ABSTRACT The contemporary increase in precarious employment has shaped lives marked by employment, economic, and social instability for many workers. While research has demonstrated deleterious physical and mental implications of precarious work, less attention has been paid to social implications, including heightened risk for social isolation. Using a 5-step scoping review process, this paper investigates what is known about the types and characteristics of physical and virtual ‘third places’ outside of home and work that help maintain social connectedness and ameliorate social isolation in the lives of precarious workers. Descriptive and thematic analysis of 24 interdisciplinary articles revealed that precarious workers navigating conditions marked by spatial exclusion enact collective agency to create and sustain alternative ‘third places’ that align with the conditions of precarious lives. Although places created could be associated with social risks, obligations, and exclusions, they were also mobilised to address diverse social needs, including: a sense of belonging to a collective of ‘similar’ others; temporary respite from the conditions of precarity; assertion of presence and visibility; and exchange of diverse resources and forms of care. These results inform critical reflections on the kinds of spaces that can serve as ‘third places’ within societies marked by growing precarity.

ABSTRACT We analyse binding constraints to productivity growth in the UK’s regions outside London and the greater South East. These analyses challenge a number of common arguments about the UK’s regional economic inequality problem. We find little evidence consistent with the hypotheses (i) that low shares of university graduates remain the primary constraint on growth for the UK’s regions; (ii) that there is a generalised issue with access to finance for firms outside the South East; or (iii) that low or falling regional migration rates are to blame for the persistence of the UK’s regional economic inequalities. Instead, we find evidence consistent with (i) a specific relative shortage of STEM degrees; (ii) binding transport infrastructure constraints within major non-London conurbations; (iii) a failure of public innovation policy to support clusters beyond the South East, in particular through the regional distribution of public support for Research and Development (R&D); and (iv) missed opportunities for higher internal mobility due to London’s overheating housing market. We also find some suggestive evidence consistent with constraints on access to early-stage equity financing for high-growth-potential SMEs in certain regions.

ABSTRACT We consider whether the UK government’s levelling-up governance model of Combined Authorities and metro-mayors is the most appropriate solution for beyond the metropolis. We draw on case study research from the Mersey Dee area between North East Wales and North West England. The paper addresses three propositions. First, that the underlying distinction between agglomeration-driven and place-based policy centres on assumptions regarding the homogenous and heterogenous character of place. The paper shows how, in the UK context, the city-region concept has evolved as an agglomeration-driven territorial construct with practical limitations. Proposition two focuses on how a distinctive character of place reflects its particular mix of firms and their resulting combined processes of agglomeration. Proposition three suggests that this mix of firms presents choices for the appropriate design of institutions locally and regionally. Finally, the paper illustrates why the present agglomeration-driven framework is a barrier to enabling levelling-up. Progressing ‘levelling up’ involves recognition that heterogenous local governance contexts are shaped by history, culture, and geography, where the success of place-based policies is not aided by the top-down imposition of governance models.

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to examine what needs to happen in central, sub-regional and local government to ‘level up’ public health in the United Kingdom (UK). The Government's recent Levelling Up White Paper outlined ambitious targets for reducing regional disparities, including a ‘mission’ to tackle inequalities in healthy life expectancy and reduce inequalities in the social determinants of health outcomes. However, the approach has been criticised for failing to integrate population health policy objectives, programmes and interventions into the implementation of the levelling up agenda and its associated ‘missions’. Drawing on a case study of promoting healthy urban development in the UK, we examine how the wider determinants of health might be incorporated into the Government's levelling up strategy. Based on in-depth interviews with 132 urban development actors, our findings reveal that long-term investment in healthy urban development could play a key role in levelling up public health but is not currently part of the Government's plans. We make a timely contribution to the levelling up debate by placing public health centre stage in social science debates. We conclude by offering a series of recommendations for transformative policy change to level up health.

ABSTRACT The UK government’s levelling up strategy is the latest attempt to address the nation’s spatial inequalities. This issue has been amplified by voting in the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union, within which people in places with lower levels of educational qualifications and wages demonstrated their desire for change. These places have been characterised as ‘left behind’ by the pursuit of a knowledge economy fuelled by university expansion and mobile labour. The article explores how the specific policies adopted to support university expansion in England have influenced spatial inequalities and the political motivation for levelling up. It then describes how universities are recognised within the diagnosis of spatial inequalities in the Levelling Up White Paper and the vision for addressing them, but not the strategy embodied in its prescription of missions. The article concludes by exploring how tertiary education systems can strengthen the civic influence on universities, and how this could inform future approaches to funding and regulation in England. This could balance the growing influence of national government and global market forces, which has been a feature of university expansion in England since the 1980s, and thereby position universities better for the imperative of levelling up.

