Any Exeter-based readers who fancy £144,000 a year to help the government deliver its “Levelling Up” agenda (still only a white paper) in the South West need look no further.
DLUHC is advertising “an opportunity for exceptional leaders to work collaboratively with local areas and all of us across central government to drive new and innovative local policy proposals based on a real understanding of local issues and opportunities.”
You’d be expected to “drive delivery of levelling up missions through a new, closer partnership between local and central government” and would draw on existing local networks to “live, breathe and champion the places you represent while working closely with local partners, senior officials and ministers to help develop and deliver new approaches to tackling systemic, place-based challenges.”
You’ve got until close on 18 April to get your application in. But you might like to take a look at the Institute for Government’s take on the twelve “missions” you’d be pursuing first.
It says five are not ambitious enough, three are too ambitious to be realistic, four don’t define what success looks like, two have too narrow a focus and one (re. R&D spending) has little to do with the aim of levelling up.
Its verdict is that the government’s agenda won’t reduce regional inequality or “deliver change on the scale that is needed”. Oh, and there is little or no new money for delivery in any case.
