Is the Island levelling up or levelling down?

By Press Release Jan 29, 2023

Information giant, Bloomberg UK, introduced a Levelling Up score-card in May 2022, which tracks whether constituencies have been closing the gap on London since the 2019 election, using the government’s own criteria across 12 categories.

The Conservative’s Levelling Up agenda was introduced by Boris Johnson and has been continued by Rishi Sunak. It is supposed to improve jobs, pay and living standards across the country, and revitalise disadvantaged areas after many years of neglect. However, Bloomberg’s analysis shows that in many cases the economic gulf between rich and poor areas has widened, with only six per cent of constituencies seeing an overall improvement. Much of that improvement has been in the East of England, where one in three seats have improved since May 2022, but Bloomberg puts this down largely to the areas’ proximity to London.

In December, the score-card showed that the Isle of Wight’s position is worsening in 10 of the 12 categories. It was behind the average in 2019 but has been improving in just two areas – broadband coverage and life expectancy.

The Island was already behind in 2019 and has fallen even further behind in seven areas – salaries, civil service employment, foreign investment, total government spending, government spending on transport, productivity and well-being. We were ahead in 2019 but are now worsening in three categories – Universal Credit, home affordability and total crime.

The council’s cabinet member for levelling up, Cllr Julie-Jones Evans, said the data was both “depressing and worrying”; she added: “All we are asking for is a level playing field. The latest calculations in a report that the government itself commissioned last year show that the Island needs a minimum of an extra £10 million a year to get us onto that level playing field.

“These statistics compiled by Bloomberg are depressing and worrying. If we are slipping even further behind it is hard to see how we can ever catch up without sustained and carefully targeted funding.

“Whatever impact the government’s Levelling Up policies are having elsewhere, they are certainly not working here.”

Pictured: Rishi Sunak promoting the Levelling Up agenda in 2021