A new phrase is seeking to define the political lexicon of the 2020s.

‘Levelling up’ is now everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere, in that it is mentioned at every opportunity by the Prime Minister and his cabinet, repeated back by headlines, academics and think-tanks; it is nowhere, in that nobody yet knows what it means in practice.

Narrowing the regional divide is firmly on the agenda, post-electoral landslide. For years, many in this neck of the woods have been making arguments that are now becoming mainstream, as the political imperative turns towards holding seats not previously lavished with attention.

So far, Number 10 has certainly been strong on transport and the need to improve infrastructure here - which is good news. Money and focus on bringing bus services up to the standard of those in the capital is decades overdue, as is a genuine overhaul of our Victorian railway network, both in respect of how it is run and what it is run on.

This is a key factor in narrowing the economic gap with London and, even if it is only what we should have had long previously, it is clearly to be welcomed.

Yet as two major reports highlight this week, the issues underlying this debate are far more complex and structural than that, having been exacerbated by a decade of unequal austerity.

(Image: M.E.N.)

Not every aspect of the divide splits neatly into red wall towns versus booming cities, for example, whatever the current narrative or political strategy might suggest. It’s worth taking this opportunity to again highlight a social scandal within the second city - one that shows no signs of abating, no signs of redress from Westminster and one which is storing a new generation of social inequality.

Manchester’s homelessness crisis is off the chart. While local services scramble to come up with new methods of solving it - smart initiatives, publicity, partnerships with the charity and health sector, all of which are to be applauded - they are still essentially based on a negative. All that energy is being poured into solving a disaster that was avoidable.

As we reported this week, the number of people living in emergency housing in Manchester is ten times that of five years ago.

You can rehearse the reasons and the detail of that, as we have done many times, but ultimately that fact should be enough to make someone in Westminster take this seriously.

The blistering Marmot review into health inequality, released this week, highlights one grotesque nonsense that underlies this: local authorities across the country have spent more and more on homelessness in the past decade, while spending less and less on housing.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

That is the definition of policy failure.

As one housing official said to me last week, the city is now ‘desperate for anything’ in terms of housing for the less well-off. It is frantically trying to bail out a leaking boat. Manchester is hemorrhaging housing through Right to Buy, while spending nearly £20m a year on temporary accommodation and hotels. Headteachers are increasingly worried about the effect this is having on the welfare of the city’s children, bouncing around from precarious dwelling to precarious dwelling.

The solution is not to solve the crisis through one-off panicky funding measures. There is now the risk that ‘levelling up’ falls into that category - cash payments here and there, aimed at the symptom and not the cause. If the children sleeping behind those hotel doors are followed by a steady stream of hundreds more, then that generation is in reality being levelled down.

This is just one example of the situation in which we find ourselves. But both the Marmot report and Lord Kerslake's UK 2070 Commission this week highlight the more sweeping extent to which government actions - and inaction - have led to growing inequality, particularly between regions.

Professor Marmot is scathing. ‘England is faltering’, he says in regards to the health of its people, a pattern that is intertwined with growing social, regional and economic inequality.

(Image: Andrew Cowan/Scottish Parliament)

Life expectancy is usually a marker of progress in the Western world, yet here it has stalled in the past decade and on some measures is now going backwards, particularly for poorer northern women, with the gap between the North and London just getting wider and wider.

"If we leave this for another 10 years," he writes, "we risk losing a generation."

Notably, he argues ‘catastrophic’ economic or political shock would normally cause this trend in such a short space of time, highlighting the impact on life expectancy within former Soviet states after the fall of the USSR.

His is the second report in less than a year to draw such a parallel: the first UK 2070 report last summer warned that the level of regional economic divide in this country is comparable to that in Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Ten years ago, Marmot’s original government-commissioned report had issued a string of recommendations designed to narrow the gap that existed then. The coalition accepted almost all of them.

But not only did government not then act, he finds, it often did the reverse, even as many councils - including Manchester - tried to implement his suggestions. National leadership on the entire agenda was 'weak', he says. The housing crisis mentioned above is one driver. But fundamentally, the areas cut hardest in the wake of 2010 were those that most needed the support, helping instead to widen the existing divide.

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Marmot found children's services funding had fallen five times faster in the poorest areas than in the wealthiest, for example. “The most deprived areas and communities, particularly in the North of England, have experienced the greatest declines in funding in almost all social, economic and cultural domains, and poverty, poor health and socioeconomic inequalities have increased,” he notes.

Surestart Centres have closed in their hundreds, despite having been proven to work, as the most funding has vanished from the places that most needed them. Another loss of sensible prevention at an age where it is most effective, storing up pain and crisis for later down the line.

And yet we are now in an interesting environment, arguably unprecedented. Some of the places that have been hardest hit by the cuts Marmot analyses, areas already bearing the legacy of post-industrialisation and with some of the highest levels of deprivation - Wigan, Wakefield, Rochdale, Stoke - now have one or more Conservative MP.

If many of the problems most keenly felt by these so-called ‘left behind’ communities - left behind by whom is one of those questions politicians tend to dodge - are those associated with the anatomy of council cuts, the question will now be whether those MPs make the case for reversing the past decade's redistribution.

Council tax sits at the heart of this iniquity. These places have seen this deeply regressive local tax rise exponentially in recent years, yet that has not largely been spent on maintaining public spaces, because the money is largely being used to fill the social care funding vacuum.

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

But slapping an extra 2pc precept - the government’s sticking plaster for the social care crisis - onto Rochdale residents is never going to raise the same as it would in Surrey, so that gap gets wider too.

This isn’t just about austerity, of course. The structural problem was already there.

London’s economic growth has long outpaced everywhere else, as the UK 2070 Commission notes, a trend that is becoming a crisis for an overheating capital as much as it is for us. The gap is getting wider and wider.

More than half of all new jobs are being created in London and the South East, putting pressure on housing, transport and quality of life. The same region accounts for half of all research and development spending.

And looking forward, parts of the North and Midlands look intensely vulnerable to the loss of carbon-based manufacturing as climate change makes itself felt. Yet it is by no means clear how the government intends to stave off a second wave of post-industrial decline.

For the Conservatives, helping - and holding onto - these places means thinking in a different way, both in terms of delivery and in terms of politics. It won’t be good enough to tell Heywood, Redcar or Leigh in four years’ time that you’ve delivered, just because by 2040 HS2 might be somewhere nearby.

(Image: Getty Images)

Truly reviving exhausted communities will mean a grown-up conversation not just about capital expenditure - on which government seems to be reconciled, be that for new hospitals or new tram systems - but about how we pay for services, how much, who makes those decisions and where that money is put.

It also will require a new vision for devolution, housing and further education. Some of that could be controversial.

Neither the North of England nor Manchester are going to London with a begging bowl. To think - or do - that would be to fundamentally misunderstand the problem. This is certainly about an unfairness spanning several generations, but it is also about control, that buzzword of the past four years, both for people living in our communities and for local leaders trying to take decisions on their behalf.

And it should be, as the UK 2070 Commission argues, about a scenario that is win-win for both London and for everywhere else. Both that report and Professor Marmot recommends rebalancing now be placed at the heart of government, overseen by a cross-departmental Cabinet committee. A minister with a northern brief won't cut it.

If done right, rebalancing will be a winner for the government as well as everyone else. But levelling up will require imagination, compassion, courage and determination, as well as getting out of Westminster.

And it will mean more than some men, sitting in a room, talking about trains.