OnLondon

In his Introduction to the Conservative Party’s 2019 general election manifesto Boris Johnson said his government had already mapped out a programme to “level up, spreading opportunity across the whole United Kingdom”. The document said this meant “not just investing in our great towns and cities, as well as our rural and coastal areas, but giving them far more control of how that investment is made”. It continued: “In the 21st century, we need to get away from the idea that ‘Whitehall knows best’ and that all growth must inevitably start in London.”

Many would agree with those manifesto objectives, including plenty in London who recognise that it is unhealthy for the UK economy to be so heavily dependent on that of its capital city – London generates nearly a quarter of the nation’s economic output and around one third of its taxes – while other big cities lag far behind, and who would like to see far greater devolution to regional and local government across the nation.

And yet much of what the Johnson government has done in the name of “levelling up” seems to have nakedly electoral goals, concerned less with enabling cities and regions outside of London to enjoy greater autonomy and control over their own affairs than with making a public performance of depriving London of resources and pulling rank over the London Mayor to impose its own priorities on the capital, most notably in the key areas of transport and strategic planning.

This is damaging not only to London but also, precisely because the rest of the UK is so reliant on its capital city, to everywhere else – you will not “level up” the country by levelling London down. At the same time, serious progress towards the goal of closing the economic productivity gap between London and most of the rest of the country – one pursued with little success by successive national governments since the war – has yet to be made.

Just as the populist untruth that London and Londoners, many of whom struggle daily with poverty, prosper at the expense of fellow Britons goes largely unchallenged, the government’s policy discrimination against London and its top-down interventions in City Hall affairs go largely unreported.

On London is an exception to that failing and this page is dedicated to gathering all examples of anti-London policy into one place. As well as being compiled here in the Levelling Down Monitor, new examples will be reported separately on the website. Input to the project comes from a wide range of London-focused individuals and organisations, to whom gratitude is extended. The most recent examples of levelling down London appear at the top of the list.

Last updated, 5 January 2024.

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December 2023 – The government gives TfL about half of the funding for capital spending it had been asking for for months. A letter from transport secretary Mark Harper to Sadiq Khan includes a lecture about his responsibilities.

December 2023 – Michael Gove again attacks Sadiq Khan’s housing record and announces “a review” of the Mayor’s London Plan. This is to be conducted by a panel of four experts. One of them is a non-London Tory councillor and another is a Gove appointee to his design panel. Their work is to be produced by mid-January – hand for the mayoral election campaign.

August 2023 – Institute for Fiscal Studies report on public spending allocations reveals that parts of London have done all right in recent years, but areas outside it – and in Tory-voting non-urban areas in general – have done better. On London coverage by Richard Brown.

July 2023 – Michael Gove comes to King’s Cross to make a big speech about housing in which he describes London as “a national asset beyond price”. This sudden recognition was in some ways welcome. However, it was largely motivated by a desire to attack London’s Labour Mayor, threaten to (yet again) override his devolved powers, and to send a message to the capital’s Tory voters that he won’t let their suburban quiet be disturbed by building work. And his big “Docklands 2.0” idea was very old news.

December 2022 – The Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill goes out for public consultation. Much of it is concerned with reforming the planning system and it includes the proposition that “this document will empower local leaders and give them more tools to level up their communities, build the beautiful homes that will give young people a secure path to home ownership, and boost pride in place”. It reiterates that “levelling up is the central objective of this government”.

December 2022 – Labour publishes proposals for renewing Britain’s democracy, which include a number of ideas for devolving powers to regions and local authorities. It mentions London nearly 100 times but largely recycles arguments that the capital has for too long received unfair favourable treatment.

November 2022 – The government’s anticipated Arts Council England funding cuts are announced. More than 60 small organisations in London were given grants for the first time, but some larger ones must deal with cuts and English National Opera was among the institutions deprived of grants entirely although, like some others, it was offered money to move out of the capital.

November 2022 – New Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s first budget, intended to limit the damage caused by the brief premiership of Truss, protects previous “levelling up” spending, though by not increasing it in line with inflation effectively cuts it.

