It is. Whereas levelling up is a just a label. If you doubt it, read Levelling up- planning’s most intractable problem? says Dr Nick Green, senior tutor in the School of Planning at the University of Manchester (article in The Journal of the Town and Country Planning Association, November-Decemeber 2022, vol. 91; no.6).
Pointing out that the government’s levelling up agenda aims at nothing less the means to redress an imbalance in England’s economic geography, adding this is a problem that has resisted all previous attempts at correction. He goes on
”But this is not a problem that can be solved within the lifespan of a single government, or even two or three successive governments. To be successful, such an initiative needs a lifespan measured in decades”.
Dr Green points out for any long term strategy to be successful it will need to be implemented by successive governments and therefore carry through a genuinely collaborative element. As he is not convinced by the government’s levelling up white paper he hopes it is no more than a prologue. If it is not ‘it will fail’. Its objectives will not be delivered.
With this analysis I agree. But he also hopes dynamic indicators will reconcile short term political cycles with the long term cycles needed to underpin a a national spatial strategy. Sad to say, these cycles are false friends. Instead,to achieve dynamic levelling up, what matters is the thinking of new employers. Which I will examine in my next blog.
Ian Campbell
27 February 2023.
