10 Thursday February 3 2022 | the times
News
Michael Gove insisted he had the
money to pay for levelling up, setting
out 12 “missions” to make people
happier and help them to live longer.
Ministers aim to reduce the gap in life
expectancy between the richest and
poorest, pushing up overall healthy life
expectancy by five years by 2035.
The government will also promise by
2030 to end illiteracy and innumeracy
in children leaving primary school and
has set a target of 90 per cent of all
children meeting national standards in
maths and English.
There will be a promise to tackle seri-
ous violence and neighbourhood crime
in all parts of the country, with resour-
ces focused on the worst-hit areas.
Ministers will pledge to increase
spending on research and development
outside London and the southeast of
England by at least 40 per cent. In three
years more than half of all government
research and development spending
will be outside the region.
Oxford, Cambridge and London will
have their share of science funding cut.
Ministers want most research funds to
go outside the southeast.
Billions of pounds more of public
money will be poured into universities
and businesses outside the “golden
triangle” in an effort to kick-start inno-
vation and emulate Silicon Valley in
areas such as the West Midlands.
However, some scientists are con-
cerned that diverting money from
centres of excellence risks harming
research into vital areas such as curing
disease.
Despite reports of rows with Rishi
Sunak’s Treasury about the amount of
money available to support the pledges,
Gove, the levelling-up secretary,
claimed he had the funding he “needs”.
He told the BBC: “What we’re doing is
we’re taking numbers from a Treasury
spreadsheet and transforming it into
real change in people’s lives.
“The chancellor, in the spending re-
view, outlined significant increases in
public spending in a range of areas — in
transport, in support for local govern-
ment, in education, and health and
social care. That was money put in, if
you like, in departmental bank ac-
counts, and now we are spending that
money and it’s being allocated to the
mayors and other local leaders who are
best placed to drive change in their own
communities.”
Pressed on whether he had got all the
money he wanted, Gove replied: “Well,
in this life we never get everything we
want, but, in the words of Mick Jagger,
you might not always get what you
want, but sometimes you get what you
need.”
Publication of the white paper was
delayed, in part because of conflicts
with the Treasury. Some targets are
limited in scope, only committing the
government to reductions or increases
without more specific goals.
Other targets set for 2030 include
pay rising in every area of the UK; na-
tionwide 4G and 5G coverage for most
of the country; and every part of Eng-
land having a devolution deal with
powers akin to the London mayoralty,
as revealed by The Times last year.
Progress will be measured against pub-
licly available data, with the govern-
ment publishing an annual report on
progress.
Advice and scrutiny will be provided
by a levelling-up advisory council,
whose inaugural members will include
Professor Sir Paul Collier, an economist
at Oxford University.
The government said the proposals
represented a long-term plan to trans-
form the UK. Gove said that Brexit had
been a wake-up call to “change the eco-
nomic model of this country”.
A regional Labour politician gave
cautious backing to the white paper.Tracy Brabin, the mayor of West York-
shire, said there was a lot to be pleased
about in Gove’s “love letter to levelling
up”. She said the paper had “lots of
ambition, lots of hope”, although she
questioned whether there was enough
money behind it.
Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up
secretary, was more critical, saying the
country “deserves far more ambition
than this”. She said the plans amounted
to “new government structures, re-
cycled pots of money and a small re-
fund on the money this government
have taken from us”.
The absence of detail on levelling up
is concerning, leading article, page 29Gove puts his faith
in money to change
lives for the better
Henry Zeffman
Chief Political Correspondent
Oliver Wright Policy Editor
Analysis
M
ichael Gove and Mick
Jagger are not an
obvious pair, but it
was the Rolling
Stones frontman the
cabinet minister channelled
yesterday when trying to play
down reports of a rift with Rishi
Sunak (Henry Zeffman writes).
Asked whether he had clashed
with the chancellor because he
wanted more money to bolster the
levelling up agenda, Gove replied:
“Well, in this life we never get
everything we want, but, in the
words of Mick Jagger, you might
not always get what you want, but
sometimes you get what you need.”
Whatever satisfaction Gove
might get from the release of his
long-delayed white paper, it is
surely true that he would have
welcomed the opportunity to
unveil a headline-grabbing piece of
expenditure for levelling up.
The picture is more nuanced.
