Diverse perspectives and central themes on the UK levelling up debate.
Our intention when we launched our levelling up blog series in early 2021 was to publish a series of short pieces to help stimulate the emerging debate about levelling up by bringing our research agenda to bear on the questions surrounding this emerging policy programme.
Key themes that we wanted to consider included: questions around the definition of levelling up; the importance of considering inequality at different geographical scales; the difficulties of comparing different places; and the importance of measurement. Above all we wanted to examine how levelling up could be woven into all of the government’s policy programmes to ensure that they have a positive impact on the inequalities being felt by those hardest hit places.
The subsequent blog series covers these themes and more, and this anthology brings together a number of these different pieces. Partly this is to counter the sometimes ephemeral nature of blog posts and ensure that these pieces get the attention they deserve, but also because we feel that bringing them together as a collection enables the blogs to talk to each other and for a number of common themes to emerge from the body of work.
Our call is for government to listen to all stakeholders and give them the power to make decisions for their local and regional workforces and communities.
