Levelling up is a fantastic phrase isn’t it? At the same time, meaning everything and nothing to all who hear it. How then, from a public policy perspective, will we determine its success? If we understand levelling up to mean tackling the social, health, economic and geographical inequalities that ravage the UK, this has been the challenge of many successive governments, albeit under different names.

This week’s Budget saw the chancellor attribute a number of policies to this government’s levelling up programme, claiming that the announcement ‘laid the foundations for … levelling up the country and spreading prosperity across every part of the UK.’