PM To Level Up The Entire UK

Boris Johnson will today promise that his plan to “level up” the UK will boost living standards in every part of the country.

- Macer Hall

In a speech about the post-Covid recovery, the Prime Minister will set out his hopes of restoring a “sense of pride” in communities that have felt neglected for decades.

But he will insist he aims to tackle the soaring house prices and lengthening commuter journeys that blight supposedly better-off areas too.

The PM is expected to say: “We will have made progress in levelling up when we have begun to raise living standards, spread opportunity, improved our public services and restored people’s sense of pride in their community.”

His speech is likely to be seen as an attempt to reassure Conservative MPs in the south of England that he will not abandon the party’s traditional heartlands to hold on to the “red wall” of former Labour seats, captured in the North at the 2019 general election.

Mr Johnson, who will spell out his vision for a level future on a visit to the West Midlands, will argue that spreading prosperity and opportunity more evenly across the whole of the United Kingdom will prevent economic “overheating” caused by population surges into a few well-heeled enclaves.