Whitehall’s centralised system can’t deliver Boris Johnson’s promises to ‘level up’

The government’s levelling up strategy to tackle regional inequality promises a “revolution in local democracy”. It seeks to do this largely through regional devolution – setting up more localised governments with their own mayors to give greater autonomy and power to the “left behind” regions.

But the proposed solutions do not match the scale of the challenge set out in the document, and downplay the constitutional and economic revolution required to break away from the highly centralised Westminster model of government.