The Student Room Group

No progress made on half of UK government’s levelling-up targets

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/01/government-levelling-up-targets-progress-politics-conservatives-labour

The Conservatives have been accused of failing to live up to their ambitious agenda for Britain’s regions, as Guardian analysis shows no progress has been made on half of their levelling up targets.

Well no **** lol, this government needs to be voted out in my opinion, hopefully labour or an alternative can do better.
Reply 1
The Conservatives spent a decade underfunding local government, forcing them to cut back a lot of vital services then announced they can enter what is effectively a lottery system for some pocket change to fund specific projects.

It is up there with cutting 20,000 experienced frontline police officers then announcing they'll recruit 20,000 rookies.

Or spending millions to attempt send a handful of failed asylum seekers to Rwanda in the hope no one notices the the grotesque delays in processing asylum claims is costing us billions in hotel bills.

These are not policies that were meant to deliver, simply deceive gullible voters. .
(edited 10 months ago)
Reply 2
Original post by Talkative Toad
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/01/government-levelling-up-targets-progress-politics-conservatives-labour
The Conservatives have been accused of failing to live up to their ambitious agenda for Britain’s regions, as Guardian analysis shows no progress has been made on half of their levelling up targets.
Well no **** lol, this government needs to be voted out in my opinion, hopefully labour or an alternative can do better.

This is not a shock but Labour won't do anything meaningful either.

I'm old enough to remember Blair's third term/Brown and back then the Labour government considered the north to be the Watford Gap. Osbourne at least considered Manchester to be the wall and Boris Tyne and Wear.

But there are three reasons neither party will tackle this (at least under Starmer and Sunak).

1) Both parties completely underestimate the money required. A few hundred million here and there for a new business park does not cut it.

2) To actually properly achieve it would require a complete restructuring of local government, planning law and limiting state investment in London relative to the north.

3) Vested interests - May represents a constituency outside London and Sunak a constituency in Yorkshire. There is sufficient pressure that both of them had to include country wide allocation budgets because every MP in the south east that doesn't have mansions decides that their constituents are poor too.

Ironically, a big Labour majority would be a big problem here. The bigger the win, the more southern MP's.

4) Overall strategy and ambition - Both parties basically don't have a proper definition of levelling up success for political reasons. They basically consider any spending to be levelling up and focus on a few small areas where good business clusters have developed rather than county wide.

..

Basically, we don't have the fiscal room or political will to do it and neither Sunak or Starmer are the types to take sufficient risk.

To put it another way, I'm here in West Yorkshire and I'll be shocked if either of them give me more than a few trams which ironically will mean destroying the roads and traffic chaos while building them (I want heavy rail or bus, not half measures).

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