It was a day of huge symbolism on December 14, 2019, when hours after starting his new term as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson arrived in the County Durham constituency which for years had been the patch of Labour premier Tony Blair.

The Labour stronghold of Sedgefield was one of a swathe of 'red wall' seats where voters cast off decades of tradition to vote Conservative for the first time, ushering in an 80-seat majority.

"I know that people may have been breaking the voting habits of generations to vote for us," Mr Johnson said. "And I want the people of the North East to know that … I will repay your trust."

Fast forward to July 2022 - three years almost exactly since the phrase 'levelling up' was coined - and the slogan used to sum up his plan to spread opportunity to left-behind parts of the country is starting to ring hollow.

The pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have left little bandwidth for the complicated task of undoing decades of worsening inequality.

And in many parts of the North the dramatic events of the last two years have actually set the cause back even further.

As reported in The Press on Saturday, 7,443 children are now living in poverty in York, according to statistics released by the End Child Poverty Coalition.

Those shocking figures were released just days after City of York Council declared a 'cost of living emergency' in the city.

Their decision came as representatives from the York Foodbank charity and Citizens Advice York spoke in support of a motion at a full council meeting, outlining the real extent of the cost of living crisis in York and the need for long term solutions.

The council will be distributing £200,000 worth of fuel and food vouchers to support the most vulnerable in the city, and a local Cost-of-Living Emergency Summit will be convened.

But York isn’t alone in the North of England in grappling with growing levels of child poverty and a cost of living crisis.

In County Durham there are an estimated 3,000 more children living below the breadline than there were two years earlier.

One area of Hull has more people in fuel poverty than anywhere else, while from October in Barnsley you won't be able to catch a bus after 7pm as cuts to local services kick in.

Mr Johnson has in the last two years named a key department after 'levelling up' and tasked one of his most able Ministers - Michael Gove - with delivering his agenda.

But for the thousands of families across the North still held back by non-existent transport and a lack of jobs and skills, with inflation chipping away at their living standards, the idea that their communities are being 'levelled up' must seem almost laughable.

So with Boris Johnson now on his way out and Michael Gove abruptly sacked it's all the more alarming to read multiple reports in the national press that the agenda could be junked by the next PM.

Though Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have made many of the right noises, levelling up has been far from a top priority in a debate largely focused on tax cuts and culture wars.

At the heart of the issue is a problem under the bonnet of the North’s economy. The average Northern worker - for a host of reasons - is 50 per cent less productive than one in London, a gap that’s widening.

Any leader serious about the task of bridging this gap will have to make hard decisions about where and how it spends its money.

While total public spending in the North was £16,223 per person in 2021, up 17 per cent on 2019, the England average rose by 20 per cent and the London average by 25 per cent to £19,231.

But this is not simply a case of the North with its begging bowl out.

Meaningful change will only come with commitment to a more ambitious long-term approach.

The North deserves to know where Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss - the two contenders to be our next PM - stand on these issues.

Ahead of the first regional leadership hustings in Leeds this week, major news titles across our region – including The Press - today put the following five key questions to the two candidates:

  • What will you do to make sure the commitments made to the North by your predecessors as Prime Minister are kept?
  • The average worker in the North is 50 per cent less productive than one in London, what will you do to address this widening gap?
  • What will you do to address spiralling rates of child poverty in parts of Northern England?
  • How far will you go to give Northern leaders control over education and skills, transport and health budgets currently held by Westminster?
  • Will you retain a government department responsible for tackling regional inequalities with a Cabinet-level Minister for whom this is their main job?

We’ll publish the responses later this week. And with Labour making the case that they’re now the true party of levelling up we’ll be asking them to answer too.