Two years ago, I and my colleagues collaborated with Birmingham City Council on a project to explore the regeneration of East Birmingham. We described a combination of local authority collaboration, strategic investment, and convening with the private, third and community sectors when undertaking planning – perhaps making use of a briefly-fashionable Investment Zone – as a potential form for the future of ‘levelling up'.

Such plans, we must assume, will now be untenable for the foreseeable future. Birmingham City Council, a vast local authority with an economic powerhouse of a city within its jurisdiction, is bankrupt and its grand plans for regeneration and deep investment must take a very different form if they are to survive.