This seems to be the season of grand strategic reports. Here is the latest on regional inequalities, chaired by Lord Kerslake. These must have been started a couple of years ago and Owl wonders how the new disruptive regime of Boris and Dominic will react to them. 

Make No Little Plans: ACTING AT SCALE FOR A FAIRER AND STRONGER FUTURE

http://uk2070.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/UK2070-EXEC-SUMMARY-FINAL-REPORT.pdf

 UK 2070 Commission is an independent inquiry into the deep–rooted spatial inequalities within the United Kingdom. There is no longer any real debate about the scale of these inequalities. Whether in terms of health, housing or productivity, it is now accepted that the UK is one of the most regionally imbalanced economies in the industrialised world.

The Ten Point Programme of Action 

Action 1: A Spatially Just Transition to Zero-Carbon Ensuring there is an explicit spatial dimension in the UK’s plan to become zero carbon by 2050. 

Action 2: Delivering a Connectivity Revolution Creating a transformed public transport network between cities, within cities and beyond cities.

Action 3: Creating New Global Centres of Excellence Harnessing increased investment in research and development to create ‘hub and spoke’ networks of excellence across the country to complement London and the Wider South East.

Action 4: Strengthening the Foundations of Local Economies Empowering local leadership in towns and local communities to deliver increased local economic growth and wellbeing. 

Action 5: Rethinking the Housing Crisis Recognising housing as part of national infrastructure and ensuring that supply of new housing meets the needs of the economy.

Action 6: Harnessing Cultural and Environmental Assets Increasing the focus of policy and funding of assets outside of London.

Action 7: Implementing a Comprehensive Framework for Inclusive Devolution Allow different places to step up through different levels of devolution according to local ambition, need and capacity. 

Action 8: Future Skilling the United Kingdom Develop a national plan to raise attainment levels, especially in future skill needs for all areas to achieve the levels of the best performing places.

Action 9: Levelling-up the Playing Field: Fairer Access to Funds Triple the size of the Shared Prosperity Fund to £15bn per annum for 20 years with clear spatial priorities; and change the way major projects and local priorities are able to be funded and assessed. 

Action 10: Shaping the Future: A National Spatial Plan for England Task the National Infrastructure Commission to create a national spatial plan for England and linking to those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, to guide investment and to support local and regional spatial plans.

A more interesting,  though highly individual, view can be found in this article by Simon Jenkins entitled: If the regions are to rise, London must take a hit. Note he doesn’t seem to mention the South West and Owl wonders how effective Great South West and Heart of the South West lobbying on our behalves has been.

Simon Jenkins  www.theguardian.com

[last two thirds of the article]

……Kerslake is aware of the need, but he does not address the issue obsessing my Mancunians. To them the issue was London, seen as exciting, creative, rich – an existential menace. Rulers since Elizabeth I have tried to reduce its appeal. She tried to send her courtiers back to their country estates, and failed. London has always been the goose that lays Britain’s golden eggs, and is still – now more than ever.

My economics tutor used to warn us that much of what he taught might one day be proved wrong, but he hoped at least to have showed us how to recognise nonsense. A case in point must be Kerslake’s solution to the north, which tallies with Boris Johnson’s old-Labour cliche of “levelling-up”. It lies in vast dollops of public investment in infrastructure, in interconnectivity, skills and “cross-governmental, ministerially led” coordination. This is the same language used by Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair – every prime minister– usually in the year after an election.

None of this addresses what Manchester understands, that you will not level up the north without levelling down London. The capital has to reduce its appeal to the north’s most precious resource, its creative talent and entrepreneurial zeal. This requires big regional cities to develop “creative critical mass”. They must treasure their heritage, their converted mills, their historic districts – anything to distract their young people from craving a move to London. This may involve sucking energy from their surrounding towns – as Leeds has from Bradford. Cities such as Frankfurt, Toulouse, Milan and Barcelona have established a cultural self-confidence that has succeeded in resisting the magnetism of their country’s capital. The only city outside London to come near such magnetism is semi-autonomous Edinburgh.

In the case of demagnetising London, the task is near insuperable, but it must be attempted. Revival will come from small steps, not giant infrastructures. These steps will never work if they depend on London, on its taxpayers, its civil servants, its government. Dependency economics has been the curse of Scotland and Wales. There is no such thing as public spending-led growth – as has conspicuously failed in eastern Germany. Growth comes from employers and investors being stimulated to exploit local skills and talents. They should pay local taxes and run local government. Northern cities will flourish only when London stops stealing their people, their ideas and their power.

If the regions are to rise, London must in some degree fall. It must stop gorging on infrastructure investment – as, mercifully, it may now do on Heathrow expansion. It should stop drawing ever more commuters into its centre, which is what Crossrail and HS2 (now running only to the Midlands) are about. It must stop cramming itself with students, the one truly energising factor in many northern city economies. London’s student fees should soar, and northern ones plummet. The capital should stop receiving the lion’s share of arts subsidy.

Kerslake rightly acknowledges that Britain must decentralise government power. But how many times must we hear this trotted out? Experience abroad advises accountable local mayors, delegated taxes, borrowing powers and no more reliance on begging from Whitehall.

I believe this will never happen until those with power are physically ejected from the capital. Civil servants and politicians (and journalists) must go north. The increasingly dysfunctional Houses of Parliament should abandon their billion-pound gilded temporary outposts in Westminster, and go north for five years. It would refresh them and it would certainly refresh the nation.

Demoting London to promote the regions would not necessarily mean a richer Britain, though the present imbalance must be damaging to national prosperity. Wealth is not the issue. Brexit has shown it is now subservient to populist slogans such as patriotism and group identity. One such “identity” is the north, and it has shown itself politically toxic. The north-south divide must be countered. This will happen only if the “levelling” is real. London should ready itself for a hit.