Mubin talks to Danny about Levelling Up. What is Levelling Up? Why is Britain so unequal? Is Levelling Up working? Danny gives his verdict on all these questions and more.
Summary of the discussion
We have huge geographical inequalities across the UK, and that impacts all of us, from our health, living standards, jobs, transport, housing and much more. Levelling Up is the Government’s attempt to try and reduce these gaps, but will it work and why are these inequalities so wide in the UK.
Mubin speaks to Danny Dorling, professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, who’s written extensively about spatial inequalities.
What is levelling up?
What it is for the government is an aspiration that the country becomes less divided, isn't the most divided country geographically in all of Europe, and put in practical terms, they're looking at doling out relatively small amounts of money to areas to try to make life less uneven.
What are the government’s plans?
Well, they've renamed what was the old department for communities and housing, they’ve put the words levelling up into its title. So it's not a new department, it's a rebranding.
What's the scale of this money?
It's quite large when you put it all together. But it's quite small when you look at the amount that any individual area gets.
There are 12 ambitions. Let's have a look at the first one, increasing pay, employment and productivity in all areas of UK, with each one containing a globally competitive city.
We've just gone through our biggest reduction of pay since the Napoleonic Wars, bigger than the 1930s, bigger than dozens of all the recessions we’ve had in the last 200 years.
So pay has actually dropped in real terms. Employment, apart from large amounts of sickness, we have very, very high rates of employment because you have to work. You can't survive as a single adult on benefits. Productivity is always a bugbear in Britain. But it partly reflects our inequality in pay that somebody has said to be productive if they're paid more.
I mean, the second one, raise public investment in research and development outside the southeast by 40%. That's laudable, it's in their power, because a lot of R&D money, particularly for the research councils, is organised by government. But if you look at where the big research centres are, where the centre is looking at gene technology, and so on, it's in London, or Oxford and Cambridge, and outside of there, there is much less, and the amount of spending is so low that raising it by 40% is not necessarily that hard. And we also have some of the lowest research and development spending in all of Europe. So it's, it's from a low base, but, but it's good that they're, recognising this as an issue.
Let's go into another one, transport, which is bringing the rest of the country's public transport ‘significantly closer’ - to London standards
It's about buses. I mean, one problem the government have is that Britain has become remarkably poorer, particularly in the last 12 months, you know, the cost of borrowing is now very, very high. So the kinds of schemes we used to have, you know, new train lines, where HS2 might still happen, but you know, we don't know how far it's going to go. Those schemes become unaffordable.
Narrowing the gap of healthy life expectancy between the areas where is lowest and highest. And we've got some massive gaps, not just in terms of life expectancy, but as they highlight here, healthy life expectancy.
We've got gaps between neighbourhoods that are 20 years, you can expect to live on average 20 years longer in some of the most affluent local neighbourhoods as opposed to some of the poorest and we haven't had gaps like this since the 1930s. We can actually go back and see that this has happened before, but you have to get to the 30s to see that huge divide.
