Have the Conservatives Levelled Up the North?

The Conservative government was “never serious” about Levelling Up the country, one of the UK's leading public health experts has claimed.

Speaking on The North in Numbers podcast, Professor Sir Michael Marmot, director of The Institute of Health Equity, said: “It’s not going well. The latest data we have suggests little in the way of progress.

“We’re not moving in the right direction, and at the moment we’re not putting much money into it. How are you going to level up with that?”

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Levelling Up promised to boost Britain’s “left behind” areas, and helped Boris Johnson storm to victory in 2019 as voters in former Labour heartlands turned to the Tories in droves.

But have the Conservatives actually managed to deliver on their promise? Annie Gouk spoke to local leaders, policy experts and academics to find out how it’s going.

“Sadly, not very well,” says Henri Murison, Chief Executive of cross party think tank the Northern Powerhouse Partnership.

“Apart from the devolution stuff - that’s gone really well, but a lot of the other ideas around improving transport links, some of the direct investment the government wanted to do into local projects, have all gone sadly pretty badly.”

Meanwhile, North East Mayor Kim McGuinness branded Levelling Up an “abject failure”, adding: “Nobody in the North feels like it’s been Levelled Up, which is the opposite to what the government wanted to achieve with it.”

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The government claims it is making "significant progress" against its Levelling Up missions.

However, last month Guardian analysis of official government figures suggested that no progress had been made on half of Levelling Up