Levelling up

The government’s ambition to ‘level up’ the country and reduce regional disparities was a key plank of the Conservative 2019 general election manifesto. The 2022 levelling up white paper defined what levelling up means in more detail, specifying 12 ‘missions’ to be achieved by 2030, covering most aspects of government policy across the economy, public services, pride in place and devolution.

This is not the first government to have tried to reduce regional disparities, and previous Institute for Government research has shown how previous attempts to address these longstanding problems have been undermined by frequent changes to policies and delivery institutions.

In this programme of work, we are assessing the government’s approach to levelling up, whether it is well-defined and whether it can succeed where other governments have failed. This includes looking at what the public expects from the agenda, which policies are likely to be most successful to drive reductions in regional economic inequality, and whether the changes to the way policy should be made set out in the white paper (so-called ‘system reforms’) are likely to be effective at driving the agenda forward while also monitoring how far they will be implemented in practice.