn investment that inflates prices by more than its subsidy value. You know what’s faster? Retrofit. And where do we need retrofit? Cold places. Take your housing investment and create a genuine retrofit policy that levels up Northern towns – and bonus prize, this also tackles your climate change problem and the cost-of-living squeeze due to energy price inflation. As my niece would say, it’s a win-win-win. You know what would help with this? VAT equalisation: 5% for new build and retrofit. Boom. Done. See, that wasn’t so hard. 

4 Sort pollution 
The rivers, not unlike Boris Johnson’s press team, are full of shit. Literally. In places from Solent to Somerset, it’s blocking your precious housebuilding because the water just can’t take any more of it. Perhaps the tens of thousands of homes on hold will help you pay attention. Unlike housebuilders, the fish being suffocated by algae blooms may not be Tory party donors, but they speak to another critical issue – the next pandemic. The chemical cocktail of pollution in English waters is endangering lives. Wastewater is the breeding ground of deadly super bugs, viruses and antibiotic resistant bacteria which already kills an estimated 12,000 people in the UK annually – and the number is rising. You’re not even monitoring this – not even taking samples or tracking the data. And that’s just water. As one of the first countries to industrialise we are dealing with a backlog of pollution, not to mention the underinvestment stemming from the privatisation of utilities. The total cost of air pollution to the NHS and social care will be £9.4billion per year by 2035, according to a report by Public Health England in 2018. What does this have to do with Levelling Up? It’s the places with the highest level of social deprivation that have the worst quality air. Tackling pollution is critical to tackling the economic cost of environmental degradation – to put it bluntly, if you die younger or get sick, you can’t work. Air pollution is estimated to take three years off your life, on average – that’s worse than smoking.
 

5  Make life worth living 
Your predecessor was fond of talking about “beauty” to create a unique sense of place (whatever happened to the Office for Place?). But local comedy clubs, small music venues, the cinema and pantos – places where people come together – form community in a way that roundabouts and paving stones don’t. Put your money where the people are, and where they want to be. It’s about culture, high and low. Local cultural institutions are critical to creating a sense of identity and they have all suffered hugely through the pandemic. Your ballerina didn’t want to work in cyber, she wanted the stage and the applause and to feel emotion and music expressed through her body and to connect with people. You don’t get that doing encryption codes. Likewise, people see their local theatres and pubs suffering and it’s a stab to the heart. What is a place without something to do, whether that’s Bingo or Beethoven? Levelling Up is an opportunity to prove that we’re all in this together, and that requires a comprehensive policy of everything, from poverty to popular culture.

Uma Marman is a researcher that studies urban and housing policy