Levelling-up report co-author says UK should be like Renaissance Florence
The government’s new levelling-up strategy should help Britain’s left-behind towns and cities emulate Renaissance Florence in cooking up the “secret sauce” of economic success, according to its co-author Andy Haldane.
The hefty report, published on Wednesday, was mocked by some for its frequent historical references – including to 15th-century Florence under the Medici – but Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist, is deadly serious.
Only by looking back at where and when economic development has really worked, he says, can we decide how to reverse what he calls 70 years of government failure in tackling regional inequality.
“The power of this is not that every part of the UK is going to look like Florence – I think that would be a stretch,” he said. But he added that the “raw ingredients” were the right ones. “It was the coming together of scientists and artists and business people, and financiers of course, as the Medicis themselves were. It was that crucible, of skills and of professions and of sectors, public, private, third, that generates a kind of spontaneous combustion.”
As the permanent secretary to the Cabinet Office and former chair of the industrial strategy council, Haldane was a key driving force behind the 350-page document. It set out for the first time what Boris Johnson’s election pledge to “level up” the UK means in terms of policies and targets.
Twelve wide-ranging new “missions” on narrowing regional gaps in everything from healthy life expectancy to crime rates will be put into legislation, giving the government a duty to pursue them. And a new wave of devolution will see every area in England given the option of a London-style metro mayor.
Haldane said the agenda had been made all the more
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