NEW: This is a copy of the foreword to the Levelling Up White paper due tomorrow- written by Michael Gove and Andy Haldane and seen by Newsnight. They say they want to create a country where “by staying local, you can go far.”
Michael Gove will announce 12 missions tomorrow, actual metrics against which levelling up will be judged. This is the full table from an internal govt document. Includes everything from Living Standards, to digital connectivity, to education, to “pride in place.”
You’ll notice 2030 is the key date used repeatedly. Various metrics of economic growth across regions is the first mission and here are the full explanatory and technical notes we’ve seen from within the Dept as to what they mean by it.
Mission 2 technical note on R&D also included there
Mission 3: connectivity
Mission 4 : broadband
Mission 5: Education
Mission 6 (skills) and Mission 7 (health)
Mission 8: pride of place
There’s several more of these technical notes (can share if anyone wants them) but for sake of brevity here’s more meat. The particular metrics they’ll be using to measure progress against each “mission.”
Loads more to come on this on tonight’s Newsnight- make sure you’re tuning in, 2230, BBC2
Full list of all 34 announcements in the Levelling Up White Paper tomorrow, from a new “UK National Academy”, to “Innovation Accelerators” to “trailblazer deeper devolution deals”
Thoughts before debate starts
-a lot of metrics but also in some ways not a lot of metrics
-“Levelling up” remains a lot of things rather than being specified into a narrower (more achievable?) set of policy goals.
-2030 is (at least) two general elections away.
-Central policy problem remains: you’re talking about regional and sub@regional inequalities of decades’ standing and longer. There is v little new money here. That is...tough
-Quite a lot of this in terms of the structures is quite Coalition industrial strategy/New Lab w/o money
-the fact it’s so diffuse and covers so many policy areas allows ministers to essentially say, as Chief Sec to T did this afternoon, that all of the £150bn of extra spending in the SR supports levelling up. But that’s...general government spending.
key bit of context is that ministers are touring the studios today saying that never again will regions of the country be “ignored” or left behind as they were under last Lab govt. Worth remembering Conservatives have now been in office for nearly as long as last Lab govt was.
Well here it is: the Levelling Up White Paper, over 350 pages. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
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