Day: February 3, 2022

The Secretary of State for Levelling Up Michael Gove has written to the First Ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland following the publication of the Levelling Up White Paper.

In the letters the Secretary of State for Levelling Up:

• discusses the publication of the Levelling Up White Paper
• calls for the First Ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to work with the UK government to overcome shared challenges

The Scottish Government is yet to respond.

LEVELLING UP: REACTION

Responding to the publication of the levelling up white paper, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: “If we don’t level up at work, we won’t level up the country. 

“But the government has failed to provide a serious plan to deliver decent well-paid jobs, in the parts of the UK that need them most. 

“Insecure work and low pay are rife in modern Britain. And for far too many families hard work no longer pays.  

“With the country facing a cost-of-living crisis, working families need action now to improve jobs and boost pay packets – especially after more than a decade of lost pay.  

“Ministers should have announced a plan to get real wages rising – starting with a proper pay rise for all our key workers and the introduction of fair pay deals for low-paid industries. 

“And they should have delivered the long-awaited employment bill to ban zero hours contracts – as well as new, meaningful investment in skills and good green jobs of the future. 

“Without a plan to deliver decent work up and down the country, millions will struggle on, on low wages, and with poor health and prospects.” 

Recent polling published by the TUC found the British public’s number one priority for levelling up is more and better jobs.  

The TUC polling, conducted by YouGov, reveals that the most popular priority for levelling up, chosen by one in two Britons, is increasing the number and quality of jobs available.   

Increasing the number and quality of jobs is popular across the political spectrum. Half (49 per cent) of those who voted Conservative in the 2019 general election picked it as their top priority, along with more than half of Labour voters (56 per cent) and Lib Dem voters (54 per cent). 

Matthew Fell, CBI Chief Policy Director, said: “The Levelling Up White Paper is a serious assessment of the regional inequalities which have hamstrung the UK’s economic potential for generations.

“It offers a blueprint for how government can be rewired and an encouraging basis for how the private sector can bring the investment and innovation to start overcoming those deep-rooted challenges, and power long term prosperity for every community, wherever they live.

“The picture it paints of a reinvigorated 2030 UK can inspire public and private sector partners to unite on shared missions for improving health, wealth, growth and opportunity across the country.

“Crucially, it accepts the CBI view that business-driven economic clusters – enabling every region and nation to build its own unique competitiveness proposition – can be a catalyst which brings levelling up ambitions to life.”

University of Birmingham’s John Bryson on the Levelling Up announcement: “The UK has always suffered from uneven development and this is reflected in all measures of well-being – from salaries to place-based differences in mortality rates and morbidity.

“There is no country on this planet that does not suffer from some form of uneven place-based outcomes. The implication is that any attempt to remove place-based uneven outcomes will and must fail. The policy outcome might mean some alteration in the extent or degree of unevenness, but unevenness will continue to persist.

“No political party will be able to develop effective solutions to create a level playing field. Nevertheless, this does not mean that policies should not be designed to support and facilitate some form of more even development. However, the outcome will still be the persistence of uneven outcomes.  

“The key to any levelling-up agenda is to accept that every place is different and that there are multiple alternative place-based pathways; London can never become Newcastle and Newcastle can never become London.

“The levelling-up agenda needs to be positioned around a debate that is not based on closing the gap between the richer and poorer part of the country, but instead must be framed around facilitating place-based responsible inclusive prosperity.

“This must be the focus as any policy targeted at economic growth can never be sustainable. The levelling-up policy initiative ultimately must be designed to encourage inclusive carbon-light lifestyles. One implication is that levelling-up might also require some degree of levelling-down.” 

Campbell Robb, Nacro chief executive said: “We know tackling poverty and inequality is key to levelling up. For over 50 years Nacro has been embedded in communities helping some of our nation’s most vulnerable people through our housing, education, and justice services.

“We see a huge amount of unmet need in our country. We need radical change to the systems that support people and significant funding to address this need, not just ambitions and slogans.

“Until there is right support, opportunity, and funding in place for everyone to succeed regardless of the circumstances, we cannot truly claim to be levelling up”

Torsten Bell, Chief Executive of the Resolution Foundation, said: “We now know what levelling up is – George Osborne plus New Labour.

“The White Paper is all about combining the devolution of the former Conservative Chancellor, with the bigger and more activist state focused on deprived areas of the last Labour government.

“There is a strong case for both. Whether they can be delivered very much remains to be seen.”

Responding to the publication of Government’s Levelling Up the United Kingdom White Paper, Social Mobility Commission Chair Katharine Birbalsingh and Deputy Chair Alun Francis said: “We welcome the publication of the Levelling Up White Paper, and the fact that it gives a clear framework to address disparities between regions and communities.

