IPPR Progressive Review最新文献

In recent years, both of the UK's largest political parties have sought to orientate their policy offering around missions. Both have made explicit commitments to tackle the country's geographic health inequalities. In their starkest form, health inequalities – whether based on race, class, gender, geography and so on – will mean that those at the wrong end have, on average, fewer years to live and worse health when alive. In comparison to London and the South East, a baby born in the North East will live three years fewer, while the north of England as a whole has 144 extra infant deaths a year.1

It is not just that these injustices are self-evident; it is also that the economic consequences that flow from them matter. At a time of labour shortages, sluggish economic performance and underperforming cities, economic inactivity due to ill health is much higher in the north than in the South East.2 It is unsurprising but welcome that both main parties have developed ambitious missions to tackle these inequalities as part of their headline domestic policies of ‘levelling up’ and ‘mission-driven government’.

And yet, since 2010 when the Marmot review laid bare the millions of years of life lost to health inequalities, very little has changed.3 Life expectancy has stalled in England overall, it has decreased in deprived parts of the country and the gap continues to grow.4 What is missing is not ambitious political rhetoric or ambitious government objectives; the two main parties have almost identical missions on healthy life expectancy. Nor is there an absence of understanding about the causes; both parties acknowledge the wider determinants of health that underpin growing spatial health inequalities.5 The problem, we argue, is the failure to identify mechanisms of change.

Over the past five years, the government has put health at the heart of its levelling-up rhetoric, defining levelling up as “people everywhere living longer and more fulfilling lives, and benefitting from sustained rises in living standards and well-being”.6 The focus on longer lives and wellbeing is reflected in the levelling-up missions. Mission 7 targets improvements in healthy life expectancy and mission 8 targets people's self-reported wellbeing.7 Both also entail a commitment to reduce the geographic disparities of their respective metrics.

The government has legally bound itself to these missions, enshrining them in Part 1, Section 1 of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, which requires the government to report each year on levelling-up progress.8 Unless the Act is repealed, these same requirements will bind future governments too.

There are, however, concerns with the way these missions are formulated. While there are clear targets for improving outcomes overall, such as the target for a five-year increase in healthy life expectancy by 2030, there are no specifics on the reduction in health inequalities. All that is required is for th

The past decade has witnessed an English ‘devolution revolution’ in which a series of new combined authorities and associated mayors have been rolled out across England. By May 2024, 60 per cent of England will be governed by a democratically elected mayoral combined authority (MCA). The ethos of English devolution is to transfer power and resources from the centre of government to the regions, to have decision-making closer to communities and to better understand needs and opportunities on the ground. In terms of culture, devolution affords agency to advocacy, nationally and internationally, to connect audiences, publics, partners and investors to a single coherent message about the offer of a place and its people.

But as devolution has evolved across England, tensions have begun to emerge between central government's one-size-fits-all approach to culture and the changing needs of communities in the regions. Devolution has created the need for a more relationship-based approach to culture delivery at a local level, one that is less top down and more co-created closer to communities. In this new world, arm's-length bodies (ALBs) have become key delivery mechanisms for recognising and responding to regional priorities and planning. Through aligned funding and support to deliver shared objectives in new place-based partnerships, their rewiring of the relationship between the centre of government and the regions is key to the success of cultural devolution.

The 2024 IPPR North State of the North report “recommends further regional empowerment and prioritising regional rebalancing” in policies, including culture. It argues that “clear promises and tangible change for people's communities would reap political reward … local and regional leadership should be strengthened through broader and deeper devolution, improving outcomes and trust”.3 By better investing and connecting culture spend closer to communities, we can more effectively ensure that culture becomes a delivery mechanism for meeting other targets in areas like education and skills, health and wellbeing, pride in place and civic identity. This approach is also popular with voters. As the RSA states, “the public want local leaders to have more control over both spending and decisions over policy, including schools, transport … skills, and culture”.4

The aim of devolving culture is to enhance delivery and reach, adding value and expanding access to put local people and places at the heart of decision-making. Devolved mayoral authorities can co-create a local cultural framework with communities and cross-sector stakeholders to enhance pride and wellbeing, develop the local visitor economy, and build skills and investment to increase access and opportunities for local young people to live and work in the area. This integrated approach to service delivery is key to driving inward investment: through harnessing culture and the creative industries to catalyse growth, dev

Evidence from GM and the LCR demonstrates that policy activity was a central mechanism by which the metro-mayors, working with and through their combined authorities, contributed to evolving the office and ensuring it became, if not embedded, then more mature. Transport is the policy field where the metro-mayors were directly accorded their principal ‘hard’ power and here they sought to make maximum impact with a visible public issue. Transport afforded the metro-mayors the opportunity to demonstrate to the public the worth of their office – in Burnham's case by returning the buses to greater public control and extending the metro system, and in Rotheram's case by enhancing what was already a well-regarded public transport system. While transport policy showed the possibilities of the metro-mayors, it also illustrated the constraints on their powers. On the central question of the High Speed 2 (HS2) rail project and its connection to Liverpool and an underground station at Piccadilly to accommodate it, the crucial actors in the policy network – the Treasury, the Department for Transport and the prime minister – used their power to frustrate. Both metro-mayors protested about their lack of influence over a range of transport issues, such as the failures of the major train companies to run efficient or sufficient services and the inadequacy of the policies of the Ministry of Transport.

