The 2019 Conservative manifesto promised that the party would make “the most of the opportunities of Brexit” and “level up” deprived parts of the UK. Voters in former Labour heartlands turned to the Tories in their thousands, handing Boris Johnson a historic general election victory.
“You may only have lent us your vote,” Johnson said, promising to deliver the change so many clearly needed. But as the country looks ahead to the next general election – and a bumper set of local elections in May – will those voters feel that promise to improve their local area has been delivered upon?
We looked at the 12 levelling up “missions” set out in a 2022 white paper with metrics on how progress in each should be assessed, and found that three had gone backwards – including health, housing and pride in place. There was no progress in a further three – education, skills and wellbeing. There was good progress in just one – local leadership.
Living standards
Goal: By 2030, pay, employment and productivity will have risen in every area of the UK, with each containing a globally competitive city, and the gap between the top performing and other areas will have narrowed.
Verdict: Some progress.
Since the target was set two years ago, the UK has been battered by high inflation and the cost of living crisis. Pay, as measured on the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ (DLUHC) chosen metric of median weekly earnings, rose in all regions in the year to April 2023, the latest period for which this series is available. Growth was faster in Yorkshire and the Humber (7.3%) and the north-west (7.2%) than in London (3.7%) or the south-east (5.7%) – potentially an early indication of a modest narrowing of the gap, though it is unclear whether it will be sustained.
The employment rate for 16- to 64-year-olds across the UK – the government’s metric – is no higher than it was in mid-2022, however, and the regional breakdown shows no clear pattern that would suggest the gap is closing. On productivity, up-to-date data is not yet available, but recent projections by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (Niesr), a thinktank, suggest economic output has bounced back more strongly since the pandemic in London than in the north or the Midlands.
Heather Stewart
Transport
Goal: By 2030, local public transport connectivity across the country will be significantly closer to the standards of London, with improved services, simpler fares and integrated ticketing.
Verdict: Some progress.
Boosting connectivity outside London was a key goal of the levelling up white paper in 2022. While the decision a year later to scrap the northern leg of the HS2 line between Birmingham and Manchester may have seemed counter-productive to this goal, there has been progress in other areas.
Decisions to introduce Transport for London-style bus franchising in places such as Manchester, West Yorkshire and Liverpool since the white paper came in will lead to improved services and integrated ticketing in the country’s biggest city regions.
However, quantifying the government’s progress is difficult. The metric to measure connectivity has just been developed, and therefore has no published data.
The second metric is taken from the national travel survey and measures public transport trips as proportion of all trips but comes with a heavy Covid-19 caveat.
According to the 2022 survey, just under 6% of trips outside London were made on public transport, compared with 25% in the capital. That was up slightly from the 4.8% recorded in 2021, when Covid restrictions were in place.
While not an official metric, another measure for success could be the proportion of people commuting to work by car, where data stretches back further. In 2022, 76% of people outside London commuted by car, a slight improvement on the 77.1% that travelled by car in 2019, the year before the pandemic.
Jack Simpson
Education
Goal: By 2030, the number of primary schoolchildren achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths will have increased significantly. In England, this will mean 90% of children will achieve the expected standard, and the percentage of children meeting the expected standard in the worst performing areas will have increased by over a third.
Verdict: No progress.
The levelling up mission for education was always going to be difficult. In 2019, 65% of pupils met the expected standard in reading, writing and maths. In 2022, the number was 59%, and in 2023 it was 60%. In 2019, just a single mainstream local authority – Richmond-upon-Thames – had more than 80% reaching the standards in year 6. In 2023 the rate had fallen to 74%.
Jon Andrews, the head of analysis at the Education Policy Institute, said the government’s slim hopes had been blown away by the after-effects of the Covid pandemic.
“Instead, we have seen a fall in results overall and a widening of the gap in attainment between pupils from low income backgrounds and their peers,” Andrews said.
“We’re now behind where we were in 2019, both in terms of overall attainment and in closing the disadvantage gap – which isn’t strictly part of the ambition but given how many pupils you need to achieve the expected standard you wouldn’t be able to achieve it without increasing the proportion of disadvantaged pupils who do.”
