‘Why and how Labour should embrace a “new levelling up” agenda’

Labour has carefully avoided mentioning ‘levelling up’ in the five missions Sir Keir Starmer has outlined this year. But whether the phrase survives or not as we approach the election, the issues that underpin it cannot be avoided.

The government’s levelling up work has yet to really get off the ground, but the focus on regional inequality it has led to resonates in the areas that Labour needs to win if it is to form another government.

We released a new report last week called How Can Labour Level Up? that brought together 12 contributors including the mayor of the West of England Dan Norris and the TUC and Co-operative Party to outline ways in which Labour could address the challenge of regional inequality and levelling up. There are four main messages from the report that could help Labour if it is to form the next government.

Labour needs a coherent vision for education – from early years to adults

Firstly, Labour’s mission to spread opportunity does include new commitments to early-years education and a national body for skills but needs to go further and develop a coherent life course approach to education and training from early years through to adult learning. Our report suggests rebooting the successful Sure Start programme, matching the apprenticeship minimum wage to the national minimum wage, removing the age-based distinctions to give working people a right to retrain and expanding higher education participation.

The government has only belatedly connected levelling up and higher education with its recent investment zone initiative but focuses on the contribution that research in higher education can make rather than participation.

The evidence shows the economy needs more graduates, but in some areas of the country, participation remains shockingly low – less than 15%. Labour has the chance here to claim ground ceded by the government with its attempts to bear down on universities in recent years and tap into the potential for higher education to address inequality.

The party must confront the challenges associated with devolution

Secondly, confront the major challenges associated with devolution. These include inertia from Whitehall associated with a Labourist tradition of centralisation alongside the problem of working out what powers should sit with combined authorities or local authorities and the uneven, messy local government landscape in England.

As John Denham, ex-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, states in the report, there needs to be a distribution of powers to localities by right and a coherent national government for England. Dan Norris argues that, as mayor of the West of England, his ability to make change has been hamstrung by a system that is not matching the right powers with the right tier of government.

And recognise that levelling up requires culture change in Whitehall

Thirdly, Labour needs to find a way of acknowledging the scale of the challenge related to levelling up and use this as a mechanism to drive cultural change.

Lord John Bird, founder of the Big Issue, points to the billions we spend maintaining people in poverty rather than removing them from it. He argues for a new Ministry for Poverty which will pull together efforts across government to address both in-work and out-of-work poverty. This kind of initiative would require genuine cross-departmental working which means changing the mindset of Whitehall where inequality is concerned. Much cannot be solved from the centre, which is why devolution is so important, but what can be done needs to be done both differently and collaboratively.

In the same vein as ‘New’ Labour, we need a new approach to inequality

Finally, the last time Labour won an election after a lengthy period out of power was on a platform of renewal of its own identity, as it presented the electorate with a shift from old to ‘New’ Labour. Something similar is required from Labour where levelling up is concerned. Not necessarily mimicking the policies of that era; much good work was done under the last Labour government, but inequality still increased.

Rather, the parallel between New Labour and levelling up needs to be in terms of approach. As with the shift to New Labour, the existing approach to levelling up has been defunct for many years (well before the phrase levelling up even came along). A different approach is needed, but it must be one that is willing to confront the present realities – as New Labour did when looking at how the party was perceived by the electorate at the time. 

‘New levelling up’ needs to recognise that the reason gross inequalities exist in the UK and so many millions of people’s lives are blighted by them is deeply rooted; in how we view inequality itself, how we are governed and how our economic system works.