October 2022 – Liz Truss resigns as Prime Minister after just 44 days in office and is succeeded by Rishi Sunak, who reappoints Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Levelling up.

September 2022 – Government figures show that by the end of March 2022 only £3 million of the £65 million awarded to London projects in the first round of Levelling Up Fund allocations the previous October had actually been distributed.

August 2022 – Tory leadership contest favourite Liz Truss tells a party membership hustings in Wembley that “We are not going to succeed as a nation without a successful London…and in order to level up the United Kingdom we need a successful London”.

August 2022 – It emerges that while campaigning to be Boris Johnson’s successor as Prime Minister, former Chancellor Rishi Sunak told Conservative Party members in Tunbridge Wells that he had “managed to start changing the funding formulas” in government so that “areas like this” rather than “deprived urban areas” are “getting the funding they deserve”. The ensuing furore proceeds on the basis that “deprived urban areas” is shorthand for the north of England.

August 2022 – Campaigning to be Boris Johnson’s successor as Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss hurriedly backtracks on a pledge to link public sector pay to local living costs, in order to save money, a move which would result in civil servants (and possibly others) outside of London earning less money than before – the very opposite of “levelling up”.

July 2022 – Transport secretary Grant Shapps provides Transport for London with what he calls “our final offer” on funding, saying it “supports £3.6 billion worth of [capital] projects” yet is “fair” to UK taxpayers. He later described TfL as repeatedly “coming out with the begging bowl“. Prior to the pandemic London’s economy, which depends heavily on its public transport networks, was providing up to £40 billion a year in taxes spent elsewhere in the country.

July 2022 – The prospectus for the second round of Levelling Up fund bids is published. Transport for London and the GLA together seek £29.5 million from the £2.1 billion to pay for improvements to Colindale and Leyton stations.

July 2022 – Boris Johnson resigns as Prime Minister following a series of scandals.

June 2022 – Government “levelling up” adviser Andy Haldane confirms during an event for Centre For London that government “re-tilting” against London is underway, though he also argues that “levelling up” is not an “anti-London agenda”.

June 2022 – Arts Council chief Paul Bristow tells London Assembly members that the capital’s culture sector will face government-decreed grant cuts in the autumn.

June 2022 – Senior London Tory MP Bob Neill says in the House of Commons that “levelling up” policies in other parts of the country should not be pursued “at the expense of London” and that doing so would “damage everybody in the long run”.

May 2022 – Home Secretary Priti Patel reportedly tells outgoing chief inspector of constabulary Tom Winsor that the review of the Met he is leading should consider cutting the powers of the London Mayor over the service.

May 2022 – An outstandingly ignorant Spectator comment piece proclaims that London doesn’t need a Mayor.

May 2022 – The Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill is introduced into Parliament, with the government claiming it will “put the foundations in place” for “ensuring all part of the country share equally in our nation’s success”. Exploring the detail, Centre for London director Nick Bowes raises concerns that provisions of the future law could “chip away at the Mayor’s powers on the London Plan and give the government “more sway”, eroding the powers of London government still further.

May 2022 – In a report about Covid’s impacts on the capital and government measures to address them, the Legatum Institute think tank says London continues to have the highest poverty rate in the country with one million Londoners coping with what it calls “deep poverty”, defined as more than 50% below the poverty line.

March 2022 – Home Secretary Priti Patel reportedly orders formal “probe” into Sadiq Khan’s handling of the departure of Cressida dick as Met commissioner.

March 2022 – An opinion poll finds that most Londoners are unmoved by the “levelling up” agenda.

March 2022 – The Arts Council, obeying instructions from culture secretary Nadine Dorries, confirms that £75 million will be cut from the capital’s arts funding over the next three years.

February 2022 – Michael Gove’s compendious levelling up white paper is finally published. Writing for On London, Richard Brown describes it as a mixture of the laudable, the aspirational and the spiteful and notes that the government’s intention to divert funding for housing away from London is not very helpful.

