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Building A Regional Regeneration Index To Track Socio-Economic ‘Levelling Up’

Building a Regional Regeneration Index to Track Socio-Economic ‘Levelling Up’

This project will evaluate existing policies designed to lift up ‘left behind’ communities and simulate the impact of new policies – including more devolved powers. It will bring together key economic and social indicators to create a Regional Regeneration Index (RRI), and provide a benchmark and reference point for the impact of policy in the years to come.

Project Status

Ongoing

Related Theme

Destitution, Exclusion, and Strategies for Well-Being

Funder

Summary & aims

Levelling Up, or reducing regional disparities, is one of the most important tasks in tackling persistent inequalities in the UK that hold back economic growth and social well-being. But there is currently no rigorous, robust evidence base on which to measure progress not just against the measurable ‘missions’ set out in the Levelling Up White Paper but also against broader and deeper indicators of welfare. Our annual Regional Regeneration Index (RRI) and a real-time dashboard will fill this gap.

Using the National Institute’s unique modelling capabilities, we will also be able to evaluate existing policies aimed at ‘levelling up’ the UK’s ‘left behind’ area and simulate the impact of new policies. All this will enable us to help design better policy mitigation for vulnerable groups to inform decision-making in Whitehall, regional authorities, and local government.

Our overarching objective is to arrive at a single headline value of regeneration that is transparent in its construction and can be compared over time and across different areas.

Methodology

Our project will build a new index and dashboard, which will be more comprehensive and provide evidence at more granular levels than what is currently available. We will bring together key economic and social indicators of living standards and well-being. And we will do so at the level of local authorities, Travel to Work Areas, and households (using datasets such as the Wealth and Asset Survey). This will allow is to measure both progress and gaps and identify vulnerable groups and the areas in the UK that are economically and socially deprived.

We will construct the index and dashboard using international best practice developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Joint Research Centre on composite indicators. In particular, the proposed project combines a clear conceptual framework with careful data selection and the weighting of the various indicators.

Because such an index can be broken down into the effects that drive changes in index scores, our index can act as policy focus. There is no established example of a regional regeneration index of the kind we are proposing to develop. We will draw on the sub-national indicators as provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for our real-time dashboard, building a publicly available website where all the data can be accessed and used by policymakers and other interested parties.