LEVELLING UP
“Antisocial behaviour should be a top priority in levelling up local areas. Without people feeling safe on the streets, efforts to boost economic growth and unlock opportunity will be wasted. Our new report provides a practical guide to leaders looking to tackle low-level crime, and deal with the other common challenges we found.”
Levelling Up is a national mission. But much of the energy, insight and levers to make change are local. Onward’s Levelling Up In Practice programme brings together research from places across the country to understand common challenges and identify practical, low-cost interventions that can kickstart progress. Levelling Up Locally is our final report, based on five research visits:
Oldham – how antisocial behaviour limits levelling up
South Shields – building bridges between industrial past and future
Walsall – hyper-local challenges at the neighbourhood level
Clacton – the generational and geographical coastal poverty trap
Barry – a working-class town well on the way to levelling up
Our conversations across the country identified five common challenges. These issues are consistently raised by the public, observable in the data, and stubbornly persist over time:
In every area, these common challenges had particular characteristics and were a blocker to levelling up to differing degrees. For example, in Oldham, high levels of antisocial behaviour on public transport have restricted connectivity and hollowed out the town centre. In South Tyneside, extreme health inequalities drove economic inactivity and held back industry while community assets remained untapped.
And in some of the areas we visited, these five common challenges even varied between different neighbourhoods. In Clacton, poverty was concentrated in clusters of streets with poor housing stock and among elderly residents with little familial support, placing high pressure on public services. In Walsall, the drivers of economic inactivity varied from ward to ward between low levels of formal skills, chronic health conditions, ageing workers, and cultural norms in South Asian communities.
These two factors – variation in the most pressing barriers to progress between areas and the presence of hyper-local challenges within areas – point to the need to tackle these challenges locally. We need to level up from the bottom up.
The report recommends a data diagnostic approach that local leaders can adopt in their place to understand which of these common challenges are most pressing. Blackpool is used as an example, illustrating the maps and graphs that can help to direct action. The appendix includes a data manual to allow local leaders to recreate the analysis for their area using commonly available tools.
Recommendations for tackling antisocial behaviour
Recommendations revitalising high streets and town centres
Recommendations supporting local sport, culture, heritage and green space
Recommendations for boosting local growth in the private sector
Providing community-based support to the most disadvantaged
The report recommends a data diagnostic approach that local leaders can adopt in their place to understand which of these common challenges are most pressing. Blackpool is used as an example, illustrating the maps and graphs that can help to direct action. The appendix includes a data manual to allow local leaders to recreate the analysis for their area using commonly available tools.
Recommendations for tackling antisocial behaviour
Recommendations revitalising high streets and town centres
Recommendations supporting local sport, culture, heritage and green space
Recommendations for boosting local growth in the private sector
Providing community-based support to the most disadvantaged
Reducing economic disparities between places.
Our work on the UK’s regional disparities has been the engine behind the levelling up agenda. This programme focuses on bridging the UK’s longstanding spatial inequalities and bringing economic opportunity to places which have lagged behind for too long.
The authors would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the thinking and analysis within this report. Their advice is invaluable, and any mistakes are, of course, the author’s own. We are also grateful to the National Lottery Community Fund for supporting this project and the interim reports we have published as a part of the Levelling Up in Practice programme.
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