Failure to deliver true levelling up will only leave the region vulnerable to health emergencies - Jayne Dowle

What’s worse is that these inequalities show no sign of improvement. In fact, as Westminster seems to have lost interest in putting enough money where its mouth is when it comes to delivering on levelling up promises, it’s arguable that they are only getting worse.

The chasm between North and South, especially between deprived Northern areas and London and the South East, yawns wider than ever. Whilst the Budget may throw some money our way, it is never considered or targeted enough to enable long-standing change.

The facts from this new report are stark; the average Covid mortality rate during the first 13 months of the pandemic was 17 per cent higher in the North than elsewhere – an additional 29.4 more deaths per 100,000 people. Hospital pressure was 10 per cent greater in the North, with patients experiencing larger reductions in elective, inpatient, emergency inpatient and outpatient procedures.

Mental health also took a massive blow. Northern residents from minority ethnic backgrounds, women and younger people, had worse mental health scores than those in the rest of England during the pandemic.

Although this fact often seems to escape the clever minds in Cabinet, poor health and unemployment are sadly interlinked.

As a result of the pandemic, the North experienced a 20 per cent higher rise of levels in unemployment compared to the rest of England, and a bigger drop in wages. In some Northern areas, including urban parts of West and South Yorkshire, lockdowns lasted up to six weeks longer, with predictably disastrous results for local economies.

The legacy of boarded up shops and businesses will stand testament to firms which went bust during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath.

However, as the report’s co-author, Luke Munford, deputy lead for Economic Sustainability at NIHR ARC Greater Manchester, points out, the problem started way before this. When Covid hit, it hit hardest at those areas of the UK least equipped to cope.

Whilst the preventable loss of 2,500 lives - mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents and friends - is already tragic enough, what is sadder still is that the report will fall on the deaf ears of those with the power to have stopped this, and to stop it happening again. Because it surely will; pandemics, many global health experts predict, will become an accepted fact of modern life.

Even more chillingly, the rates of long Covid - which means individuals are left with long-term debilitating health problems that can leave them unable to work, reliant on benefits and suffering from myriad physical and psychological conditions - are a staggering 30 per cent higher in the North than in the rest of the country.

Northern ‘Red Wall’ MPs, Conservatives elected at the 2019 General Election to serve previously Labour-supporting seats in former industrial heartlands, must be so angry and frustrated.

Party loyalty is one thing, but knowing that constituents died because their lives were never taken seriously enough by central government is going to be a very unpalatable truth when it comes to the 2024 campaign trail.

It is indefensible that politicians should be allowed to gloss over what really happened during this most testing of times for the entire nation. What we have learned from the Lockdown Files, the leaked WhatsApp messages laying bare the sheer lack of moral duty and human concern for the rest of us whilst politicians and their aides partied and parlayed is insulting.

And nowhere is it more insulting than in the North.

Without proper investment in deprived and cut-off Northern communities, without an acceptance that, as the report says, “wealth means health”, we’ll have to continue to endure sticking plaster solutions when major surgery is what is required.