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The Committee's report examines the persistent regional disparity in prosperity between UK regions, which is damaging to the UK economy as a whole as well as to individual regions, resulting in reduced productivity levels and higher rates of unemployment and ill-health. The economies of six out of the nine English regions (in the North, Midlands and South West) have consistently registered lower growth rates than the UK average. The Committee welcomes the Government's commitment to address the persistence and scale of the problem, in establishing a challenging Public Service Agreement target of reducing the gap by the year 2012. However, concerns are expressed that policy planning and funding is insufficient to achieve this target. The Committee indentifies a number of key priorities to address the situation including: prioritising the least prosperous regions; using differentiated measures to tackle unemployment depending on the local situation; better infrastructure to promote growth in less prosperous regions; and giving elected regional assemblies, where introduced, adequate power and resources.