The Levelling Up white paper, released in February 2022 after major delay, outlines the UK government’s much anticipated strategy for tackling regional inequality. The centrepiece of the government’s reform agenda, “levelling up” is presented as a solution to the UK’s longstanding and serious geographical inequalities (box 1). Although levelling up is already permeating political and media discourse,10 the white paper is the first attempt to translate this broad idea into specific policy commitments to tackle place based inequalities: white papers set out proposals for future legislation.

Levelling up secretary Michael Gove last week unveiled the government’s long-delayed plans to address regional and social inequalities, but cash-strapped councils across England are having to plan heavy cuts to frontline services after more than a decade of ongoing austerity. Recent funding increases have not undone £15bn of cuts in central government grants to local authorities between 2010 and 2020, and councils wrestling with the impact of Covid are set to pass a succession of savings measures plus widespread council tax increases. Several local authorities are facing votes on service cuts in the coming weeks.

Government plans to “level up” the country are ignoring rural areas like Shropshire, the local authority has said.

The scheme is designed to close the gap between rich and poor parts of the country.

On Wednesday, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove announced details of the government strategy.

But councillor Ed Potter said the plans meant “once again Shropshire has been overlooked”.

“At the moment we feel overlooked, unrecognised, taken for granted and completely undervalued,” the cabinet member for economic growth said.

Philip Dunne, Tory MP for Ludlow, echoed the council’s disappointment at failing to get anything from Wednesday’s announcements and said he would be arranging a meeting with Mr Gove.

Liberal Democrat MP Helen Morgan, who took the North Shropshire seat from the Conservatives in December, said the plans showed the government was continuing to ignore people in the area.

“We are having our rural services cut left and right and we are facing [a] healthcare crisis. Yet the government chooses to turn a blind eye,” she added.

The secretary of state’s plans bring all existing government initiatives into 12 “national missions” which include improving “well-being” and increasing pay, employment and productivity across the UK.

The Labour Party can only win as a truly national party, supporting people’s hopes and dreams. Individual aspirations can only be built in a stable nation where we equally care for ourselves, each other, and the natural environment. The future is bleak if our children have no prospect of being prepared for graduate level jobs in their own communities. We need to see jobs we aspire to in our own neighbourhoods, not in a distant city or virtual reality.

Secure local employment should also make housing affordable. It is not sustainable if only a few parts of the country, the economy, our politics, or our cultural life are thriving; and if those successful areas are having to bail out those we are failing. For Labour, success will mean that the answers for the “red wall” seats are also the answers for coastal and market towns. All share the same sense of being left behind by the economy and being on the periphery. Rural communities and former industrial towns both feel taken for granted by politicians.

Labour must be wary of different messages to different voters in different parts of the country. That spreads division. While that worked for the Tories and the nationalists, I believe that post-pandemic Britain will be ready for a vision of hope and unity. What are the steps to finding that vision? It needs to be more than a slogan. People have heard of “levelling up” but now recognise that it is empty of policy.

We must be embedded in, and listening to, the places we want to represent. Labour is the biggest political party and has members in every party of the country, the coast and the cities. Our members need to be encouraged and supported to be visible, as well as to be a source of ideas and understanding of the nature and state of their communities.

We must then commit to a better deal for those communities to have more delegated power, wealth and opportunity in their hands, out of Whitehall. The problems places have can only be solved locally by the people who live there. Giving power back to people over housing, skills, and infrastructure allows for bespoke solutions and strong local leadership.We have seen from the success of First Minister Mark Drakeford in Wales, Mayor Andy Burnham in Manchester and Sadiq Khan in London that place-based leadership works. Let us build that nationwide.  

Mr Tanner, a former adviser to Theresa May, has become an influential voice in Conservative circles after his Onward think tank identified the red wall seats in the run up to the last election. 

They were the once rock-solid Labour seats which fell into Conservative hands at the 2019 general election.

In a report shortly before the election, Mr Tanner described “Workington Man” – from the West Cumbrian constituency – as the sort of lifelong Labour voter who would switch to the Conservatives. 

This voter was pro-Brexit, sceptical of globalisation and wanted a government that would protect cherished local institutions such as pubs and post offices from closing.

In an interview with Newsnight ahead of the publication of his new report, Mr Tanner says: “Absolutely we came up with the Workington Man concept at the last election. We identified that as the archetypal voter that swung towards the Conservative party and delivered all those seats in the north of England – like Workington, like Walsall, like Warrington – those seats that the Conservative party had often never held before.

“It is precisely those seats that would benefit from a more localised approach, a bottom-up approach where communities take control of local assets like libraries and sports clubs and community hubs. Using them as the lynchpin for regeneration is likely to be successful in regenerating those local areas.” 

Newsnight visited Workington to gauge opinion about the government’s “levelling up” agenda. Some shoppers thought the government was too focused on larger metropolitan areas.

But Mike Johnson, the Conservative leader of the local Allerdale Borough Council, did not recognise the criticisms in the report.

Leaked analysis of a proposed new national housing formula reveals Tory-run local authorities outside London overall should deliver more than 30,600 extra houses every year. 

In contrast, Labour-run town halls would be asked to deliver 1,500 fewer homes each year. 

Areas such as Oxford, Epsom and Ewell, Sevenoaks and the Isle of Wight could all see a surge in house building, while Salford, Newcastle and Liverpool would see a large decrease.

The warning comes as around 30 Tory MPs are said to have joined a WhatsApp group aimed at opposing the plans, reports The Sunday Times.