Read: Town centres need to be the focus of the levelling up agenda
With the government’s long anticipated White Paper on levelling up about to be published, it is worth reflecting on how much the landscape has changed since it was first mooted. Expectations were sky high for the Government’s levelling up agenda back in December 2019, when Boris Johnson’s administration won its mandate to govern. The Conservatives’ victory in swathes of new territory, including Barrow and Furness where I had been the MP, was at least partly due to the sense that this was a government that was serious about bringing positive social change to disadvantaged areas.
Two years down the line and optimism is in shorter supply. COVID-19 has taken its toll on some of our wealthiest cities as well as, inevitably, on our least advantaged towns. What the pandemic has really underlined, however, is how hard a task it is genuinely to level up the country. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. It’s a problem that policy experts, businesses and local leaders have grappled with for decades, with little lasting success.
This is surely a moment for a determined, sustained and bold focus on what could genuinely make a difference. Otherwise, it will never be possible to reverse the downward trajectories of some of our most left behind communities. The Centre for Cities recently warned that Britain has been levelled in the wrong direction. It was prosperous locations, north and south, that were the hardest hit during the pandemic. Businesses in London and Birmingham, for example, lost the equivalent of almost a full year of trading in less than two years. They are likely to be more resilient and retain their successful status relatively quickly as visitors and commuters return. Other cities that saw a significant increase in vacant shops, including Oxford and Newcastle, may take longer to recover. The danger is that the very poorest locations like Stoke and Sunderland may never be able to make up the ground they’ve lost. That would see whole communities permanently blighted, and the levelling up agenda fundamentally undermined.
That is why the imminent Levelling Up White Paper is so crucial. I hope that it will hand over much of the decision making to local business, council and community leaders who already have an understanding of their area and the problems it faces. But it should also provide a sense of the Government’s ambition to shape the levelling up agenda, particularly to drive footfall back into town centres. That means a willingness to put financial incentives on the table to encourage businesses to remain there and to take difficult decisions to resist superficially attractive out-of-town schemes that only serve to hollow out our communities.
Part of this must surely be a more serious and fundamental rethink of the way we use our town centres than previous exercises to reimagine high streets in recent years. An empty shop should not just be seen as a sign of failure. It can also be an opportunity. For example, health leaders should be systematically looking at moving key services, including vaccination programmes, into high street premises that have recently been vacated by corporate clients. The NHS could widen the range of services it provides, helping to support and participate in the design of healthy communities. Similarly, schools, colleges and universities should consider repurposing former department stores to transform the buildings into classrooms, laboratories and lecture theatres.
More broadly, this can only work if government shares the aim goal. Again, easy for any administration to state, much harder to change cultures so it can be delivered. Michael Gove will need to deploy all his authority and skill as a cross-cutting leader and ensure that every Whitehall department prioritises town centre revitalisation when it is making key spending decisions. For all the innovations like ‘tsars’, cabinet enforcer, a beefed-up Number Ten, audits on various issues, silo-working is still deeply embedded in government departments. They are often too preoccupied with delivering on their own core mission to also take on key performance indicators imposed from elsewhere.
It can be done. Ultimately, if as a country we value having thriving, vibrant town centres which offer opportunity to individuals and businesses and a beating heart for communities, we need to make this a priority. It will mean tough choices and determined leadership, but that commitment is what I hope to see clearly and boldly in the pages of the White Paper.
Rt Hon Lord Walney, Crossbench member of the House of Lords & former Labour MP for Barrow & Furness
