Read: The 2021 Budget will do little to ‘level up’ pre-pandemic inequality

The Government continues to be challenged by the public finances as we move through this pandemic. As shown in the Budget, the Chancellor has to balance investment that enables public services to recover after Covid while retaining wider confidence that finances are being effectively managed and controlled. It’s not an easy task and makes it hard for Rishi Sunak to bring long-term coherence to the Treasury’s fiscal strategy.

This Budget was about getting a country back on track after the unprecedented shock of the pandemic. It had to recognise the near term and growing challenge of inflation and cost of living pressures. As a consequence, it necessarily had a shorter-term focus.

The levelling up challenge of ending Britain’s endemic inequality of opportunity existed long before Covid. Dealing with it was at the heart of Boris Johnson’s 2019 election manifesto. In the two years since, Covid has made inequalities in opportunity wider, and the necessity to level up even starker.

Today’s announcements were a shift in the right direction – there were welcome steps in early years investment, extra schools funding and skills investment on “T levels” – but the announcements tended to be about closing Covid gaps rather than the longer-term inequalities that were already there. Though the Chancellor described the Budget as being about optimism, for the long-term plan on opportunity, we must wait for the Prime Minister’s Levelling Up White Paper, now apparently scheduled for early 2022.

I hope that the Prime Minister builds his strategy not from Whitehall down, but instead from the grassroots up by taking his cue on what works from local communities. He should look at the huge amount of effort already happening around the country, whether by businesses, universities and community groups or galvanised by local authorities and Mayors. These are the groups, alongside the MPs who represent them in Parliament, who can readily identify the projects and priorities that make a difference. One of the fastest ways to level up is to identify what already works and then do much more of it. Boris Johnson must be ambitious – shifting beyond simply trying to narrowing gaps on opportunity to plans aiming to close them entirely.

It is this, rather than today’s Budget for a “new age of optimism”, that will provide the truly defining moment of Boris Johnson’s premiership. It will be his Government’s chance to finally shift away from short-term, more reactive, piecemeal announcements to a more comprehensive, long-term approach on levelling up. 

Read the full article from Rt Hon Justine Greening in the i Paper.