The long-term high-paying jobs thing was always exaggerated. As for levelling up, in our opinion what was needed was a strategy to create a more mixed local economy. Houchen certainly never bought into that. And data centres while they are needed are not large scale employers.
If these Data centres do get the go ahead, won’t this blow up the levelling up programme? This was to achieve long term high paying jobs but will now show that it was just a transfers of wealth (even though the whole deal was).