Levelling (up) the Green
With over £3.7bn currently allocated to Levelling Up projects, we took a quick look at their contribution to Net Zero.
Levelling up is a moral, social and economic programme for the whole of government. [W]e will spread opportunity more equally across the UK.
Source: HM Gov
So far, our old pal Michael Gove has presided (off and on) over two rounds of Levelling Up Fund (LUF) awards. The first round, announced in October 2021, dished out around £1.7bn to 105 local authorities (in the main) around the UK. Then, despite well-publicised delays, the successful bidders for round two have just been announced and show 111 happy campers getting a combined total of another £2.1bn. The whole fund is £4.8bn, so our fingers and toes tell us there’s still another billion or so for round three, if there is one. Places like Hastings are hoping there is.
So how is this cash from the money tree being spent? Well, in round one, nearly one-third of the projects focused on some form of regeneration, like Cannock and Aberystwyth. And in round two, HM Gov tells us that around 30% of the funds will develop better transport links, 40% will kick start community regeneration and the rest will restore local heritage sites.
Image: TGE adapted from Levelling Up White Paper, Feb 2022.
Levelling Up’s objectives, missions and targets all seem fairly clear. But how much of it, we ask ourselves, is directed at Net Zero?
The Net Zero transition could create huge opportunities for many of the UK’s left-behind places, but also poses risks for them which, if unmanaged, could be damaging.
Source: Levelling Up White Paper, Feb 22.
The Levelling Up white paper certainly has plenty of references to Net Zero. It tells us that ‘Industrial centres stand to benefit from employment and export opportunities created by the transition to Net Zero’ but that ‘emissions per capita are regionally concentrated in the areas that are home to the largest emitting industrial sectors, which include some of the areas of the UK with the lowest productivity.’ Plenty of carrots and sticks there to splash the Levelling Up cash, then.
But hang on, there’s other money available too. Wending our way through the Net Zero references in the white paper we see that BEIS aims to invest at least 55% of its R&D funding – including green R&D - outside the Greater South East by 2024-25; Defra will spend £75m on Net Zero-related R&D in Defra sectors in the next three years, as well as £140m to scale-up the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment; and DfT will harness its £299m R&D settlement for decarbonising transport to trial zero-emissions road freight, invest in maritime emissions reductions in and around major ports and leverage private investment into decarbonised transport schemes across the UK. Not forgetting the £3.6bn Towns Fund, which ‘show[s] practically how levelling up and Net Zero can go hand in hand’ and encourages towns to ‘make interventions that contribute to the UK’s overarching goal of reaching Net Zero by 2050’.
Not for the first time, we suspect it may be a little like knitting with spaghetti for local leaders, trying to figure out which fund to point their hard-pressed bid officers towards. Andy Street, the Mayor of West Midlands may well have a point.
For now, at least, given that this pot-pourri of funding is what it is, we cast our eyes down the list of LUF awardees to see what we might find in shades of green. We spotted a few active transport projects, including e-commuting – good folks of Preston and Dundee take note. We don’t see many EV charging point projects though – only four across both rounds, according to our count.
We did take note of some good projects in Round Two that should have a good impact on skills development. £9mn towards a new High Value Engineering (HiVE) post-16 education centre in Ebbw Vale, for instance. And a proposed Maritime Innovation Centre at Torridge in North Devon awarded nearly £16m.
We were particularly struck by two projects in the North West – a new carbon-neutral multiversity in Blackpool focusing on AI and robotics learning, and a green business Incubator in Oldham – and will watch with interest to see what synergies might be found with the region’s LSIP developments alongside the growing of its freeport and hydrogen hub.
Image: TGE
There are other questions too. How will these projects fit with the Innovate UK funding for Net Zero Innovation and Delivery Officer roles? There’s £6m available for 20 of those roles right now. And in the wider sense, how will these projects fit with the wider set of green projects, usually linked to universities, again funded by funded by Innovate UK together with the various Research Councils?
Pondering all these questions, something occurs to us. Wouldn’t it make sense to have a central register of all Government green investments, their scale, their impact, and so on? Westminster is always crowing its green credentials, but let’s face it, the UK is falling behind in green growth. The most recent comparison in Europe show the UK Government is only investing 1.2% of GDP in climate change and the green economy. This is less than half that of France and a measly quarter of the current German commitment1. Perhaps the Office for Net Zero, proposed in Chris Skidmore's Mission Zero report, will address these questions and seek to drive the level of total investment in the net zero transition. And part of this new bodies’ role should be to collect and publish data at a spatial detail to support local action to achieve Net Zero.
Now, that could be a nice bit of joined-up thinking.
The CBI drew together government spending committed by selected countries to climate change and found: Germany invest 5.2%, France 2.5%, USA 1.9%, World Bank developed economies benchmark 1.4%. Note for EU members, their national levels of investment are uplifted by 0.3% which is the EU commitment. EU countries benefit from REPowerEU, which was passed in May 2022, has been designed to diversify energy supplies and accelerate the clean energy transition: roll-out of solar, wind and hydrogen accelerator projects, dedicated funding for industrial decarbonisation and faster renewables permitting and hydrogen deployment.