In many places that need levelling up, the real unemployment rate exceeds the number of job vacancies; labour supply is a greater problem in the South.
The West Midlands must compete with Barcelona, Boston, and Beijing – not with London and Manchester.
Empowering left-wing leaders is the price that one has to pay for the local experimentation that devolving power and funds entails.
Having delivered the tough medicine of the recent Spending Review, the Government needs to focus and expand on this opportunity.
Germany has come closer to managing it – but take a look at the bill: an average of £71 billion between 1990 and 2014. That’s a little more than the £2 billion Sunak was sharing out yesterday.
“These five promises are the people’s priorities. So, they’re my immediate priorities, too. But they’re not the limit of my ambitions for our country. They’re the foundation.”
Early struggles with reading are one of the largest, and is possibly the largest, root cause of poor outcomes for school leavers.
Attacks on targets are criticising the problem’s symptom rather than its cause – that the English planning system is not currently designed to solve the country’s housing problems.
The principled case for Clarke’s amendment is also the simplest one. Why should central government stand in the way of local communities where there is support for building new turbines?
If we instituted the measure I propose, it would do more to help young people become homeowners than anything proposed by the target-obsessed.
Councils have retained more Business Rates as an incentive to boost enterprise. But it has been mooted that receipts grown by individual councils will be redistributed.
Trying to replicate successful schemes like Canary Wharf in places like the East of England is a pointless exercise. What works in cities may not be applicable elsewhere.
We already have a track record of getting real results – imagine what we could do if the shackles were off.
A pro-green agenda can complement a pro-growth one rather than contradict it, and the two can work together hand in hand – making progress on levelling up as they do so.
There’s no better time to look beyond arguments about regional funding allocations to re-address how neighbourhood-level communities that have been historically overlooked do not go unnoticed anymore.