January 2022 – The Times reports that a survey conducted for think tank More In Common has found that “a majority of voters think London and the south have to become less wealthy and prosperous in order to achieve Boris Johnson’s flagship goal of levelling up Britain”.

January 2022 – Grant Shapps announces a further extension of the “funding settlement” for TfL imposed in June 2021 to 4 February 2022 (it had previously been extended to 17 December) while he thinks about proposals from Sadiq Khan for raising additional incomes of between £500 million and £1 billion. In a statement Shapps says: “The government is committed to supporting London and the transport network on which it depends, whilst balancing that with supporting the national transport network as a whole.” Don’t worry voters elsewhere, London won’t be given more than you think it deserves.

December 2021 – Responding to Sunday Times coverage of a letter to Rishi Sunak from London business leaders imploring him to fund Transport for London properly, a spokesperson for the Treasury says “any support” for TfL, whose latest short-term funding support arrangement was to expire on 11 December, would be provided “in a way that is fair to taxpayers across the country”. Government figures show that up to £40 billion of taxes raised in London are spent in other parts of the country every year.

November 2021 – Secretary of State for Levelling Up Michael Gove tells MPs that he intends to discuss with Homes England “how we can invest in proper urban regeneration projects outside London and the south east” and that it is “very much something that is in my mind” to redistribute funding to help local authorities in the North of England.

November 2021 – London receives only £1.9 million of the £203.3 million awarded by the government from its UK Community Renewal Fund, representing a 30 per cent success rate for London-based schemes bidding for the money compared with 36.8 per cent rate for England as a whole and a 42 per cent rate for bids from Wales.

October 2021 – In his budget speech on 27 of the month, Chancellor Sunak announces funding for a string of towns, cities and regions but mentions London only twice (three times if you count a passing reference to the British Museum). One mention praises the city for being named the “best place in the world for green finance” but the other is to “London-style transport settlements” for other city regions, the effect being to reinforce the populist untruth that London has been spoiled at the expense of the rest of the country. The budget and spending review “red book” detail contains further use of the “London-style” formula along with a repeated emphasis on what proportion of national spending on particular things was being deployed “outside London”, adding to the impression of the UK’s capital quite properly being cut down to size. There is a surreal sense of a separate quasi state of Outside London effectively being formed. London also receives the smallest amount of money from the first round of allocations from the Levelling Up Fund in the whole Britain – £65 million for six projects out of £1.7 billion, equating to four per cent. The only bit of real cheer for London’s economy is a business rates discount for the struggling hospitality sector.

October 2021 – In advance of the budget and spending review, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces £6.9 billion of transport funding for English cities. He laters admits that only a fraction of it hadn’t been announced before, but even so London is pointedly excluded.

October 2021 – At the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, Boris Johnson’s speech contains crowd-pleasing jibes about “north London dinner parties” and “lefty Islington lawyers” amid signals that his priority is maintaining his new-found support in the North of England. London Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Richard Burge complained that Johnson’s presents London “almost as a villain” in his “levelling up” narrative. Prior to the conference, the former Northern Powerhouse minister Jake Berry had written an article denouncing “southern privilege”. London Tory MPS at the conference were unhappy with Berry’s remarks, and AM Andrew Boff told a fringe event that problems his party is having with road schemes in the capital stem from Johnson’s transport adviser Andrew Gilligan.

July 2021 – PM’s transport adviser Andrew Gilligan blocks funding to London councils which, in his view have “prematurely” ended active travel schemes he wants kept going, having pressured the Mayor’s cycling and walking commissioner and Transport for London to take a more aggressive approach to “backsliding councils“.

July 2021 – Bids by seven groups of London colleges and businesses for government “skills accelerator” schemes are all unsuccessful. Eighteen bids from other parts of England receive all the money. London weighting for Higher Education is officially removed.

June 2021 – TfL emergency funding extended until 11 December with Grant Shapps stating that the arrangement is “fair to the national taxpayer” and that “the government will continue to review passenger demand” in the capital. The package requires more savings and sources of income, a review of TfL’s pension scheme and a programme for additional Tube automation. Shapps claims the deal combines helping the capital with “continuing to spend money on vital infrastructure projects to level up the national transport network outside of London”. A campaign led by London TravelWatch is later launched to prevent further bus service cuts.