ABSTRACT The UK economy is one of the most geographically unequal among OECD countries, with London's lead having increased since the mid-1980s. The UK is also one of the most centralised, in terms of the overwhelming concentration of economic, financial, political and institutional power in the capital, London. A key question, therefore, is whether the latter feature is a cause of the former. This paper focuses on one aspect of this question, namely London's dominating role in the UK's financialised, neoliberal-globalised growth model that has held sway for the past forty years. It is often argued that London's pre-eminence in finance acts as an engine of national growth, delivering benefits to all regions through ‘trickle down' effects. We argue that these claims are exaggerated and that much more need to be known about London's negative impacts on other regions and cities, about the geographical dimensions of what some have labelled the ‘finance curse'. We argue that such negative effects are integral to the growth of regional inequality in the UK. The Government's new ‘Levelling Up’ policy, though innovative in some respects, remains subordinate to the promotion of London and finance, and is unlikely to decentre and spatially rebalance the economy.

ABSTRACT Recent debates on evidence-based policymaking have demonstrated limited engagement with the history of the Government Social Research (GSR) profession and its role in facilitating the translation of evidence into policy. Though there was a concerted scholarly focus on social research functions within government during the 1980s and 1990s, the recent limited focus on these professions has led to a ‘blind spot’ in contemporary governance research. As a case in point, the United Kingdom's GSR profession offers a critical vantage point upon which to develop new insights into the relationship between evidence and policy. We argue that just as the GSR profession is currently undergoing significant reform programmes, there is a critical need for a critical research agenda on the composition of research professions within governments. Such a research agenda would reflect on crucial questions about the interface between research evidence and other government functions. In conclusion, we offer four starting points for a comparative, interdisciplinary, transnational research agenda, focusing on the effects of reform programmes for (1) researchers’ professional identities and values, (2) organisational change processes, (3) accountability challenges, and (4) intra-professional relationships with evidence producers.

ABSTRACT Emerging as the flagship policy of the Conservative Government in 2019, the Levelling Up agenda identified the need to ameliorate the United Kingdom’s (UK) spatial inequalities with a particular focus on so-called left behind places. However, there is a dearth of qualitative research in these locales that explores what Levelling Up means to residents and how they believe it can be a success. Drawing upon 25 interviews with residents of left behind Redcar & Cleveland – a unitary authority that was central to the 2019 collapse of the Red Wall – this article explores their nuanced sentiments on the Levelling Up agenda. After presenting a brief history of Redcar & Cleveland, the study’s qualitative methodology is presented. The findings sections are then structured into three themes: (a) the ambiguity of Levelling Up, (b) Redcar & Cleveland’s freeport, and (c) cynicism of Levelling Up. It explicates how locals believe improved public infrastructure and well-remunerated employment, particularly through the unitary authority’s recently opened freeport, should be central to Levelling Up the area. Next, the paper exposes the cynicism towards the agenda. It closes by suggesting failures to Level Up will serve to entrench peoples’ discontent in places like Redcar & Cleveland.

ABSTRACT International studies show that relative levels of regional (de)centralisation are associated with more or less balanced patterns of economic growth, well-being and resilience. Alongside supporting specific levels and types of devolution, prior studies emphasise the quality of local institutions as a key factor underlying balanced growth. This study empirically confirms the relative lack of devolution alongside large and growing disparities across England’s regions. Drawing on an interview-based case study of the West Midlands, we then identify a Catch-22, with devolution predicated on high-quality local institutions caught in a highly centralised system that undermines the development of the required capacity and competency. We identify specific decision-making and resource allocation mechanisms, appraisal and control systems which underpin the dominance of central government agencies in an ad hoc and asymmetric approach to devolution. In combination these limit progress towards locally-driven ‘levelling-up’.

ABSTRACT UK policy targeting regional economic disparities has been characterised by frequent reversals and announcements, with multiple, uncoordinated public bodies, departments and levels of government responsible for delivery. Prior ‘place-blind' national policies have given way recently to ‘place-based' approaches, with a convergence between industrial and spatial policies. Yet a consequence of inconsistency and poor co-ordination is that the UK policy framework lacks adequate feedback mechanisms from local outcomes to the national policy process; there is a failure to learn. More effective policies to address spatial inequalities require institutional reform embedding evaluation and learning mechanisms into subsequent policy analysis and implementation. Other advanced economies offer institutional examples that could be feasibly implemented in the UK.