Then I read a survey on the worst High Street in Britain. The investigators stated that it was Grimsby. Those of us who know it were not entirely surprised. The sense of bleak abandonment I experienced when I last walked past its betting shops, pound stores, charity shops and boarded up storefronts is hard to exaggerate. It is the only town centre I’ve been to in recent times where it was hard to track down a coffee shop because not enough of the people shopping there could afford that kind of luxury.
The contrast between the two experiences is deeply unhealthy. Any society that had a government with the ability to plan and to organise would make a serious attempt to address the balance of an over heated London economy and towns and cities that have suffered decades of neglect. Proper regional policy has two huge gains. It cuts down on congestion and over pricing in London and it boosts and strengthens economies across the rest of the county.
Look closely at the regional policy of the current government and you will really struggle to find anything meaningful. The only serious money that has been channelled towards neglected regions over the past 30 years has been the European Social Fund and the European Regional Development Fund. They go when we leave the EU (I’d like to say if we leave the EU but with both major political parties still backing Leave I’m trying to be realistic).
Where were the announcements in the recent budget about what those European regional funds will be replaced with? Where was the strategy for re-energising the regions? What is the long term plan to rebalance Britain?
If you looked really hard in the small print of the budget you could find one insultingly token gesture. Hammond allocated £37m to further investigate the possibility of a Northern Powerhouse Rail system. For those that don’t know the concept behind this is that a fast and efficient rail link will be created between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds/Bradford and Hull with good links to Sheffield and York. At the moment those major cities are connected by trundling inefficient diesels that take an age to move you in discomfort between one tired station and another. That effectively prevents people from travelling between cities in order to look for work. The network screams out for investment to make it one single efficient employment market where people can build careers and companies can recruit from a wide pool of employees. Such a system needs to be coherently planned by a single well organised rail operator instead of a mess of separate private companies. The creation of such a system could genuinely transform large parts of the north. A bit of money for feasibility planning won’t.
You are not going to build an exciting new rail system any time soon by allocating £37m. The Crossrail system cost around £30,000m. A good and a necessary investment. That required sucking taxpayer’s money out of the pockets of people in the regions in order to invest it in the London. In any logical world the subsidies would run in the opposite direction. Spending per head on rail transport infrastructure is desperately smaller in the north and in the other neglected regions than it is in London. In other words, poverty-stricken Grimsby is subsidising wealthy London.
So the north is left to market forces to fix the imbalance. As it happens that is having some influence. The high costs of living in London mean that firms can pay people a lot less to live at much higher real standards of living in cities like Leeds and this is starting to have an impact on footloose industries. Most of the regions have strong universities creating a pool of well trained young people who know the locality and would be happy to stay in it if there were enough diverse work opportunities there.
So again we have to ask questions of the Chancellor. Where were the policies to encourage that rebalance? Where was the funding to create new science parks in the regions? Where was the investment in helping the regional universities to create spinoff business successes and an atmosphere of creativity and opportunity?
What we got from Mr Hammond was a few sound bites about his industrial strategy. For those that don’t know this is a complete rag bag of ill thought out and contradictory policies that owe nothing to strategy and a great deal to spin. Fracking is part of the policy. The white elephant costly nuclear plant of Hinkley Point is part of that strategy. Placing the economy on a more secure balanced and sustainable basis through serious investment in change is treated as a peripheral issue when it comes to the serious matter of funding.
The one bright point in all this was the decision of Channel Four News to move to Leeds. This sent out a really helpful signal that a major media company realised how vibrant a future that city could have. That decision was driven by political pressure and a requirement that the organisation should cease to be so London centric. Pressure that was also applied to make the BBC move some of its operations to Salford.
All of which illustrates very well the benefits that conscious government planning can have when it is used to encourage organisations that rely on public sector finance of licences to rebalance their business more sensitively to reflect the needs of the regions.
So I ought perhaps be finishing this piece by heaping praise on the government for doing at least one thing right. Making Channel 4 move was genuinely helpful policy. Yet, the cynic in me does however ask a couple more questions. Why was it Channel 4 and earlier the BBC that were chosen for this sudden enthusiasm for the regions? Was the government really thinking about the needs of regional cities or did they wish to remind the public service media who was boss? Why have so few government departments moved out of London in recent times? Where is the brave initiative to set an example by rehousing Parliament in Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds/Bradford whilst they refurbish it?
Just the one small piece of gesture politics that came from moving 200 Channel 4 jobs to Leeds has lifted the mood of the whole city and encouraged other businesses to follow suit. How much more could be achieved via a properly thought through and well managed regional strategy?