‘We’re forgotten about here’: the broken promises of levelling up

Two days after his landslide election victory in 2019, Boris Johnson practically crowdsurfed into Sedgefield cricket club. Jubilant fans at the venue in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, craned for a photo, one thrust upon him their family pet, and another begged him to sign a copy of the Northern Echo, headlined: “Tory tsunami from the Wear to the Tees”.

“There was an absolutely huge buzz in the place,” said Jean Gillespie, 69, in the same function room this week, whipping out her phone to show a picture with the former prime minister: “I got a snog and a selfie.”

Between pulling pints and toasting victory, Johnson made a promise to the thousands of Labour voters who had backed the Tories for the first time, upending decades of tradition. “I want the people of the north-east to know that we in the Conservative party, and I, will repay your trust,” he pledged, wearing a red tie in Tony Blair’s former constituency.

More than four years later, the post-election party has given way to a chronic hangover. Support for the Tories has fallen to the lowest level in nearly half a century. With Johnson and his successor, Liz Truss, pushed out by the party, Rishi Sunak is facing fresh talk of a mutiny ahead of what are set to be a dismal set of local election results on 2 May.

“Unless there’s some massive change, I don’t think I will vote Conservative,” said Gillespie, who has relinquished her Tory membership, largely over the way Johnson was “stabbed in the back”. “I don’t think there will even be a Conservative party by the next election the way things are going,” she said.

Her husband, Trevor Gillespie, 73, said he too voted Conservative in 2019 but was leaning towards Labour. Levelling up, once the centrepiece of Johnson’s premiership, was in tatters, he said: “First it was the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ under [George] Osborne. We’re still waiting to see that; that never happened either … The characters they’ve got in now are not up for the job. Basically, we’re due for a change.”

Five years after the Conservatives promised to level up deprived parts of the UK with a bold – if loosely defined – agenda for change, a Guardian assessment has found that the government has gone backwards on three of its key levelling up “missions” and made no progress on a further three. In just one – a promise to devolve more powers – has there been any significant progress.

In Sedgefield, questions about levelling up are met with either a rueful laugh or cold fury. Such was the anger that Durham county council voted across party lines in January to consider taking legal action against the government over the way it handled the bidding process, which has been condemned by parliament’s spending watchdog and the National Audit Office.

The cause of County Durham’s anger is the way Michael Gove’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities changed the eligibility criteria for its funds after the council had spent £1.2m submitting five bids for projects across the county.

Paul Howell, the Conservative MP for Sedgefield, said he was “extremely disappointed” by the government’s handling of the process and told the Guardian this week that he would “continue to complain” to Gove about its fairness. “They should have had the process better defined at the start,” he said.

A 10-minute drive from affluent Sedgefield is Newton Aycliffe, a post-war new town of about 25,000 people. One of the council’s unsuccessful levelling up bids would have gone towards reviving the town centre, where the withdrawal of high street names has left its main thoroughfare, named after the late economist and Liberal politican William Beveridge, a half-empty desert of charity shops and steel shutters.

“The town’s finished,” said Andrew Bennett, the owner of Andrew’s Family Cobbler, as an icy wind whipped up a quiet Beveridge Way last week.

Bennett, 38, reeled off a list of businesses that had left in recent months: Wilko, Peacocks, Occasions gift shop. Halifax bank and the clothing store Select will close their doors for good in the town in the next month.

A few doors down, at Jorja’s Attic gift shop, Su Taylor questioned why Bishop Auckland, a more affluent market town around eight miles away, had been awarded levelling up cash while Newton Aycliffe had not.

Taylor, 59, voted Conservative for the first time in 2019 because she was “dead full of hope”. And now? “I will probably go back to Labour, [but] I think they’re all the same.”

A two-mile walk south of Aycliffe town centre takes you to the site of a world-changing revolution – although you would never know it was there. Beside a glass-strewn car park on the edge of an anonymous industrial estate is what is thought to be the world’s first railway station.

Heighington station, built in 1827, is where the civil engineer George Stephenson put the groundbreaking Locomotion No 1 on the tracks for the first time. What should be a site of national significance is a dilapidated ruin, its windows boarded up after the last owner – who turned it into a pub – shut up shop in 2017.

