How’s levelling up going?
It’s going backwards, according to Bloomberg’s “Levelling Up Scorecard”, which tracks progress since the 2019 election using the government’s own set of socioeconomic metrics for assessing its levelling-up agenda. Levelling up, if it’s to be anything more than an aspirational slogan, means reducing inequalities between regions while improving outcomes in all of them. But the Bloomberg survey (newly updated using figures from December 2022) found that since 2019 the gulf between the UK’s poorest regions and the wealthiest, London, has got wider, not narrower. Moreover, the gap’s got even bigger since the last