A subsidiary metric set by the Department for Education, to raise average GCSE grades in English and maths from 4.5 to 5, could suffer the same fate: those taking GCSEs in 2030 had their early years most disrupted by Covid and school closures.
Richard Adams
Skills
Goal: By 2030, the number of people successfully completing high-quality skills training will have significantly increased in every area of the UK. In England, this will lead to 200,000 more people successfully completing high-quality skills training annually, driven by 80,000 more people completing courses in the lowest skilled areas.
Verdict: No progress.
The skills target set by the government had the benefit of being modest and opaque and without updates from the government, progress is difficult to measure. There was a sliver of improvement in what the government calls “low-skilled” areas, with 1.5% of over-19s getting qualifications, compared with 1.4% in 2019-20.
David Hughes, the chief executive of the Association of Colleges, notes that the most recent data shows the number of entrants to courses has been “stagnant” for seven years.
“There seems to be no reporting from the government on how likely they are to meet their 2030 skills mission. Whether they do or do not meet it, we want to see serious investment in colleges to drive demand and increase numbers,” Hughes said.
The Learning and Work Institute (LWI) said it thought the government was “broadly on target” but achieving it would reverse only a fifth of the fall in adults gaining full qualifications since 2010-11.
Stephen Evans, the chief executive of LWI, said: “The number of adults improving their qualifications is 1 million lower than in 2010, so the levelling up mission is relatively limited in its ambition. It’s also unlikely to be delivered if the government cuts funding [to the sector] by a further £380m in the next parliament as their public spending plans imply, on top of the £1bn cuts seen to date.”
Richard Adams
Health
Goal: By 2030, the gap in healthy life expectancy (HLE) between local areas where it is highest and lowest will have narrowed, and by 2035 HLE will rise by five years.
Verdict: Gone backwards.
The white paper stated in 2022 that progress on the health mission would be measured using the “healthy life expectancy at birth” (HLE) figures that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) collects. “This is an estimate of the average number of years a person born today can expect to live in a state of ‘very good’ or ‘good’ health,” it said.
The most recent annual ONS statistics show that HLE fell in England between 2011-13 and 2020-22 – by 9.3 months for men and 14 months for women. It also fell for both sexes in Wales during that time and for women in Northern Ireland, although there was an increase for men of 12.2 months.
In addition, female HLE fell across that period in all of England’s nine regions, as did male HLE in all of them except London, where it rose by 6.9 months.
Historically, the north-east has had the worst life expectancy and the south-east has had the best. That divide is widening, not narrowing, especially for men.
Last year’s inaugural report by Health Equity North, a collaboration of academics, highlighted how Covid-19 had exacerbated the already sharp health divide between the north-west, north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber regions and the rest of England. It is characterised by “lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality rates and worse levels of bad/very bad self-assessed health [and] disability”.
Dr Luke Munford, a co-author of that report and health economist at Manchester University, said: “HLE is trending downwards, and so we definitely cannot increase HLE by 2035 based on these trends. Things are getting worse, not better.”
Wellbeing
Goal: By 2030, wellbeing will have improved in every area of the UK, with the gap between top-performing and other areas closing.
Verdict: No progress.
The government has said it will track the share of individuals who have low wellbeing according to life satisfaction surveys. Between 22021-22 and 2022-23, the picture across the whole of the UK worsened slightly in key areas, according to Office for National Statistics data.
There was little change in the latest figures for the three months to September 2023: 5.3% of UK adults rated their life satisfaction as low; 4% rated ‘how worthwhile they feel the things they do in life are’ as low; 8.5% rated their happiness the previous day as low and 21.5% rated their anxiety the previous day as high.
Over the last two years, the gap in average happiness has increased between some of the happiest and least happy places, the figures show. In Malvern, Mid Sussex and the Highlands of Scotland, average happiness increased to about eight out of 10 while it decreased in Hastings, Manchester and Lincoln to about 6.6 out of 10.
