Aside from “Get Brexit Done”, the Conservative party’s flagship promise to the country at the last election was a commitment to “level up every part of the United Kingdom”.
The phrase has been accused of lacking a clear meaning, but the government has said it is about ensuring opportunity is spread more equally across the country.
They argue the UK’s economy is imbalanced and that too many people are forced to travel to London and the wealthy south-east of England to pursue their careers.
The project also commits to boosting pay, productivity and transport connections in the UK’s more deprived areas, as well as restoring their “sense of community, local pride and belonging” and giving regions the power to make more decisions for themselves.
The government has set itself 12 levelling up ‘missions’, which, as a target, it has given itself until 2030 to complete.
How's it going so far?
Earlier this month, analysts at Bloomberg completed a study of how much success those 12 levelling up missions have had since the 2019 general election.
They found that in 2019, some 598 parliamentary constituencies were behind London and the south-east in at least six of the 12 categories.
Of those 598 seats, some 87pc had either made no progress, or fallen yet further behind the country’s richest region. The entirety of Norfolk and Waveney was included among them.
What’s going well in Norfolk?
Life expectancy and wellbeing across the county are both on a positive trajectories.
The first of those categories, life expectancy, has an important caveat however, because Covid-19 caused average life expectancy across the UK to fall for the first time in years.
The effect was especially severe in London, where the virus spread quickly due to the densely-populated nature of the city.
But the virus killed relatively fewer people in Norfolk, which has helped to skew the statistics in relation to its growth over London.
On wellbeing, North Norfolk, North West Norfolk, South West Norfolk, Mid Norfolk and Waveney were already ahead of London and south-east in 2019 - and all five constituencies have since pulled further ahead, while everywhere else in the county has levelled up.
Only South Norfolk fell behind on wellbeing, slipping some 2.2pc compared with 2019.
Have there been any more successes?
A more patchy picture, with a mixture of improvement and slippage, can be seen when looking at the county’s broadband coverage and on universal credit uptake in comparison to London.
On broadband, Mid Norfolk has levelled up particularly, closing the gap with the best-connected parts of the country by some 20pc since 2019.
Nova Fairbank, chief operating officer of the Norfolk Chambers of Commerce, said: “If you look at the needs of Norfolk, as a rural, multi-modal county, we absolutely need to ensure our digital connectivity is as good as it possibly can be.
“Those are projects that can be done relatively quickly in terms of timescale, when you compare them against, say, road and rail infrastructure improvements.
“The ability to have excellent, superfast broadband, and 5G, would be a real advantage to the businesses in this region.”
On universal credit, most of the county had fewer recipients proportionally than in London, but the gap has closed somewhat since 2019. Great Yarmouth and Waveney meanwhile appear to have levelled up, in terms of reducing their universal credit use.
Chris Starkie, chief executive of the New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership, argued however that the effect in Yarmouth and Waveney could be seen because “the south-east is catching up, not because we’ve got fewer people on universal credit.”
Mr Starkie said the pandemic had meant that people in parts of the prosperous south-east, who previously had not been on universal credit, suddenly were and so there was a “degree of artificiality” there.
Where are improvements still needed?
On the other eight levelling up “missions”, Norfolk, or in some cases, the wider East of England, appears to have fallen further behind compared with 2019.
One of these areas was salaries, in which the gap grew between every Norfolk constituency and London.
Mr Starkie said that Covid had again played a significant role in this.
“With salaries, one of the impacts of the pandemic was people were willing to take a pay freeze or a pay cut in order to preserve their job, and that prevented mass redundancies,” he said.
“People have been willing to do that for a period, so salaries have been depressed.
“And of course, our salaries are ‘softer’ anyway, because of Norfolk and Suffolk’s reliance on hospitality, tourism, and the health sector - social care in particular - which tend to be slightly lower paid jobs than ICT, legal services, or what have you.”
He said this helped to explain why other places in the East, like Cambridge and St Albans, which were already ahead of London and the south-east on salaries, had pulled further ahead.
He added that industries like hospitality and tourism were much harder hit by the lockdowns than sectors such as legal services, who were able to work from home.
“The latest data we can see is that salaries in our area are starting to catch up again,” he said.
The other seven areas were home affordability, total crime, civil service employment, foreign investment, total government spending, spending on transport specifically, and productivity.
In each of them, Bloomberg found that Norfolk or the wider region had overall fallen further behind London compared with 2019.
But Mr Starkie cautioned that the picture was not quite as simple as that.
On transport, the vast sums of money spent on Crossrail in London have helped to widen the gap.
And on foreign investment, he said such deals were often the product of several years of negotiations, so counting them as successful only in the years in which they happen to come to fruition was not especially helpful.
"Levelling up is a long term project," he said.
"And I think it's probably wrong to draw too many early conclusions, particularly as you've had the pandemic and many of the government's investments are only starting to be made now."
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here