The main justification for the MCAs was to enhance regional economic development. In their economic policy, the metro-mayors were prone towards boosterism and ‘grand projets’ but, in the case of Labour metro-mayors, a distinct contribution lies in marrying economic policy to social objectives under the banner of inclusive growth. This has taken shape through initiatives such as the Good Employment Charter in GM and its equivalent, the Fair Employment Charter, in the LCR, and schemes such as Households into Work (the LCR) and Working Well (GM), which were devolved to the MCAs to assist ‘hard to reach’ families back into the labour market. It seems most likely that, in the next stage of the devolution journey, metro-mayors will be able to extend their control over skills policy as a place-based strategy, building on the existing power to manage the adult education budget to improve productivity and reduce reliance on imported labour – both central objectives of government policy.

Both Rotheram and Burnham self-styled themselves as ‘place-based’ leaders despite the scepticism of local council leaders who, in our interviews, asserted that their concern has always been with place. Yet their party and ideological roots were clear through their stance on rough sleeping and planning and regulation in wider policy areas. The rough-sleeping initiative is a policy area where neither metro-mayors nor the MCAs enjoy formal powers. Yet, through informal generative powers7 such as the power to convene and to focus on issues, both metro-mayors have displayed their abi

By the beginning of 2024, devolution had taken the form of two mayoral combined authorities, albeit created under legislation passed by Labour in 2009 (the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009), and these have reshaped the governance of the North East. The most recent North East Mayoral Combined Authority restored the arrangements between the seven local authorities in the region, following the interim North of Tyne Combined Authority comprising only of Newcastle, Northumberland and North Tyneside. The route to this outcome was long and winding, however, and their powers and resources highly constrained following negotiated settlements with national government. Paradoxically, given Labour's long association with devolution, these mayoralties had been created by a Conservative government and in 2024 neither incumbent represents Labour. The unfolding of devolution in North East since 2016 has been embroiled with broader claims about “political realignment”, the “collapse of the Red Wall”, “levelling up” and the pros and cons of the mayoral model of government.8 Much of the impetus for devolution after 2016 came from a Conservative desire to make political inroads into Labour heartlands.

A Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) was established in 2016 under the provisions of the 2009 Act to cover 700,000 people in five unitary authorities: Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and Stockton-on-Tees. The creation of a separate combined authority for Teesside spoke to tensions in the 2004 devolution proposals, which some saw as leading to a region dominated by Newcastle, and the need to avoid reinstating the North East regional institutional structures from the New Labour era, which the coalition government abolished at the outset of austerity from 2010. The Conservative government pushed strongly for the arrangement as a means to local power in a Labour heartland. The first mayoral election took place in 2017. A turnout of 21.3 per cent saw the Conservative candidate, Ben Houchen, win 51 per cent of the vote. Houchen was re-elected in 2021, on an increased turnout of 34 per cent, and with 73 per cent of the vote. Houchen's victory was widely interpreted as signalling the broader ‘collapse of the Red Wall’ and the realignment of the electorate.

Houchen pursued an avowedly Johnsonian ‘levelling up’ agenda based on an interventionist state and manifesting national agendas locally by channelling post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ ambitions and creating a ‘freeport’ on the banks of the Tees. While this was sold as a radical departure in regional policy, in fact it mimics a longstanding approach to physical regeneration and the attraction of foreign direct investment. Houchen eschewed any pretence of building a broad coalition of support for his plans, reducing the likelihood of them surviving his loss of office. Moreover, the Teesside story has become mired in controversy about the accountability and

In a recent Guardian interview, the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, acknowledged that the Labour party historically had been divided between devolutionists and centralisers, “but now the whole of the shadow cabinet supports the devolution agenda”.1 Streeting went on to say that the purpose of a Labour government was to “win power to give it away”. This is a curious perspective. It surely matters to whom that power is given away. If Labour governments are elected, only to give power away to their political opponents – Conservatives, separatist parties and others – is localism always better for the people whom Labour is meant to serve?

The mission of a Labour government is to create a more equal society and to improve the condition of the working class. This article argues that the devolution agenda could operate contrary to those key objectives by empowering forces that work against the common good and by inhibiting the ability of a Labour government to pass transformative and redistributive national policy.

Historically, as Streeting acknowledged, the Labour party contained within it many sceptics of policy decentralisation. The ability of a House Commons majority to deliver radical, transformative change across the whole of the UK was one of the bedrock constitutional objectives of working-class reformers for decades. The British constitution offers the opportunity, rarely matched anywhere in the world, for a democratic socialist party to govern as a majority and to use that power to transform society with few legal impediments.2 Should a government wish to nationalise industry, the banks or hospitals, a simple majority in the lower chamber of parliament should suffice.

