It’s a convenient talking point for the Government, especially when it’s worried about its immediate future: life can get better, but only if decisions keep coming from the top.

It’s a problem highlighted by IPPR’s State of the North paper published this week: that despite frequent talk of local leadership and devolving powers, Whitehall is reluctant to let go. Central government “makes key decisions around levelling up”, it reads, “often in an opaque manner.”

Money that has been injected into the project so far, including the Community Ownership Fund and the Towns Fund would have been “previously designed, managed, delivered – and generally funded – by local councils”. But currently, these funds are centrally controlled.

The inevitable consequence of ploughing cash into a project without proper consideration of the structures is that it never fully delivers. It’s a risk that the levelling-up initiative quickly morphs into something like the NHS phenomenon: that no amount of money pumped into the service manages to result in better outcomes.

Levelling up cannot simply be a spending project. While there’s close to universal agreement that local infrastructure and transport need a refresh, far less attention has been given to the host of regulations, tax structures and bureaucracy that need to be overhauled to enable local areas to hoist themselves up.

Again, this would require Whitehall to renounce control, but it is likely to be a necessary condition of the Government achieving its goal of creating equal opportunities for workers in Stafford and Davison’s constituencies as there are in London. No amount of taxpayer money will substitute for the ability to attract large businesses and start-ups alike to a wider variety of regions throughout the UK.

Allowing for more devolved tax competition would be an obvious way of kick-starting such an ambitious economic restructure in an organic way – but such measures have, so far, been absent from discourse.

It’s ill-advised for any government to usher in major public policy as a way to save its leader from gritty political reality: a recipe for poorly thought-through plans and mistakes. But in the case of levelling up, some clarity into the Government’s thinking is long overdue.

Recent political events might finally get us an update – but that won’t guarantee good policy.