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The policies announced in today’s Queen’s Speech are designed to do three things. In reverse order of national importance these are: to provide some red meat for a weary and irritated party base; to chart a path to prosperity which might unite a kingdom which appears, after last week’s local elections, to be more divided […]
Since it was elected in 2019, the government has declared two key ambitions. Firstly, a more economically balanced country, underscored by the rebranding of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and the Levelling Up White Paper. And secondly, tackling climate change as the UK became the first major economy to set a legally […]
The white paper recognises that a “strong planning system is vital for levelling up communities”, yet it dedicates just over one page (page 227) out of nearly 300 to planning reform, with under ten references throughout the document to land-use or spatial planning. Even then, it simply repeats what we already know about the commitment […]
The Levelling Up White Paper filled a void by dint of its very existence, with the concept of levelling up having been loosely and amorphously defined on the fly ever since it played its role in the landslide Conservative victory of 2019. This analysis looks at the white paper from various angles, aiming to build […]
The pandemic has shown how good quality housing is central to public health. Access to private outdoor space, green public open space, natural light, and good insulation, are all things that have been vital to our mental and physical health. The frequent lockdowns during the last two years shone a light on the stark inequality […]
For many who are waiting to burst through the finishing line of 2021, news that the devo ball has been kicked into the longer grass of January 2022 brings a contented sigh of relief. We can catch up with all this big screen strategy stuff refreshed from the Christmas holidays. Hurray. However, on Monday there […]
In the well-reviewed recent popular anthropology book The Dawn of Everything, the authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, posit that the “ultimate question of human history is not our equal access to material resources… but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together”. This, they suggest, implies there should be something meaningful […]
All eyes are naturally turned to Glasgow and the local side of COP26, as the pressure to engineer some meaningful climate change pledges before the circus leaves town intensifies. To this end, it’s a good thing that the big guns of our own local government leadership have journeyed, in an eco-friendly manner by train of […]
It seems to be an inimitable rule of thumb that when writing about urban regeneration, Lord Heseltine will enter the frame of discussion at one point or another. It’s something akin to Godwin’s Law on internet arguments rapidly descending to mentions of a certain infamous dictator. Heseltine’s Law demands that within a certain span of […]
In the run-up to the Autumn Budget, the expectation was that expenditure tramlines had already been marked out by the earlier promises made to protect funding for defence, education and health service budgets. The view was that the purpose of all the advance press briefing, a litany on everything from pocket parks to more bus services in […]