Labour's supermajority means levelling up should be back on the agenda

Although absent from general election campaigns, Labour, now that it has a super-majority, will have to implement its own version of levelling up* to reward localities that voted for it.

When the Conservatives won the Red Wall in 2019, their response was to emphasise the need to level up the country, with a focus on the left-behind regions of the North and Midlands. Levelling up was an attractive political and economic strategy for the Conservatives. It allowed them to address the economic and political concerns of these Red Wall regions by giving them more money through new funds such as the Levelling Up Fund, the Towns Fund and the High Street Fund, and more power through devolution.

Now that Labour has a supermajority, made up of seats spread across the country, the need for its own version of levelling up has grown. Like the Conservatives, it will need to show in the seats it has won for the first time and in those it has won back that it has something to offer them. The experience of the last five years shows that while far-reaching commitments to political stability, mature politics and green energy by 2030 can help, they will not be enough.

People will expect to see tangible changes in themselves, quickly.

And their skepticism about the possibility of such a development will be all the greater because the previous government did not keep its promises. The ideal strategy to meet these expectations is to level up. But it will have to be better conducted than that of the previous government.

In 2019, even in its early days, leveling was criticized as beingmore a question of symbols and spectacle than of strategy and substance.These criticisms have grown stronger as the government has moved into the implementation phase of Levelling Up following the publication of the Levelling Up White Paper in 2022. Concerns have been raised about the amount of money allocated to the programme (not that much),Questions about value for moneyAnddelays in paying even small amounts of moneyand its rapid decline in importance once the main advocate of levelling up, Boris Johnson, left government. Importantly, the money-related criticism contrasted with the generally positive views on progress made on devolution, with new devolution deals agreed with the North East, East Midlands, York and North Yorks and improved deals with Greater Manchester and the West Midlands during this period.

So what does this mean for Labour and its levelling up approach?

Given that we have a broadly fit-for-purpose strategy, the Labour Government can get to work straight away. That means getting money out of Whitehall and into local communities so they can start delivering the changes that people want to see. The last thing local communities want is to spend the next two years writing another local growth plan to convince the Government that it can spend relatively small amounts wisely. It also means maintaining the momentum of devolution, particularly in communities that already have some but need more. And levelling up must be at the heart of Labour’s overall Government mission to increase economic growth. We will have more to say on these three issues, and others, over the next two weeks.

Done well, the policy of levelling up could help Labour meet the needs of the different areas it now represents. Towns and villages across the country have been levelled down, with an average loss of 10,200 people due to weak economic growth since 2010. Having won big victories in all of these areas, Labour now needs to address these problems. Done badly, the policy of levelling up could likely lead to Labour suffering the same fate as the Conservative Party in the last election.

* The Labour government is likely to abandon the term “levelling up”, which is understandable to some extent.