Institute for Fiscal Studies -
Five years ago, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson made ‘levelling up’ a central plank of the Conservative Party’s bid for re-election, with a manifesto pledge to ‘level up every part of the UK’. In 2022, the government published a thorough and ambitious White Paper setting out 12 levelling up ‘missions’ to achieve by 2030, as well as specific metrics by which they would be measured. This report examines early progress towards those 12 missions, where possible using the headline metrics identified in the White Paper.