Sunak can argue with some
justification that he gave Gove
significant funding in October’s
spending review. Alongside the£4.8 billion levelling up fund,
Sunak gave Gove’s Department for
Levelling Up, Housing and
Communities a £2.6 billion budget
increase over the parliament,
higher than the average increase
in departmental spending.
It was probably more than
Robert Jenrick, Gove’s predecessor
and a much newer entrant to the
world of Whitehall power politics,
would have got had he remained in
charge of the more prosaically
named Ministry of Housing,
Communities and Local
Government.
Moreover, some of the spending
commitments touted in the white
paper were made before, or
separately, to the levelling up
drive, such as a £5 billion “project
gigabit” to improve broadband
coverage, £5.7 billion to improve
transport in eight city regions and
£3.8 billion towards skills.
The central levelling up fund is
complemented, too, by a
£2.4 billion towns fund and an
£830 million future high streets
fund — although analysis by The
Guardian suggests that money
allocated under these programmes
has gone mostly to some of
England’s wealthiest areas.
The reality, though, is that the
dozen missions that sit at the heart
of Gove’s 300-page document will
require more than just a little
more munificence from Sunak if
they are to be successful.
They range across almost every
aspect of government: cutting
crime, increasing employment,
better broadband, ending illiteracy
and innumeracy and making
people happier are vast,
cross-cutting ambitions.
The targets Gove is writing into
law, committing the government to
achieving them by 2030, are much
bigger than any dispute with the
Treasury. They are at the core of
the question of whether the
Conservatives can win a fifth
successive general election.
If people are not becoming
happier, or better paid, or sending
their children to better schools
before long, then it will be Sir Keir
Starmer in Downing Street who
will be judged against Gove’s
targets in 2030.Internet access
Proportion of the population who
have access to full-fibre
broadband by country
Urban Rural
Northern IrelandEnglandWalesUKScotland85%
36%27%
25%29%
24%28%
24%30%
17%Source: Ofcom Connected Nations ReportLife expectancy target ‘fails
to grasp scale of problem’
Kat Lay Health EditorThe government’s levelling-up agenda
will lead to “life expectancies rising”,
the prime minister said yesterday.
On healthy life expectancy, the new
plan comes with a specific commitment
that by 2030 the gap between local
areas where it is highest and lowest will
have narrowed. And by 2035 healthy
life expectancy will rise by five years,
the government has pledged. The tar-
get is ambitious and will need trends to
go into reverse in many parts of the UK.
Healthy life expectancy at birth has
decreased in Britain in recent years, for
women it fell from 63.7 to 63.3 years
from 2014-16 to 2017-19, according to
the latest analysis from the Office for
National Statistics, while it remained
steady for men at 62.9 years.
The overall figures mask severe dif-
ferences between areas. Men in Black-
pool can expect 9.2 years of good health
less than the UK average, while men in
Rutland can expect 8.6 years more. For
women, Blackpool is again the area
with the lowest healthy life expectancy,
eight years below average, while
women on the Orkney Islands can ex-
pect 11.7 years more in good health than
the average.
Experts agree that a renewed focus
on this issue is sensible. Good health isof value to the individual, but also helps
people to get a job and stay in work. But
Jo Bibby, director of health at the
Health Foundation, said the govern-
ment may have “failed to grasp” the
immensity of the challenge.
The factors involved go well beyond
the NHS — experts say people’s health
has been hit by austerity policies since
2010 that have seen welfare support de-
crease and insecure employment rise.
Bibby said the government needed to
act on areas including “secure jobs,
good pay, decent housing and high-
quality education”, adding: “Insuffi-
cient funding means that, as it stands,
the levelling-up agenda is unlikely to
lead to significant improvements in
these areas.” While overall life expect-
ancies have risen over recent decades,
that trend had started to reverse in
many parts of the north of England
even before the pandemic.
Professor Sir Michael Marmot, an
adviser to the World Health Organisa-
tion and director of the Institute of
Health Equity, said: “The £5 billion to
£6 billion allocated to levelling up is
tiny given the historic scale of the prob-
lem.” The reliance of Michael Gove, the
levelling-up secretary, on the money
trickling down to those in need was
“simply inappropriate by an order of
magnitude”.News Politics
Michael Gove seems
to be seeking divine
guidance before an
interview yesterday
in Westminster