March 2021 – Government publishes prospectus for its £4.8 billion Levelling Up Fund, announced in the November 2020 spending review. Analysis by Financial Times reveals clear bias towards Tory areas, some of them affluent, with only two London local authorities, Newham and Barking & Dagenham, eligible for a scheme that “could have been designed to exclude the capital,” as Richard Brown put it.

January 2021 – Education secretary Gavin Williamson decides to remove the “London weighting” element from the government’s Higher Education teaching grant, designed to recognise higher costs in the capital, saying “the levelling-up agenda is key to this government, and we think it is inconsistent with this to invest additional money in London providers.” A plea by Sadiq Khan to reconsider had no effect.

January 2021 – Government launches £3.6 billion Towns Fund, describing it as “part of the government’s plans to level up our regions. Robert Jenrick says it is designed to help “rebalance the national economy and level up our regions through the Northern Powerhouse, Midlands Engine and Oxford-Cambridge Arc. London town centres are excluded.

January 2021 – TfL submits its suggestions for becoming financially sustainable by 2023, as ordered to by Shapps. These include introducing a Greater London Boundary charge to be paid by non-London motorists entering the capital and retaining the share of Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) currently paid by Londoners but almost entirely spent elsewhere in the country. By the end of the month, Shapps appeared to publicly dismissed the idea for devolving VED and in February he publicly rubbished the boundary charge suggestion, which he would be able to block.

November 2020 – National Infrastructure Strategy is published, saying (page 15) “the government is investing in national transport and pivoting investment away from London, ensuring every region has great connectivity”.

October/November 2020 – A second short-term funding deal for TfL is provided, this time for £1 billion (including £95 million of further borrowing). Shapps instructs the Mayor to impose above inflation fare increases from January and to maintain the new, increased congestion charge levels and operating hours, along with the changes to concessionary fares for over-60s and under 18s, adding that if the Mayor and TfL wish to re-introduce the latter “they will meet these costs themselves”. He also orders TfL to “co-operate” with a “government-led review of driverless trains” and says a new “government-led working-level oversight group will be created”. TfL is further told to “produce a single, comprehensive management plan” for achieving “financial sustainability by 2023”) by January 2021.

September 2020 – City Hall releases documents showing that various attempts to secure government funding to repair Hammersmith Bridge had been rebuffed. Grant Shapps had previously claimed that “a failure of leadership” in London was to blame for the bridge’s poor condition.

September 2020 – Government officials argue that VAT refunds on purchases made in the UK by overseas visitors should be scrapped, because the scheme “does not benefit the whole of the UK equally” and is “largely centred on London“.

May 2020 – After Covid safety measures shatter TfL’s finances due to collapse of income from fares, government emergency funding of £1.6 billion is provided (including £505 million of additional borrowing), with a string of conditions attached, including the “temporary” suspension of free peak time travel for over-60s and all free travel for under-18s, instructions to increase the level and operating hours of the congestion charge and the implementation of “active travel” schemes and “detailed monitoring” of “operational performance” under government supervision. Two, “special representatives” of government are to attend all TfL board meetings with powers to “request additional information” and report to transport Secretary Grant Shapps. One of them is the Prime Minister’s special adviser on transport, his erstwhile media support Andrew Gilligan.

March 2020 – Communities secretary Robert Jenrick writes to London Mayor Sadiq Khan, criticising his “intend to publish” draft London Plan, the master blueprint for the capital’s spatial development, and directing him to make changes to key policies.

December 2019 – Conservative Party general election manifesto commits to “devolving power to people and places across the UK” with “full devolution across England…so that every part of our country has the power to shape its own destiny”. It adds: “We must get away from the idea that “all growth must inevitably start in London.” (The Labour manifesto also mentions “levelling up” and says a “national transformation fund unit” will be located in the north of England).

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