Robert Booth
Pride in place
Goal: By 2030, pride in place, such as people’s satisfaction with their town centre and engagement in local culture and community, will have risen in every area of the UK, with the gap between top-performing and other areas closing.
Verdict: Gone backwards.
Pride in place was defined by the government as a measure of a community’s “attachment, belonging and deep-rooted contentedness”, underpinned by their sense of safety, engagement and satisfaction with their surroundings.
Ministers sought to measure this with four key headline metrics: the percentage of people who think antisocial behaviour is a problem in their local area; the percentage of people who believe their area is attractive; a measure taken from the thinktank Onward’s Social Fabric Index; and the percentage of local people engaged with sport, cultural and heritage activities.
Three of these metrics are new measures that had not yet produced data as of March 2024. However, it is possible to assess progress so far by looking at statistics similar to those proposed.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s community life survey, published in May 2023, found that 76% of people felt satisfied with the area where they live – down from 79% in 2020/21. A third of people said they engaged in “some form of civic participation”, down from 41% the previous year.
On antisocial behaviour, the Office for National Statistics said in January that perceptions had remained consistent for the past decade. In the year ending June 2023, the Crime Survey of England and Wales estimated that 24% of people perceived antisocial behaviour to be a fairly or very big problem in their local area.
Onward’s Social Fabric Index, published last year, found that the “social fabric” was most frayed in the so-called red wall and found a stark north-south divide. Those places, the report said, had faced a “double whammy” of weaker economies and community ties falling apart. It added: “For levelling up to succeed, the government needs to address both of these with specific interventions.”
Josh Halliday
Housing
Goal: By 2030, renters will have a secure path to ownership with the number of first-time buyers increasing in all areas; and the government’s ambition is for the number of non-decent rented homes to have fallen by 50%, with the biggest improvements in the lowest performing areas.
Verdict: Gone backwards.
Renters’ path to home ownership is strongly linked to their ability to save for a deposit, and with rents rising 9% nationally over the last year, according to ONS figures in March, that is not improving.
In 2022-23, there were about 874,000 recent first-time buyers in England – that is people who had bought a home for the first time in the last three years.
That means the number of people getting the keys to their first home was down from the 957,000 in 2020-21, but up slightly from 874,000 in 2021-22, figures from the latest English Housing Survey show. However, the number of first-time buyers outside London fell by more than 100,000 over that same period from 803,000 to 693,000. The government does not yet have robust regional data by which to measure its goal of making sure there are more first-time buyers in all areas.
In terms of the standard of homes, the picture is no better. There were 3.67m non-decent homes in England in 2022, an increase on the previous year of 3.41m, again using figures from the English Housing Survey. The biggest increase in these sub-standard homes was in private rented homes – 1.03m of which were rated as non-decent in 2022, 60,000 more than in 2020. These declines in the condition of the country’s housing stock come after a decade of improvements in standards across rental and owner-occupied homes. It means the goal of halving the number of non-decent rented homes in the next six years would need to see marked improvements in the condition of more than 700,000 homes.
Robert Booth
Crime
Goal: By 2030, homicide, serious violence and neighbourhood crime will have fallen, focused on the worst affected areas.
Verdict: Some progress.
The worst-affected areas for both homicide and serious violence are defined as the 20 police force areas with the largest volumes of hospital admissions for an assault with a sharp object against under 25 years olds over a six-year period (2015-16 to 2021-22).
Based on available data and using the measures above, limited progress has been made since February 2022. Of the 20 worst-affected areas, there was an increase in homicide in nine between the year to September 2023 and the year to September 2022 (the most recent available data).
Only six of the 20 worst affected areas have recorded hospital admissions for an assault with a sharp object against under 25s since February 2022. Of those, four had shown a decline year on year, one had an increase and there was no change in one.
Neighbourhood crime is more complicated to determine because it is defined by the Home Office as a range of offences: robbery and selected theft offences – theft from the person, domestic burglary, and vehicle-related theft.
Using the same police force areas worst affected for homicide and serious violence, police-recorded data shows a mixed picture in the year to September 2023 compared with the year to September 2022.
