RBI: ‘Levelling up’ the UK requires looking at each region on a case-by-case basis

A year after we first launched the Rebuilding Britain index, our latest report recognises that progress in the UK has stagnated,?with little improvement in several key areas of British life and regression in many more.??

Two years ago, our current government committed to ‘levelling up’ the UK in every area, from?jobs and the economy to housing, health, social care and public services.?While it goes without saying that these past two years have been fraught with challenges perhaps unimaginable at the time, it is nonetheless alarming that so little progress has been made to date.??

Last January, we introduced the Rebuilding Britain Index as a way to tangibly measure the UK's levelling up journey on a quarterly basis. With input from 20,000 residents across the nation, the RBI gathers answers to help measure 52 key metrics in categories such as health, social care, housing, jobs, economic prosperity, the environment, energy, transport and digital.?

Giving us in-depth insights into what life looks like in communities across the UK, the picture it paints is one of disparity, with relatively prosperous urban areas racing ahead of rural and coastal towns in many areas. This seems to highlight an obvious truth: in order to improve life for everyone in the UK, not just those who can afford to live in city centres, the government needs to look at each region on a case-by-case basis, looking at what areas of public life are lacking and which public services need the most urgent attention. More than half of our 52 individual metrics that create the index have declined over the last 12 months. House prices relative to average income and access to quality primary health care have experienced the biggest falls and remain matters of critical importance.?

We must seek to improve life for people in all areas of the UK - no matter how rural or remote. It perhaps feels especially significant that 19% of UK adults are now thinking about relocating from their local area within the next year.?This should be viewed as an opportunity to get skilled workers from cities like London into coastal and rural communities and to provide injections into local economies.??

On a positive note, our latest research demonstrates the efforts to protect UK employment over the past 12-months have been largely successful, with slow but consistent improvement in jobs and economic prosperity across the country. Even so, we need action, effort and investment to address wider physical and digital infrastructure and services and level up the staff disparities that exist at a local level.

We hope you find the Rebuilding Britain Index both interesting and useful and hope to see progression in the months and years to come.