Civil servant relocation won’t help levelling up

More civil servants are to be relocated out of London, as a new report says the policy does little to help levelling up. The Cabinet Office on Thursday unveiled the creation of a “first of its kind” scheme in South Yorkshire as part of its wider “places for growth” programme, which aims to move 22,000 civil service jobs outside the capital by 2030. So far, 12,000 government roles have been shifted out of London under the programme, which was designed in part to support the Tory administration’s levelling up policy. However, a report by the Institute for Government think-tank into civil service relocation, to be published today, warned that any local economic benefit from moving Whitehall jobs was likely to be “modest” and do little to improve overall regional economic inequality. It said the relocated roles were too few in number to meaningfully reduce regional economic inequality, so the scheme cannot be claimed as a primary tool of “levelling up”. The FT (£)