The Tories must not be allowed to pass off business as usual as ‘levelling up’

As an ex-council leader, I try to keep out of the day-to-day commentary of the organisation I used to lead – although it is hard to watch my Tory successor squander £1.8bn of private sector investment for regeneration, scrap a state-of-the-art youth zone, abandon plans for 800 new council homes and abolish plans for a first-time buyer grant of up to £10,000 for local residents to get them on the housing market, without commenting on every piece of propaganda that is released.

However, something has bothered me. Really bothered me. Yesterday, I stumbled upon a LinkedIn post from the CEO of my former council. Accompanied by pictures of council officers cutting back trees and mowing the lawn, the post read: “The government[‘s] ‘levelling up’ agenda is something I have taken a keen interest in. Plans to rejuvenate areas of the country with much needed investment to inspire growth is something I am keen to see develop and further in Basildon.

“Our ‘Safe and Sound’ programme is a multi-million-pound programme to refresh and improve some of our estates, building up our borough to create communities people feel proud to call home. Working with partners is key to achieving our vision for our residents and businesses. Work has begun on the Felmores estate in Basildon where we’ll be tidying up communal areas, improving public facilities, completing repair works and engaging with residents over the next few months. I really want people to be proud of where they live, and this programme shows our commitment to making this happen.”

Now, putting to one side the fact that these estates are only in the condition they are in because for 17 years the Basildon Tories neglected to invest in their upkeep (until my administration took over in 2017 and put the multi-million pound scheme in place via the housing revenue account, which has nothing to do with council general funds or central government grants), the conflation of the government’s levelling up agenda with business-as-usual services is seriously worrying for various reasons.

Firstly, from a political point of view, Labour councillors and MPs should be seriously concerned that local government officers are using flagship Tory policy in common discourse in this way. Would you ever have seen council CEOs writing LinkedIn posts about the ‘just about managings’ under Theresa May, the ‘big society’ under David Cameron or the ‘third way’ under Blair and Brown? No, you really would not have. Yet somehow it has become acceptable for civil servants to trot out the term ‘levelling up’ to describe any announcement or service, no matter how much of it is business as usual. When civil servants are using policy terms in this way, it is wrong.

Politically, one of the beauties for the Conservatives has been the vague nature of levelling up, which means that it can be applied to almost any situation and mean almost anything to anyone. When CEOs are endeavouring to imply that cutting the grass and pruning the trees on deprived estates is ‘levelling up’, then Labour should be calling this out in the strongest possible terms.

In the 2022 local government elections, I saw time and time again the Tories receiving undue credit for their levelling up agenda in places like Sunderland when in fact the city is being transformed by the Labour-led council. We have to tackle the notion that when councils get the basics right, it is somehow a consequence of levelling up and the Tory government and nothing to do with the ingenuity of Labour councillors putting our principles into practice and delivering major policy reforms.

Secondly, we should be challenging the ambition. In the words of Senator Elizabeth Warren, we need “big, structural, change” in the country. That’s a consequence of 70-odd years in the last century of Conservative governments dismantling communities. However, it also means the private and public sector will need to work together to deliver that change. So is the message that councils want the private sector to hear about levelling up in our communities to really be reduced to cutting the bushes and the trees? Are the forgotten communities left behind by the Tories under austerity really going to bank on bushes being cut as their path to higher-skilled and higher-wage jobs? Whilst the aesthetics of estates is pivotal and the ‘broken glass’ theory is one I think has real merit, a council’s ability to tidy its paths, isn’t really the grand agenda I, and many others, envisaged levelling up being.

Despite being in a wealthy county, Basildon is the fifth most economically unequal place in the UK. Life expectancy differs by ten years from the north of the borough to the south. It has more children in child poverty than Barnsley. It has the highest rate of NEETs (not in employment, education or training) in Essex, and its secondary school attainment gap is widening.

In fact, across ‘true blue’, Tory Essex, the county is moving backwards on every single social mobility indicator at an alarming rate. It is a story of abject failure by the Conservatives locally, regionally and nationally, and this is being repeated all across the country. Yet the message that the CEO of the largest council in Essex is sending to the investment community on LinkedIn is that levelling up is about mowing the grass. It’s unbelievable and in stark contrast to the kind of reform agendas Labour councils like Sunderland, Stevenage and Southampton have developed to change people’s lives.

Labour must get after this lack of ambition and the ambiguity about what levelling up means for councils and communities. We, political parties and politicians, should dictate and be clear about what can and cannot be constituted as a consequence of levelling up, not councillors, CEOs and officers.

Indeed, whilst Labour rightly needs to have a strong policy rebuttal on the cost-of-living crisis, the energy crisis and Brexit, we urgently need to have a frame around our policy position on levelling up.

For me, it should fall into three areas: jobs, housing and access to public services. That will mean a physical build programme – particularly in housing but also in primary care. We committed to ‘Building Schools for the Future’ the last time we were in government. Now, we should commit to building GP health centres for the future, with a brand new one in every town in every part of England. And it will mean an investment programme with the private sector that sees jobs created, skills strategies deployed and wages increased.

Levelling up should be about working people, no matter their postcode, fulfilling their ambitions for themselves and their families with a good job, a secure home, a safe community in which to live, work and raise a family and access to the public services that educate their kids, care for their sick and provide dignity in old age. It’s a vision that is a far cry from sweeping the paths, and one that only Labour can deliver.