What could Levelling Up look like for Liverpool?
Last month, the government released its long awaited Levelling Up whitepaper. But what is Levelling Up and what could it mean for Liverpool? Moreover, how could the Government embrace the unique opportunities Liverpool offers to further support the Levelling up agenda?
What is Levelling Up?
Levelling Up was a key policy outlined in the Conservative Party’s 2019 election manifesto. Research by The Institute of Fiscal Studies suggested that regional disparities affected communities in the UK, more than in comparable countries. These differences between regions included salaries, employment rates, health, education and productivity.
The Conservatives outlined their promise to ensure that opportunities were equally available throughout the whole of the United Kingdom, by:
Investing in towns, cities, and rural and coastal areas
Giving those areas more control of how investment is made
Levelling up skills using apprenticeships and a £3bn National Skills Fund
Making life easier for farming and fishing industries
Creating up to 10 freeports to help deprived communities.
Over two years later, and after many delays, the Government has now released a whitepaper to begin setting out how it intends to tackle the regional and local inequalities that unfairly hold back communities and encourage private sector investment.
Summary of proposed policies
The Government whitepaper is 350 pages long and contains a lot of content because it touches on so many different things to do with placemaking and innovation in the economy. There is a more digestible summary document of the key points available.
The whitepaper lays out a broad policy programme, covering large elements of the Whitehall policy agenda including innovation, net zero, transport, skills and health. It outlines four quantifiable national missions to be achieved by 2030:
Boost productivity, pay, jobs and living standards by growing the private sector, especially in those places where they are lagging
Spread opportunities and improve public services, especially in those places where they are weakest
Restore a sense of community, local pride and belonging, especially in those places where they have been lost
Empower local leaders and communities, especially in those places lacking local agency
These will be given status in law in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill and will be supported by a £4.8 billion Levelling Up Fund.
What could Levelling up look like for Liverpool?
Highlights from the report show that Liverpool and its wider City Region area will benefit from investment into:
Education - continuing to improve schools through encouraging membership of Multi Academy Trusts
Transport - with new green bus corridors and £710m to Liverpool City Region for schemes such as pioneering battery technology to enable extensions to Merseyrail . The Liverpool Freeport will also provide opportunities for the city by providing new investment and jobs.
Nine new regional Levelling Up Directors bolstered by additional civil service staff are being relocated across the nation (including in Liverpool), intended to strengthen links between regions and Whitehall.
Yet there are still shortfalls in the overall power devolved when examined in comparison to other European regions’ relationships with their capitals, notably in finance and health.
It is also notable that the paper adds another layer of ‘same but different’ strategy documentation over the ‘Industrial Strategy’ approach of Theresa May’s government, and the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ and ‘Midlands Engine’ approaches of the Cameron-Clegg administration. Critics will rightly point out that the effects of those previous endeavours appear limited.
How could the Government embrace the unique opportunities Liverpool offers to further support the Levelling up agenda?
Liverpool’s history as an ‘industrial powerhouse’ is explicitly alluded to in the whitepaper. It is mentioned in the context of one of the major cities outside of London “confounding pessimism about the inevitability of urban decline.” Liverpool City Region is recognised for its success in Mayoral Devolution and the roll out of LCR Cares, a fund set up to raise £2m for the city region’s community and voluntary organisations tackling COVID-19.
However, in my view, the government could better take advantage of the unique opportunities that Liverpool offers to add firepower to their Levelling Up agenda. Here, I elaborate on just a couple of the numerous thoughts which came to mind upon reading the whitepaper.
Current plans indicate that a number of locations will benefit from relocation and expansion of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Why isn’t Liverpool being considered for such a role considering its unparalleled track record in delivering economic value from culture? Claire McColgan MBE - Director of Culture Liverpool, and her team have presided over one of the greatest programmes of cultural events the country has ever seen, and has realised enormous social and economic successes off the back of it - all whilst in the midst of economic austerity. Talk about productivity, and doing more with less…
DCMS was renamed Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in July 2017, to reflect the department's increased activity in the digital sector. We know Liverpool is well known for culture. But we’re more than just culture. Liverpool has one of the foremost best developed use cases in the country of digital health in the Internet of Things enabled 5G cluster. This health/digital cross sector collaboration between local SMEs, health authorities, and telcos has generated an 11 or 12% decrease in strain on the local GP services in Kensington, one of the most deprived suburbs in the country. As one of only one of only two deployments in the country, Liverpool is unequivocally leading the way in improving outcomes for those receiving care in the community, and alleviating strain on inpatient services.
This brings me neatly onto the Life Sciences and allied technologies sector - arguably our greatest economic asset; the nexus of our innovation-heavy activity. The LCR Combined Authority has rightly invested Strategic Investment Fund money into programmes that support this sector and its tertiary activity. It would be good to see government build on something that is truly a unique asset, adding to the investment that has already gone into some of the key assets from names such as IBM and Bill Gates. Investment here does not need to be made into the existing assets of the sector; rather, it should be aligned with the levelling up transport and education investment that government has already touted, helping to join up the Daresbury Laboratories campus with the rest of the City Region (it is currently almost impossible to access without a personal car - still a luxury for a lot of students and graduates) and helping young people from C2DE backgrounds access jobs in the sector (innovation-heavy sector jobs pay better and are more secure compared to the low-wage, shifting sands jobs of the tourism, retail and hospitality sectors upon which so much of Liverpool City Region’s economy relies).
Conclusions
It is too early to make any firm assertions about how ‘Levelling Up’ will pan out as a programme of transformation - but it is striking that the terms very much still seem set by Whitehall, with local partners merely acting as delivery agents. This seems to be true across the board, but undoubtedly the smaller and less matured Mayoral Combined Authorities will have a harder time ‘playing the game’ with central government if this is truly the case.
Understandably, the cynics will point to the huge pile of existing or sunsetted strategies and ask what will be different this time. Remember Regional Development Agencies?
My personal belief is that success here relies on Liverpool City Region (and other Mayoral Combined Authorities) ‘fixing the plumbing’ that feeds information to its political leaders so that everybody sings from the same hymn sheet - and that those leaders are beholden to more than just political advisers, so that all rhetoric with national government is grounded in evidence-based practice. Each MCA needs to then build a rapport with government that enables success to be delivered across administrations and generations, so as to avoid another short lived set of buzzwords and unfruitful hoops for local authority staff to jump through again.