In recent years, Labour has taken a broadly uncritical approach to devolution, which sees local as always better, but this is because decentralisation has been targeted to Labour-friendly areas like London, Wales and large cities. Given the counter-cyclical nature of local and national politics, Labour in power in Westminster would likely correspond with huge Labour losses in local government. And, then, what would Labour's response be if, as a result of further devolution, regional governments start to charge residents for using NHS services? Or, very likely, what would happen when ‘local people’ refuse to deliver badly needed housing, to obey infrastructure targets or to accept immigrants and asylum seekers into their areas?

It is odd that Labour would become the champion for an arrangement that would fragment the welfare state. Yes, devolution creates space for policy experimentation but, as we see in other decentralised systems, it does so at the expense of universalism. Localism does not always serve the greater good of the country. Local control can be a more elite form of control. When devolved units are given more power, including to opt out of the welfare state and from their wider obligations to their fellow citizens, peo

During her visit to the US in May, Reeves set out her support of Biden and Sullivan's ‘new Washington consensus’ – echoing their focus on creating good, local jobs through the rebuilding of strategic industrial and technological capacity in the domestic economy. For Reeves and Labour, it offers a convenient framework into which their prior commitment to spend £28 billion annually on ‘net zero’ (now by the end of the next parliament) might practically fit. And just like Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science investment in the US heartlands, it also allows Labour to target parts of the north of England and the Midlands that Labour needs to win back in the next general election.

Pittsburgh is already widely studied in how to turn around the fortunes of a declining industrial city. Central to this has been the role of the city's two main universities: Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. One specific example of this can be seen at the Mill 19⁹ development in the former steel neighbourhood of Hazlewood Green. Originally built in 1943 to produce arms for the second world war, today it houses Carnegie Mellon's advanced robotics facility and is financed partly by the US defence department and by CHIPS and Science Act investment.

It's perhaps even more surprising given that they still claim to be committed to the levelling-up agenda initiated by former prime minister, Boris Johnson. Indeed, this was also a key element of his Atlantic Charter¹⁶ agreed with Biden: “our commitment to spur economic regeneration and build back better in a way that benefits all communities that have experienced the pain of economic change and advances equality for all – not just in cities, but also small towns and post-industrial areas”.

However, the commitment to spending £28 billion a year on net zero, as well as the pledge to match current government commitments on science investment (£20 billion annually), suggests that there is rather more potential to follow the US model than they might let on. Furthermore, they will also recognise that many elements of ‘Bidenomics’ rest not just on government spending today, but also on tax incentives and credits that get cashed in only as new factories are built and jobs created. This means that it is possible – should they wish – to put together a package of similar place-based investment and incentives that can transform regional and national economic performance, but still do so while meeting fiscal rules and avoiding accusations of high rates of borrowing and spending.

The major long-run economic challenge facing the UK is slow productivity growth. In 2023, the UK economy is about a quarter smaller than it would have been if output per hour had grown at the same rate after the global financial crisis as it had in the previous three decades. This stagnation of productivity has led to a flatlining of real wages and living standards.1

In this article, we consider the role of a modern industrial strategy – coordinating a range of ‘industrial policies’ – in shaping such an approach. How can the UK, an open and service-based economy with a small domestic market (relative to the US, the EU, and China) but with significant strengths in areas of high-value manufacturing and clean-tech innovation, design and implement an industrial strategy that can generate much-needed productivity growth, boost resilience and deliver against its ambitious net zero targets?

Delivering net zero requires significant increases in investment and innovation across infrastructure, transport and urban systems this decade. Investment needs are estimated to rise to an additional £50 billion per annum by 2030 – much of which is expected to come from the private sector.2 Improving the UK's productivity performance also requires increased investment in innovation, infrastructure and skills, with a key role for business investment.3 On aggregate, business investment in the UK is around 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with over 12 per cent on average across France, Germany and the US – and the UK has performed poorly versus these comparators and a broader set of advanced economies for some time.

Net zero investments are attractive because in addition to addressing the climate crisis, they will improve energy security (by reducing reliance on imported fossil fuels with volatile prices) and generate a variety of other economic and health-related co-benefits (for example, through improved resource efficiency, opportunities for innovators serving new markets, and cleaner air). Globally, there is no route towards long-run growth without addressing the climate crisis – which unabated will have devastating consequences for people's lives and livelihoods.4 Indeed, the net zero transition is “the growth opportunity of the 21st century”.5 There are reasons to be optimistic. Socioeconomic tipping points – where new clean solutions consistently out-compete incumbents – have already been achieved in electricity, and the evidence suggests that these can soon be achieved across a broader range of clean technologies with increased investment in research, skills, development and deployment.6

Industrial policy encompasses interventions that seek to change the structure of the economy in order to achieve a key, typically growth-related, goal.7 Such interventions span a range of policy instruments (including subsidies, regulation, public investment, innovation support and skills programmes) that create incentives for busi