Are the Tories serious about levelling up?

How serious are the Conservatives about levelling up? Their MPs have reportedly been told not to use the phrase in their campaign literature, presumably on the basis that it is meaningless. Today, however, ministers are fanning out across the country to make a big fuss about the latest round of levelling up funding.

Rishi Sunak is in the north west promising to ‘build a future of optimism and pride in people’s lives and the places they call home’. It’s all nice and good, but even the MPs who are getting funding today are struggling to feel a sense of optimism about the future of their seats. One says ‘we have largely mentally checked out’, and predicts that may more colleagues will announce they aren’t standing at the next election. In part this is because they think they will lose their seats, but also because even safe-seat Conservatives are wondering if they can be bothered with a spell in opposition. Another merely sent me a picture of Grumpy the dwarf from Snow White when I asked what his mood was.

Even those who are pleased with the money accept that it is not going to make much of a tangible difference in time for the next election. One red wall MP says: ‘Any and all funding is welcome, but there’s an issue on lag. We’ve got lots of new money but zero spades in the ground.’

Then there’s the question of where the funding is going. There were theatrical laughs from opposition benches in the Commons this morning as Levelling Up Minister Lucy Frazer told MPs that ‘the Levelling Up Fund has a clear and transparent process for determining how bids are selected’. That laughter was backed up by the newspaper front pages which also suggested the money wasn’t going to areas that needed that much levelling up, including Sunak’s own constituency. Labour, which wants to run its own version of levelling up, is trying to seize the narrative on where the money is going in order to suggest that the opposition party would do it better (which is still its basic slogan: ‘we would do this thing better than the government’).

Levelling up is also changing as a model. As I reported recently, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt wants it to be decentralised to the extent that, rather than the ‘hunger games’ (that’s Labour’s way of putting it) style bidding we see at the moment, local elected representatives, such as mayors, have more power over where the money goes.

There are political risks in this approach, including creating an Andy Burnham on steroids (more on that here) but it would also mean less hollow laughter in the Commons when decisions were taken. The biggest problem with levelling up, though, is that local government is not strong in many areas, indeed it has been denuded of funding over a long period of time.

If you want to trust local government more, you need to be confident that the people working in it are top quality and that they have the resources to do their jobs properly. Otherwise we’ll end up with the same see-sawing between promises to decentralise and Westminster politicians clawing back power that we’ve had for the past few decades.