Read: Place-based approach is key to levelling up success but measurement matters too - it’s why the Purpose Coalition’s partnership with the ONS can help us all get further faster

There was a warm welcome for this week’s historic devolution deal that will see a transfer of new powers to a directly elected mayor serving York and North Yorkshire, with £540 million of government investment over the next 30 years. Fittingly announced on Yorkshire Day, it will enable the region to focus on what really matters to local people and take control of decision-making on transport, housing and education.

There’s no doubt that it will unlock a host of new opportunities for the region. Having grown up in Yorkshire, I know first hand just how much of an impact there will be if we can deliver on the promise of levelling up opportunities. And place-based solutions have nearly always proved to be the most effective approach in dealing with the different challenges that different areas face. I spent many years in Cabinet and Whitehall, but it became ever clearer to me that we don’t necessarily need a top-down, formalised process to deliver change. In fact sometimes, it’s the opposite of what’s required.

The Opportunity Areas that  I set up when I was Education Secretary in some of the country’s most disadvantaged communities have seen great results on the ground. It’s probably the policy innovation as a Secretary of State that I had the broadest, most universal, cross party support for. The general objective of lifting education results was always the same, but each area tailored its action plan to the particular problems on education it was experiencing. In essence, it decluttered a plethora of DfE initiatives to focus on the ones that mattered the most to improve results - so clear priorities, and also an encouragement to go well beyond that and innovate on what needed to happen locally to improve results. 

Take Bradford, for example. The Opportunity Area (OA) work brought together both education and health alongside business and communities, so the question was raised as to whether part of the problem on literacy could be as simple as making sure children had the right glasses prescription if they needed one. Sure enough, children’s poor performance in the classroom turned out, in part, down to that. They literally found it hard to read. Prescriptions for glasses saw significant improvement and so did literacy rates for primary school children, well in excess of national averages. In Scarborough, part of the North Yorkshire Coast OA, the recruitment and retention of teachers was a target challenge to meet.  As a coastal area, its normal catchment area compared to other areas was limited - half of what would have been a catchment area was sea. The OA particularly worked through the incentives to bring in teachers but also to recruit and retain local talent. There are countless other examples of local OAs taking the initiative to work through their challenges and then find solutions working in partnerships. 

 In a sense, it’s the same lesson we learnt during the pandemic. When there’s a clear objective and set of priorities, in that case bearing down on Covid-19,  local partners –  schools, colleges and universities, the NHS and businesses – work out very quickly how their organisations fitted into what needed to be done. It’s not even necessarily a formalised process with the clear demarcations of authority that a mayoralty brings, but it is undoubtedly effective.

 But there’s one other crucial takeaway: localised measurement.

Opportunity Areas also taught us that, although tracking and measurement are key to assessing the success of a policy, we can’t use the same set of metrics to judge different areas tackling different challenges. Each OA had their own metrics to track performance against their own plan. They did shift the dial on national metrics, particularly on literacy and numeracy, but how they tracked delivery and outcomes was down to them. As we look at measuring progress more widely on levelling up and  social mobility, it might seem a difficult concept, but there is no one size fits all solution for those locally tailored plans and devolution deals.

 The Purpose Coalition has taken part in some important discussions with Professor Sir Ian Diamond, the UK’s National Statistician, and his team at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). They’ve looked at how we can work in partnership to develop a local offer for those wider metrics. And there’s an agreement between us that there needs to be a dialogue not just with local authorities but also with businesses, universities and NHS Trusts about how to measure their contribution to levelling up.

I can see a time soon when we have a national Levelling Up Goals-style framework with those overarching metrics of progress, but then complementary but tailored metrics at a more local level, and at a more stakeholder level, e.g. business. That is the work ahead of us partnering with the ONS.

If we can monitor our progress and accurately measure outcomes, then that will provide a framework for those local areas that don’t necessarily have devolution deals to create opportunities and make a difference to the people that live there. 

There is no easy quick fix. Tailored solutions don’t make life straightforward, but they are how we have impact. We must be able to measure how effective they are and each region will make up a different part of the jigsaw. The ONS measurement work is crucial and  will contribute to the overall levelling up agenda and it’s why we’re so pleased to work with the ONS to help its team get further faster.