With the Levelling Up White Paper it appears as if a whole Whitehall industry has been born.
There was much excitement when it appeared eight local government chief executives (different from the regional nine) had been invited to form a new levelling up group – variously described as a working group and a delivery group.
The Local Government Association was aware of its existence – but then a Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities spokesperson denied knowledge of such a group. Instead, the spokesperson suggested a senior civil servant had merely asked ‘some chief executives to attend a workshop on levelling up specifically in January'.
So the group that wasn't a group was just a one-off meeting or maybe a workshop and won't be meeting on an ongoing, regular basis.
But Diary understands there is an external levelling up advisory council to ‘support ministers by advising on the design, delivery and impact of levelling up policy' and a new levelling up Cabinet committee ‘tasked with embedding levelling up across central government policy design and delivery' that will ‘work directly with local leaders to improve the clarity, consistency and coordination of policy'.
And for full transparency, it turns out this Cabinet committee is actually a sub-committee of the domestic and economic (strategy) Cabinet committee and has ‘no strict membership' other than the chair and deputy chair.
That clears everything up then.