Robbery, theft from a person and theft from a vehicle are up in more areas than they have fallen, while domestic burglary is down in more areas than it has risen.
The Crime Survey of England and Wales – which measures experience of crime – estimates that there were 1.5m “neighbourhood crime” incidents in the year ending September 2023 nationally, no change compared with the previous year.
Jamie Grierson
Local leadership
Goal: By 2030, every part of England that wants one will have a devolution deal with powers at or approaching the highest level of devolution and a simplified, long-term funding settlement.
Verdict: Good progress.
Success on this mission is measured by the proportion of the population living in an area “with the various levels of local devolution in England”.
At the time the levelling up white paper was published in March 2022, about 40% of England was covered by a devolution deal.
Since then, nine additional regions have moved towards new settlements, with four preparing to elect mayors in the 2 May local elections. The north-east, York and North Yorkshire, east Midlands, and Norfolk will elect mayors for the first time next month, adopting a suite of new powers.
Three other areas – Hull and East Yorkshire, Greater Lincolnshire, and Suffolk – are set to elect mayors in 2025, while Lancashire and Cornwall expected to adopt a more limited version of devolution without mayors.
The government set itself a rather soft target on devolution, such that any newly devolved areas would have counted as success. Despite that, even some of the government’s most persistent critics concede that this is one area where ministers have largely delivered so far.
Josh Halliday
Research and development
Goal: By 2030, domestic public investment in R&D outside the greater south-east (encompassing London, Oxford and Cambridge) will increase by at least 40%, and over the spending review period by at least one-third. This additional government funding will seek to leverage at least twice as much private sector investment over the long term to stimulate innovation and productivity growth.
Verdict: Some progress.
The greater south-east accounted for 46% of all public and charitable spending on R&D in 2020, but just 31% of business R&D and 21% of the population. The levelling up white paper set out the ambition to rebalance this.
There have already been some tangible investments: £100m has been given to three new “innovation accelerators” in Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and Glasgow. These are private-public-academic partnerships aiming to create Silicon-valley style hubs of scientific and technological innovation. That money has arrived and is being spent – although it is not clear whether these pilot projects will be extended and/or rolled out elsewhere. The UK Research and Innovation’s Strength In Places fund, with a £316m budget, is also aimed at funding research beyond the south-east that builds on existing regional strengths to deliver benefits for the local economy.
However, even with a levelled up R&D budget, there is concern that some regions and institutions may still see a decline in investment due to the loss of EU structural development funds. Bangor University, for instance, secured EU structural fund projects with a total budget value of £110m over the previous six-year period, with no prospect of this being replaced by new national initiatives.
Hannah Devlin
Digital connectivity
Goal: By 2030, the UK will have nationwide coverage of gigabit-capable broadband and 4G mobile networks, and our ambition is that higher quality, standalone 5G will extend to all populated areas.
Verdict: Some progress.
Ensuring Britain’s homes and businesses have strong internet and mobile coverage is seen as a vital pillar to levelling up, as the post-Covid boom in working from home opens up new opportunities to rebalance desk work away from cities.
In December, the communications industry regulator, Ofcom, said that gigabit-capable broadband coverage levels reached 78% – or 23.2m – of UK residential premises in 2023, up from 70% the year before. Full-fibre broadband was available in 57% of UK residential premises, or 17.1m premises, up from 42% in 2022. The government is largely reliant on the speed and efficiency of private companies in rolling out full fibre, particularly the largest operators including BT’s Openreach and Virgin Media O2.
However, just two in five residential premises in rural areas have access to full fibre, causing concern over a “digital divide”. “Rural areas feel forgotten and the last to receive connectivity investment,” said the Country Land and Business Association president Victoria Vyvyan. “Painfully slow and desperately unreliable, poor connectivity is holding rural businesses back and hitting economic growth.”
Alex Lawson
A spokesperson for the levelling up department said: “Levelling up is an ambitious long-term programme of reform and by sticking to the plan we are making significant progress against our missions.”
