Levelling up will cost more than the £1.7tn it took to reunify German, a think-tank has said.
Centre for Cities has said that the government’s various schemes were a “drop in the ocean” compared with the scale of investment actually required.
Paul Swinney, policy director at the group, said: “At the moment we are in the rounds of a couple of small pots of funding and some nice warm words about some places and free ports.”
A white paper is expected to include more levelling-up policies, but experts have been underwhelmed by what they describe as a lack of coherence, urgency or ambition in the prime minister’s announcements so far.
