The UK's Conservative government has pledged to reverse the decline of the Midlands and North of England by 2030 under its “levelling up” vision for the country.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s long-awaited white paper on the plan explains how 20 deprived communities will benefit from their share of a £1.5 billion boost.
Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, the architect of the plan who will be responsible for driving through the changes, said it would end a “historic injustice".
Mr Johnson has vowed to increase research and development outside of the south-east of England by at least 40 per cent and improve rail services across the nation to bring them up to the standards enjoyed by Londoners.
The 400-page document says the 5G broadband network will be expanded to regions which are cut off. Schools with pupils whose performance is lagging behind will be offered help. The government will focus on raising children’s maths and literacy rates in a bid to improve their prospects.
There are also commitments to ensure hundreds of thousands more people get high-quality skills training every year, while gross disparities in healthy life expectancy between communities will be addressed.
Wolverhampton and Sheffield are the first of 20 areas in line to benefit from the cash, as Mr Johnson promises to break the link between “geography and destiny".
The White Paper sets out a series of 12 “missions” to be completed by the end of the decade. It will be enshrined in a Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill.
Mr Johnson’s promise to “level up” forgotten and deprived communities was a major theme of his 2019 general election campaign, which saw the Conservatives make huge gains in Labour's previously impregnable “red wall” heartlands.
Mr Gove again raised the prospect of the House of Lords moving out of London as an example of levelling up in an interview on Wednesday.
“We’ve got our friends in the House of Lords who will have to move out of their current building, at the moment, because of the renovation of the Palace of Westminster,” he told Times Radio.
“I think it’d be a really good thing if the House of Lords were to meet for at least part of the time in Glasgow or in York. I think it would do us all good.”
Mr Gove said people in deprived parts of the North and Midlands had been “overlooked and undervalued for years” by politicians.
“The Brexit referendum was a wake-up call,” he told Sky News.
“As well as a clear commandment to leave the European Union it was also a way of saying to people in SW1, people like me, ‘Look, it’s vital that you change the economic model of this country. It’s all very well if people are in London and the Southeast in financial services and others do well, we don’t begrudge that. But you’ve got to listen to us.' ”
However, he refused to take the blame on behalf of the Conservatives for the gap between the North and the better off South. Mr Gove insisted that mistakes had been made by “parties of both colours” and that “one of the things in the past is there have been sincere and committed attempts by politicians left and right to deal with this”.
“But nothing as comprehensive or as long-term as the plan that we’re setting out today,” he added.
Mr Gove said the plan would end a “historic injustice” and wind down a “cycle of decline”.
The opposition Labour party dismissed the plan as “more slogans” with “few new ideas".
The release of the document comes as the prime minister struggles to recover his political image after taking a battering from weeks of allegations of parties at Downing Street during lockdown. While Sue Gray’s report has been released — but not in its full form — Mr Johnson still has to await the outcome of a police investigation.
