Levelling Up White Paper - some thoughts
Yesterday felt a little like a reminiscence day for the regeneration sector. Remember Regional Development Agencies ? English Partnerships , the OG brownfield regeneration agency, before it became all about housing delivery and ended up, after several interim acronyms, as Homes England? What about Sure Start ? Isn't rural proofing reviving the 2000s approach of the Commission for Rural Communities ? The 90s and 00s revival has spread to politics as Michael Gove's long awaited Levelling Up White Paper looks to a future with a lot of old ideas brought back into play. After an idiotic introduction (someone tell Andy Haldane that Renaissance Florence was a slave-owning society, and the Industrial Revolution hardly reduced inequality), when you delve into the detail it's almost like a junior civil servant at DLUHC found an old filing cabinet full of John Prescott's briefings, and had an epiphany. The news release came out at 9am but the full White Paper wasn't published...