Committees

Government response to Business Committee Levelling-up report published

3 December 2021

The Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee has today published the Government’s response to the Committee’s Levelling up report  published on 22 July 2021, as part of the BEIS Committee’s post-pandemic economic growth ‘super-inquiry’).

[Please note: In the Government response - the BEIS Committee’s original report recommendations are in bold type, the Government response is in plain type.]

Chair's comments

Commenting on the Government’s response published today, Darren Jones, Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, said:

“Ministers still haven’t made enough progress on defining what levelling up will mean for people across the country. The Government must take the opportunity in the upcoming Levelling-Up White Paper to finally explain how people will experience a positive change in their lives and in their local communities. Failure to spell out how levelling-up will deliver meaningful change risks exposing the whole initiative as nothing more than a campaign slogan.”

Background – BEIS Committee report, Levelling up, 22nd July 2021

The BEIS Committee report (also see news item) said that a lack of clarity on what the Government means by ‘levelling up’ and how it translates into coherent and specific initiatives risked relegating the Government’s flagship agenda to an ‘everything and nothing policy’.

The report stated that a lack of definition on how Government is going to achieve levelling up, an absence of detail on how success will be measured, and confusion over who is leading on delivery raises concerns that the levelling-up agenda will fail to deliver meaningful change for people across the country.

The report made a series of recommendations to press the Government to establish clear levelling up priorities and to develop a set of metrics and regular reporting on progress. Recognising inequality in the capacity of local areas to bid for government funds, the report recommends the Government put in place effective mechanisms to ensure that it is not only the most well-resourced authorities who are successful in securing funding.

Further information

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