In his recent reshuffle prime minister Boris Johnson
appointed Michael Gove to head up the newly renamed Department for Levelling
Up, Housing, and Communities.
The rebranded department will be tasked with
supporting ‘communities across the UK to thrive, making them great
places to live and work’ [1]. Its remit will include driving growth and job
creation, delivering more housing, and overseeing local government [2].
Marking
his first day as Secretary of State for Levelling Up Mr Gove with a visit to
Thornaby, a town in the Northwest that has received £29.9 million in funding
from the government’s Towns Fund said in a press statement “It’s been fantastic
to see how our levelling up agenda is boosting opportunity, employment and
pride right across the country” [3].
Gove,
a Johnson loyalist with a reputation for getting things done comes into his
role as serious questions are being asked about the ‘levelling up’ agenda that
won the Tories a host of ‘red wall’ seats and the 2019 general election.
Even
without the disruption caused by the pandemic the gap between promises and
reality is looking to wide for comfort to the legion of Conservative MPs
holding constituencies in the North their party hasn’t held for decades, if at
all.
Michael
Gove was brought in to calm nerves and sharpen up delivery, at the top of his
reading list needs to be the report written by the No Place Left Behind
commission set up by the Create Streets Foundation.
The
commission was set up in August 2020 to develop policy and practice to enable
the regeneration of ‘left behind’ towns and cities and is chaired by former
head of policy at housing charity Shelter Toby Lloyd.
The commission’s
report, published in September found that England has been ‘scarred by
geographic imbalances’ when it comes to development and that this is a legacy
of poor post-war planning policies and centralised decision making.
Places,
thriving town and city centres, are important, as is making development ‘green’
wherever possible and empowering local authorities and communities to make key
decisions about how their area is regenerated.
Among
the recommendations made by the commission are repurposing roads away from
traffic use and reducing speed limits to 20mph to make streets safer, reviving
town centres as places where people work, shop and live and kickstarting
decarbonisation by retrofitting insulation to homes across the country [4].
The
appointment of Michael Gove, a politician who might be said to be ‘a man in a
hurry’, usually to further his ambitions, matters massively to a city like
Stoke-on-Trent and to the wider county of Staffordshire. It is vital that he
understands that ‘levelling up’ isn’t just another slogan or a vague concept to
be adapted to meet the needs of any given moment; it is something that will
impact on the life chances of millions of people, many of them not yet born.
Council
leader Abi Brown has called Stoke-on-Trent the ‘litmus test’ for whether
‘levelling up’ can be delivered. In a progress report on the ‘Powering Up
Stoke’ regeneration drive she cites improvements in delivering more housing,
creating employment opportunities and, slowly, regenerating the city’s
transport infrastructure [5].
The
regeneration of the city after years of decline is a noble project, how it is
being delivered shows all the flaws that mean ‘levelling up’ will fall flat on
its face if something doesn’t change.
The
focus is tightly on economic growth as the only valid marker of success, when,
as the No Place Left Behind commission show, it must be about much more than
that. It must be about changing the way we think about where we live and how we
travel; where we work and how we make the important decisions about these
matters.
We can
see the implications of not doing so in the way green spaces like Keele Golf
Course and Berryhill Fields are under threat of development, while the centres
of the six towns crumble through neglect. In a futuristic town centre being
planned for Hanley, with written into the blueprint an outdated belief that
most people will get to it using a private motor car.
What
we need is a New Deal for the twenty-first century, one that recognizes the
need to regenerate areas economically; but is mature enough to know the process
can’t stop there. New life must be brought into the moribund and often
paternalistic political process, setting communities free to decide for
themselves on major issues and at the heart of it all must be a recognition of
our environmental responsibilities.
Sadly, nothing about the way Michael Gove, a busy man with ambitions to rise much further that being Secretary of State, even for a new minted ministry, has gone about his job suggests he can or understands the need to deliver those things.
[1]https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-levelling-up-housing-and-communities
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/gove-sees-levelling-up-in-action-across-the-north-east
[5] https://www.stoke.gov.uk/info/20012/business/405/powering_up_stoke-on-trent
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