Event
4 October, 2022
11:00 am - 12:30 am

Levelling up Birmingham: the case for further devolution

Reform is delighted to be hosting a private roundtable event at Conservative Party Conference in partnership with Birmingham City Council.

Opportunity, investment, and productivity are highly unequally distributed across our country. The levelling-up policy agenda represents the most serious national-scale effort to directly address these inequalities for a generation, with engagement across the political spectrum.  

To be made real, levelling up must recognise the overcentralisation of our system of government. This is an important feature of the Levelling Up White Paper. Real ambition will be required to ensure that ‘levelling up’ is made real in our most deprived neighbourhoods.  

Birmingham, the host city of this year’s Conservative Party Conference, provides a powerful case in point. East Birmingham is a place with significant deprivation. Without meaningful autonomy, powers, and accountabilities, a citizen-focused, whole-place strategy for levelling up in East Birmingham will always remain out of reach. Achieving change will require leadership and genuine policy imagination: a new way of thinking about the distribution of powers and responsibilities at hyper-local, local, regional, and national scales of governance.  

Please note, this is a private, invite only event. 

This event is kindly supported by Birmingham City Council.