As a phrase, “Levelling Up” risks being nebulous to the point of cloudy confusion. Every one and every place has their strong views on what rebalancing the national economy could and should look like, but without a taut and coherent place-policy, levelling up is like candy floss without the stick.
Localis’s 2021 Levelling Up workstream will decode the levelling up language and narrative to investigate the best routes to place prosperity and pandemic recovery:
Quite simply the national lockdown occasioned by the COVID-19 influence pandemic has brought economic life in this country to a standstill with a speed, spread and in all-encompassing manner that has outstripped even the great depression, both world wars, the 1974 three-day week or in more recent memory the 2008 financial crisis. But local areas, […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has proven the resilience and strength of England’s local government in keeping our communities safe. Equally, the ongoing socio-economic consequences demonstrate the need for strong place-based leadership and governance at the right level to help our recovery. This is especially true for Oxford, one of our country’s leading cities and one that […]
Writing in 1912, Hilaire Belloc warned: “change your hearts or you will lose your inns and you will deserve to have lost them”. Should such a calamity unfold, Belloc added that “you will have lost the last of England”. The Power of Pubs looks at the attempts made in 2020 by the UK government to […]
In this essay collection Localis sets, in addition to its own analysis, twenty separate views from a wide range of individual experts and sector leading organisations asking how we might use the primacy of place to direct a return to housing growth, and with it, renewal as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. In our […]
To date, the industrial strategy has largely been led by Whitehall. Announcements of green papers, white papers and sector deals have punctuated a shift in tone and approach towards the economy by central government. The state is no longer an automatic impediment to growth but a partner and enabler. Yet a national approach can only […]
This report makes the case for a locally-led industrial strategy. It argues that to turn a national industrial strategy into local economic renewal, places and their leaders should be provided the space and powers by government to lead from the front. In short places should take control of their local industrial strategy, with greater influence over the […]