Labour to ditch Gove's levelling up targets in government

Yesterday Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up secretary, announced that Labour will replace her counterpart’s 12 “missions” which he announced last year.

They will instead be replaced with an independent advisory council, made up of regions of the UK, to monitor a Labour government’s progress based on making more connected, resilient, sustainable communities with a focus on wellbeing.

Speaking at the Institute for Government (IfG) Ms Nandy promised that Labour will “succeed where successive governments have failed, in various ways, to varying degrees, for a century”.

“Every major challenge this country faces comes back to one thing: we have written off the talent, potential and assets of most of our people in almost every part of Britain. This is not just a tragedy, it’s a social crime,” she said.

Labour, along with think tanks such as the IfG and IPPR, were a mix of unambitious, unachievable and vague, and that any measures for the project of rebuilding communities must be “clearly measurable and achievable”.

“Who can argue with the levelling up missions? But that is precisely why they offer so little,” said Ms Nandy.

“Longer healthier, happier lives, blighted by less crime and supported by good public services are not an aspiration for government, but a right that any government worth its salt should strive to realise.

“Instead the Tories have taken their failure to deliver the most basic public services, taken their ideologically driven crusade to run down our key institutions, and twisted it into a perverse plan to keep shifting the goalposts on their record of delivery.

“We are calling time on this. We say if you can’t deliver it, don’t write it down. So we will replace the current levelling up missions because, apart from anything else, it’s fundamentally dishonest to introduce measures of success without definition, clarity or even the faintest idea of how you meet them.”

Ms Nandy said that Labour is already getting to work on its “Take Back Control Bill” so that it is “ready to go”.

The legislation would be a centrepiece of the first King’s Speech of a Labour government to “flip the presumption of power” from Westminster to local communities.