The fiscally conservative stranglehold of the UK Treasury is not only choking the government’s dream of levelling up (“Treasury is not on board with levelling up”, Opinion, February 10), it is actively constraining the wealth of local ideas and initiatives that could unlock shared prosperity and rejuvenate politics.
Involving citizens in identifying the barriers and pathways to their prosperity is not only more accurate than any Treasury analysis, but it also gives people ownership of the solutions.
A small but growing number of local authorities are already collaborating with teams of citizen social scientists to do exactly this, but as Robert Shrimsley points out the Treasury’s general resistance to devolution will always limit the potential of different approaches.
At a time when trust in politicians is lower than ever, failure to reform the Treasury is not just a threat to levelling up, it is a threat to our democracy.
Professor Henrietta Moore
Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London, London W1, UK
Letter: End the Treasury’s chokehold on devolution
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