The Tory candidates have a stark choice: austerity or levelling up Britain

An ambitious vision that makes people feel better about their lives and the places they live in is long overdue, writes Jack Shaw

In recent days, Tom Tugendhat, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have all signed up to Jack Berry MP’s ‘Northern Agenda’ (PA)

When Boris Johnson became prime minister, he made tackling the structural inequalities in the UK’s social and economic fabric a central promise. The recognition that the challenges facing places are not the same and therefore require a different policy response has been widely welcomed.

But the promises set out by the current Conservative leadership candidates suggest that this vision may no longer be a priority and “levelling up” is at risk of being jettisoned. Nor is it clear what fate will befall the levelling up white paper, to which the vision owes much of its intellectual framework.

In recent days, Tom Tugendhat, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have all signed up to Jack Berry MP’s “Northern Agenda” – and Tugendhat, who is unlikely to progress to the next round, has said it would be “at the heart” of government if he were prime minister. But few have set out visions of their own. A key question in this leadership contest is whether candidates accept the need to level up left-behind places, and are prepared to commit to pursuing policies to that effect.

For the most part, candidates have signalled a move away from Johnson’s political philosophy to governing – which some critics described as “cakeism” (Johnson described himself as “pro having it [cake] and pro eating it too”) – and from the focus of levelling up. Instead, attention has turned more squarely to fiscal conservatism: tightening belts, shrinking the state and cutting taxes.

Once Johnson goes, some of the themes in the levelling-up agenda will doubtless remain central to the next prime minister’s vision. There is no absence of policymakers and think-tankers calling for a laser-like focus on boosting growth and prosperity in our lagging towns and cities, for example. Productivity in Germany, France and the US is 17 per cent higher than the UK, which has increased at half the rate of the richest 25 OECD countries since the financial crash. In some quarters growth is seen as the antidote to the disenfranchisement and abandonment felt by so-called “left-behind” places.

Yet the inequalities facing “places that don’t matter” aren’t generated solely by unequal economic development, and it is this that lay at the heart of the white paper which is at risk of being abandoned. Take boosting “pride in place”. The government’s understanding of pride is at best incomplete and at worst inaccurate. The white paper sees pride narrowly through the lens of giving high streets a new lease of life, increasing homeownership and tackling serious violence. These are important priorities in their own right, but some of them – tackling homicide is a case in point – are unlikely to make people prouder of where they live.

But the principle of boosting pride is sound, even if pride is far more expansive than the white paper suggests. As a forthcoming report from the Bennett Institute at the University of Cambridge will show, far from being superficial or short-term, pride can bind communities. Improving high streets is one aspect, but pride cuts across the built environment. Green spaces, culture, regeneration and heritage – whether that be the farmers market, pub or football club – can be “pride generators”, as can tackling vandalism and anti-social behaviour.

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In many cases these amenities have fallen into a state of disrepair, and the call for a “Universal Basic Infrastructure” to ensure that communities have the minimum they need to sustain themselves is an important one.

Civic and local leaders have a central role to play too. At a deeper level, communities want to exercise power over their lives so that change happens “with” them, not “to” them. They want to tell their own stories and celebrate their own histories. Amenities, and the interactions that take place within them, are not only sources of pride – they in turn help foster social capital, trust and participation which can help create the right conditions for economic growth.

These bread-and-butter issues are what candidates should be looking towards, both as part of a broader package to stimulate the economy and to boost pride – rather than a return to calls for fiscal restraint that have so far dominated the leadership contest. An ambitious vision that makes people feel better about their lives and the places where they live is long overdue.

Jack Shaw is an affiliated researcher at Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy