Everyone has had a chance so far to give their opinions about the chancellor's reset growth speech.  All that is, bar the bats and newts we can now safely stop worrying about.

For those on the Labour left like Clive Lewis, the fact the Plan for Change has had thrown inside its policy perimeter everything you'd expect and more from a kitchen sink surplus store, and is couched in language whose urgency sounds eerily of the disastrous Liz Truss experiment, the plan betokens panic. For others, the unrolling of a long list of strategic national and regional growth projects is a portent of the strength and variety of levers the Government has ready to hand.

 Within the wide ambit of the speech, we see the resurrection of the Ox-Cam-Arc.  Last seen flushed down the Marsham Street sewer system by levelling up secretary Michael Gove, this has been dried off into the UK answer to Silicon Glen.  The Oxford-to-Cambridge Corridor is the most obvious SW1 playbook answer to getting the nation back off its knees and sparking a revival of animal economic forces that potentially spreads out to all four corners of the land. 

Local examples and place-names abound in a roll-call of recovery. Some are new, many familiar for nigh on 6,000 words of a speech stitched from previous versions of industrial and infrastructure strategy.  The message is that we have the levers to resume control of our destiny and prosperity regionally and locally.  

However, although the speech is sprinkled with mayoral reference points and place-specific plans to reduce economic inequality, the Plan for Growth represents continuity in that it misses the target in ways uncannily reminiscent of Levelling Up.

Creating prosperity can only be built from a strong and stable foundations of a local state able to provide the bedrock of services around which everything else in the Plan for Growth can revolve.  This is true whether we are talking about AI data-centres, the third Heathrow Runway or connecting the Pennines.

Like levelling up, the plan for growth is forensically intelligent in identifying long-term weaknesses.  Like levelling up, there is a long-term plan, for which in fairness we should hold some doubt in reserve until publication of the Spending Review and 10-year Infrastructure Strategy.  But like levelling up, it is likely that HM Treasury will squash any attempts to bring fiscal devolution into play as a means of bridging the gap between aspiration and investment.  With municipal bonds seemingly being mothballed as an option, this leaves plans to bring into play up to £80bn of pooled Local Government Pension Scheme funds, as trailed by the chancellor in her first Mansion House speech, to do perhaps a bit too much of the heavy lifting to deliver the scale and pace of place-based impact investment the regional economies need.

Like levelling up, this plan should be made to work on a twin-track short and long-term basis.  Plant the seeds of recovery now and deliver bottom-up local economic growth whose success is visible and tangible, from early green shoots before maturing to root and branch.  And where possible, work to it that this plan puts a little something extra in payslips at the end of every month.

Recent polling undertaken by the Good Growth Foundation suggests that away from SW1, the metrics ordinary people see as proof that the economy is improving include better public services, thriving local areas and a lower cost of living. And within a two-to-four-year timeframe. 

In this context, the current devolution machinations, while of the keenest interest to a small minority, make little headway for a public that couldn't, in blunt terms, give a stuff about local political economy.  Needful as they might be to harness regional recovery, the new foundational and strategic authorities won't register much if at all by the next election.

Creating prosperity can only be built from a strong and stable foundations of a local state able to provide the bedrock of services around which everything else in the Plan for Growth can revolve.  This is true whether we are talking about AI data-centres, the third Heathrow Runway or connecting the Pennines.  This means a local state, however reformulated, that is financially viable and delivering on the basics more than adequately and not crippling its residents with ever higher council tax and local charges for ever less publicly visible services.

In the fix we're in, we need ambitious plans across the board.  However, like the positive changes contained in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, it's not going to be enough for us to be simply told, for instance, that the return to regional strategic planning can subsist in parallel with radical local government reorganisation without a hitch.  Or blithely assume that much of anything can be made to stick when the foundational local state is broken. 

There are many moving parts to say the least in this complex and multi-faceted growth programme.  And it remains fair to query the extent to which, without a stable place-based platform for local public finances and foundational neighbourhood services, the Plan for Growth's myriad opportunities for recovery are simply castles made of sand. 

Jonathan Werran is chief executive, Localis