Sir Roger Marsh welcomed 'the ambition' of the Government levelling up white paper which aims to bring more wealth and opportunities to deprived and forgotten areas.

Setting out 12 'missions', the newly-released paper includes a goal to improve pay, employment and productivity, while narrowing the gap between the best and worst performing areas.

It also includes a promise to increase public research and development (R&D) investment outside the Greater South East by at least 40 per cent by 2030.

Sir Roger Marsh chairs the NP11 group of northern local enterprise partnerships and the Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership which covers York.

Northern leaders will be meeting with the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, at the Convention of the North with NP11 on Tuesday, February 8, to discuss how to deliver on the levelling up promise for the North.

He said: "The North’s opportunity has been unrealised and under-invested in for decades and levelling up will only be achieved if it is a priority shared by the whole of Government, working with local and regional leaders.

"This white paper starts to define and measure what success looks like."

He said the NP11 had consistently argued that increasing R&D spending outside London and the South East was essential to leverage business investment and hit the 2.4 per cent of GDP target.

"We are pleased to see this at the forefront of the announcement," he said.

"Rightly, the white paper also makes clear that tackling health inequalities must be a priority of levelling up.

"Given the devastating impact that Covid-19 has had across the North, we hope that increased R&D investment will support our ambitions for a northern life sciences supercluster that will close the healthy life expectancy divide between North and South, while more than doubling employment in the North’s globally competitive life sciences sector and making the UK more resilient to future pandemics."

He said Government commitment to devolution was encouraging, as well as recognition of the role of public-private partnerships being convened by local enterprise partnerships and pan regional partnerships.

"These will be essential if we are to emerge strongly from the pandemic, with businesses and civic leaders working together on shared goals for their local area."

Sir Roger added: "We are pleased to see that the Shared Prosperity Fund, and other key funding streams, will be devolved to local areas.

"To achieve meaningful, lasting change it is vital that this investment is driven by local priorities, not just handed to local areas to manage, with a meaningful business voice, and that it encourages collaboration where this adds value, rather than forcing local areas to compete for centrally held funds."