Will the levelling up plans work?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of Boris Johnson’s key campaign promises in the run up to the last election was to level up the country. Now the government has published a white paper telling us how it intends to do that. So what are the plans, will they work and do they go far enough?
David Aaronovitch is joined by:
Jagjit Chadha, Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) Jennifer Williams, social affairs editor at the Manchester Evening News Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at the think tank Centre for Cities Tom Forth, founder The Data City
Producers: Rosamund Jones, Kirsteen Knight and Ben Carter Studio manager: James Beard Production co-ordinators: Sophie Hill and Siobhan Reed Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:09.9 | The briefing room is the mind chamber, where in 28 minutes you and I get to understand a big issue with the help of the top experts on the subject. |
| 0:18.5 | This week, what are the government's plans for levelling up and will they work? |
| 0:28.3 | This is an age of brands, slogans and promises, and one of this government's most striking is the ambition of levelling up. |
| 0:41.3 | Last week, a white paper was published giving shape to that objective. What was in it? And how far did the detail match the rhetoric? |
| 0:45.3 | In short, will it work? |
| 0:48.3 | Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 0:55.6 | But first, what do we mean by regional inequality, |
| 0:59.9 | how bad is it in Britain, |
| 1:01.8 | and what have other countries, well, Germany, done to deal with theirs? |
| 1:06.4 | Professor Jagdit Chatter is director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. |
| 1:12.3 | Jagdit, how long have we in Britain been talking about regional disparities and what to do about them? |
| 1:18.7 | It's clearly been a problem for most of the last century. It's something that was picked up by a number of |
| 1:23.7 | reports, particularly after World War I, that led to the definition of a mill and gap, |
| 1:28.9 | an idea that finance and regional growth looked like it was deteriorating in parts of the country |
| 1:34.6 | other than London and the Southeast. Now, there've been lots of policies. Was there a problem |
| 1:39.1 | with how programmes were sustained? I think that's something that plagues British economic policymaking, this short-term horizon, |
| 1:48.0 | this wish to parade a new idea, trumpet as something that will solve all our problems. |
| 1:53.4 | And then when the next crisis comes along, we move away from it completely. |
| 1:57.0 | What we absolutely need, and I think firms need, as well as individuals and people entering the labour market, is the sense in which these policies will be sustained over a generation, 20 to 30 years. |
| 2:09.6 | That's the kind of time scale that will be required to correct these changes. |
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