Last month the government finally announced how its replacement for EU regional development funding – the Shared Prosperity Fund – will be allocated across the country.
Globalisation, inequality, feeble productivity growth, earnings stagnation, the falling labour share of national income — the most important features of economic life. And one institution binds them together: the firm.
It is disappointing that the UK government has ‘taken back control’ only to stick to an arbitrary, poorly designed, out-of-date funding allocation mechanism.
The allocation of public spending is one the most direct levers for ‘levelling up’ health, wealth and well-being. But is policy aligned with the government’s stated aims?
The Levelling Up White Paper is just the latest of efforts to tackle regional inequalities. What does it tell us about this government’s approach? And how likely is it to succeed where others have failed?
"We’ll know we are on the way to levelling up when differences in health and life expectancy across the country start to drop. Sadly, that’s one measure of inequality that has clearly been moving in the wrong direction over the past decade." Paul Johnson writes for The Times on levelling up.
In this briefing note, we update and extend previous IFS analysis, to consider how employment, incomes, benefit claims and council tax payments have evolved over a longer period and have varied geographically, and draw out key implications for local government.
The COVID-19 crisis has affected every part of the country – and indeed many other countries. What sets this crisis apart is the many different ways that it is impacting families: while the virus itself is primarily a public health issue, the unprecedented responses it has necessitated mean that this is also very much an economic and a social crisis.
Council tax bands in Wales are based on property values in April 2003 – 17 years ago. That is more up to date than in England and Scotland, where they are based on values in April 1991 (almost 30 years ago!). But it is still enough time for the relative values of different properties to change significantly: for example, official estimates suggest that while average prices had doubled since 2003 across Wales as a whole by the end of 2019, those in Blaenau Gwent had risen 171% compared with just 77% in Wrexham.
