Levelling up: what has the government spent – and where?

Much of the money allocated to ‘unite and level up’ the UK is unspent while some funding decisions have been criticised for impartiality

• Councils demand independent review of ‘arbitrary’ levelling up schemes

It was July 2021, Boris Johnson was still prime minister and enthusiasm for the government’s levelling up programme was palpable. It was “the mission of this government to unite and level up across the whole UK”, Johnson proclaimed in a wide-ranging speech on the topic.

Three years on, the enthusiasm of the then prime minister has been cast in a new light. The Department for Levelling Up has been “blinded by optimism in funding projects that were clearly anything but ‘shovel-ready’, at the expense of projects that could have made a real difference”, according to the Commons public accounts committee (PAC).