Most Britons “haven’t seen much fruit” from levelling up and regard it with a “so what?” attitude, Andy Haldane admitted on Monday.
The chair of the levelling up advisory council, and author of the levelling up white paper, said ministers had a “mixed scorecard” to date on their aim to reduce regional inequality and boost opportunities across the country.
Speaking at the Institute for Government on Monday, he said: “If you ask most people across the UK right now, have you felt the fruits of having been levelled up, they’d say ‘no’, or ‘not really’, or perhaps most optimistically ‘not yet’.”
There may be “one or two places” that have received targeted funding which have felt some benefit from the levelling up policy, “but for the vast majority of people in terms of outcomes, so far it’s a ‘so what?’,” he said.