There are no signs or directions to this unsung national treasure; most locals don’t even know it is there. Last year, Historic England gave the building Grade II-listed status, marking it as one of the country’s most important heritage assets.

But with a year to go until the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington railway, which hosted the world’s first passenger train journey, this national landmark is but a rotting shell.

Niall Hammond, the chair of Friends of the Stockton and Darlington Railway group, said the site would have benefited from the levelling-up bids rejected by the government. Instead, volunteers are scrabbling to raise money to bring it back to life before next year’s bicentennary.

“I hate to quote Boris Johnson, but in terms of improving people’s mojo, 200 years ago, this little bit of north-east England bizarrely came up with this amazing idea and people stepped up to the mark in terms of being architects, engineers, designers and all sorts of things,” he said.

“[Saving the building] is just a fantastic way of motivating an area which has got a lot of deprivation and a lot of underenthused schoolchildren, if you can tell them that their area is really special.”

Not only is the region’s rail heritage at risk; its economic future hangs in the balance too. Hitachi has warned that its plant, a few hundred yards from the world’s oldest railway station, is in peril due to a lack of orders for next year.

The Japanese firm, which employs 750 people directly and a further 1,400 in the supply chain, was drawn to the Newton Aycliffe site in part due to its proximity to railway history. When it opened in 2015, the then prime minister David Cameron heralded a “revival” for manufacturing in the north-east.

Labour has accused the Conservatives of treating the factory with “indifference” over the past two years, as Hitachi bosses have asked the government for assurances to help keep its order books full.

Howell, the first Conservative MP for Sedgefield in 88 years, insisted that the government “could not have done more” to try protect the jobs, but says ministers had been advised that extending Hitachi’s contract would leave it open to a legal challenge.

Despite his anger over the government’s handling of levelling-up funds, Howell said his constituency had benefited. He cited the opening of a Treasury outpost in Darlington, as well as £73m in transport funding for the region, announced in February from cash taken from the aborted northern leg of HS2.

“There’s very definitely signs of things happening here for the first time ever,” he said. “But it’s all two years behind where we would have liked it to have been [due to Covid].”

Asked whether the recent flurry of announcements make up for the axing of local authority budgets since 2010, Howell conceded that the cuts regionally had gone too far. Durham county council has endured a 37% funding cut and axed around £250m from its budget since then, according to Labour.

“I do think there’s questions as to how deep the cuts have had to go [at Durham county council],” he said. “But I think the balance across the country is a different question.”

The Conservatives point to the Teesworks freeport, one of the UK’s biggest regeneration schemes, as an example of levelling up in the region. But despite promises to create thousands of jobs, the government-backed project has been criticised for a lack of transparency and the absence of any guarantee of value for money.

A devolution agreement for the north-east will bring a promised £100m in new funding and powers over transport, housing and skills when the region elects its first metro mayor on 2 May.

Yet the grand announcements about “trailblazer” deals, freeports and economic campuses are far removed from the needs of places such as Trimdon, a tight-knit colliery village 10 miles west of Hartlepool. It is one of the hundreds of villages, 14 towns and a city that makes up County Durham, but many feel the cash stays near the top.

During a coffee morning at Trimdon station community centre, a 10-minute walk from Blair’s former constituency home, there was anger about the lack of local buses. It takes three hours and three buses to travel the 29 miles to Newcastle, one villager fumes. There is only one service an hour to Darlington, Durham and Hartlepool. On Sundays, they say, not a single bus rolls into or out of the village.

“We’re just stuck,” said Rachel Large, 48, who moved to Trimdon from London in early 2002. “When I moved here, it was like a 1960s bus service, and it’s got worse. We’re forgotten about here.”

A Sunday service is expected to begin within weeks, but will be still be limited. Government ministers might point to mayors and freeports as examples of levelling up, said Derek Bradley, the community centre manager, but these villages “have nothing”.

Bradley, 57, a former colliery worker, has run the century-old centre for 15 years and worked with generations of families whose horizons, he said, had been limited by the lack of public transport: “A young lad I spoke to recently hadn’t been to the seaside before. It’s 20 minutes away..”

To Jean Jamb, 59, voting for the Conservatives in 2019 had been “a big let-down,” even though she liked Howell. As for levelling up, she said, it was all “wind and watter” – all talk and no action.