“These communities are full of talented individuals and we must do everything we can to empower them to thrive. Each of the missions the paper sets out are hugely important, and it is crucial that checks and balances are in place to ensure that local government bodies, both existing and new, are held to account for their delivery.

“The Commission has been clear that social mobility must be a core objective of levelling up. We are pleased to see that equipping young people with the tools they need to succeed in life is at the heart of this strategy, and that it includes measures that can contribute to social mobility through every stage of a young person’s journey, from early childhood through education, training and employment.

“The missions are aspirational and pose the right questions, but are also hugely ambitious. The test will be in the detail and the implementation – not just boosting skills, but which skills will be taught and how; not just aiming for essential literacy and numeracy, but defining the most effective ways to achieve them.

“Ultimately, levelling up will be judged on how well it creates opportunities in places they did not exist before. A key test will be how we help those with the fewest opportunities find decent work – this is not just about stories of rags-to-riches. More still needs to be done to stimulate the creation of much-needed quality private sector jobs in the most deprived areas.

“As the Social Mobility Commission we stand ready to work with the government to flesh out that detail, advise on the best ways to make these missions a reality, and ensure that levelling up empowers people up and down the country to stand on their own two feet.”

Finally, after months of delays, the levelling up White Paper is out! So was it worth the wait?

Levelling Up White Paper leaves low paid workers behind

As the TUC has argued, you can’t level up without levelling up at work. In-work poverty, driven by the prevalence of low-paid and insecure work, is sky-high in every region and nation of the UK. This reflects the fact that low-paid sectors, such as retail and social care, are major employers in every area of the country (writes TUC’s JANET WILLIAMSON).

And more and better jobs is the public’s top priority for levelling up, with recent polling for the TUC conducted by YouGov finding that increasing the number and quality of jobs is seen as a priority for levelling up by one in two people from right across the political spectrum. Does the White Paper deliver this?

The White Paper sets out 12 missions – or aims – spanning living standards, R&D, transport, digital connectivity, education, skills, health, well-being, pride in place, housing, crime and local leadership. There is not a specific mission on work, but the living standards mission is “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 closing.”

So, what is the plan for achieving this?

In a nutshell, it is to grow the private sector and improve its ability to create new and better paid jobs. There are five strategies to support this aim, all of which fall under a typical ‘industrial strategy’ umbrella: improving SME’s access to finance; boosting institutional investment, including from the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) and the recently established National Infrastructure Bank; attracting foreign direct investment and using trade policy, in particular freeports, to boost investment; improving the diffusion of technologies and innovation; and supporting and growing the manufacturing sector.

There are some important questions to be answered in relation to some of these strategies; for example, it is vital that the LGPS is invested in the long-term interests of its members, without its funds being diverted towards other purposes. And each deserves proper examination in its own right.

But what they have in common is that all of them aim to create a better distribution of well-paid and highly skilled jobs around the country. This is needed – but what about the jobs that people are already in? There is no plan to address inequality within the labour market and nothing to level up work that is low paid and insecure.

The experience of London shows that the prevalence of high-paid jobs does not automatically lead to rising incomes for the wider community. Indeed, London has the highest rate of in-work poverty in the country, with people in low-paying service sector jobs priced out of housing and local amenities.

To level up, we must tackle low pay and insecurity head on, and focus on those sectors that need it most.

We need to strengthen the floor of employment protection for all workers by raising the minimum wage and tackling zero hours contracts. And the government should lead by example, giving public sector workers a proper pay rise and reversing the devastating cuts that public services have suffered in the last decade. Decent jobs should be a requirement of all government procurement, so that the power of government is used to drive up employment standards.

But we also need to change the way our economy works to hardwire decent work into business models and economic growth. Relying on the private sector to level up without changing how it works will fail. We need corporate governance reform to rebalance corporate priorities and give working people a fair share of the wealth they create. And we need a new skills settlement to give working people access to lifelong learning accounts and a right to retrain.

Levelling up at work means addressing the imbalance of power in the workplace

Working people need stronger rights to organise collectively in unions and bargain with their employer. Collective bargaining promotes higher pay, better training, safer and more flexible workplaces and greater equality – exactly what we need to level up at work. Unions should have access to workplaces to tell people about the benefits of unions, following the New Zealand model.

And to level up we must tackle entrenched low pay and poor conditions within sectors head on, bringing unions and employers together to set sectoral Fair Pay Agreements for low paid sectors, starting with social care.

Creating new and better jobs is important; but this Levelling Up White Paper has left those in low paid, insecure work behind.