SIGOMA vice-chair criticises levelling up as 'arbitrary'

Posted on April 03, 2024

“The frustration is – you spend your time bidding. You haven’t actually got the money to do the bidding or the resources. The successful bids seem arbitrary. You can’t be certain the outcome related to the quality of the bid. You start to believe its been tweaked politically,” said Graham Chapman, a Nottingham City Labour councillor and vice-chair of the Special Interest Group Of Municipal Authorities.

Chapman criticises levelling up’s lack of ambition and focus on physical infrastructure at the expense of tackling skills shortages: “It was the only game in town, but it was naive, totally superficial and underfunded. You don’t turn anything around with a few bob over a few years. You can’t just tart up the town centre and think you are levelling up,” he said.

Read the full article in The Guardian, here.

Listen to Cllr Chapman interviewed on the Bloomberg UK Politics Podcast here.