There isn’t going to be a Northern Renaissance. Not a chance.
Even if the zoom zoom whizz whizz projects are built - high speed rail, tramways, concert halls and football stadiums - there won’t be any renaissance until we pull the right levers.
Had a trip across the Pennines this morning for a panel debate about the North of Ebgland’s economy - the idea of a Northern Renaissance. Interesting panel (plus me) including Andy Preston, former mayor of Middlesbrough, and Jonathan Hinder, the decidely ‘Blue Labour’ MP for Pendle & Clitheroe in East Lancashire. Here, pretty much as delivered is my opening saying that there isn’t going to be a Northern Renaissance:
“There isn’t going to be a Northern Renaissance. Not a chance however many reports are written or speeches made by Andy Burnham.
I don’t like this at all but it is important to be honest about the North.
It’s not the people. Or even the weather. It’s that the North has almost no real control over its destiny. That destiny isn’t decided in Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle. That destiny is decided by anonymous men in smart offices in the City of London and SW1.
I used to believe in regeneration, to accept Michael Heseltine’s lie, the one that became the dominant ideology of economic development - that dollops of cash kindly given to local boards, council or mayors would ‘lever in’ loads of extra cash that would, through a sort of financial sleight of hand, mean hard up men and women in poor communities would have their lives transformed for the better.
We now have over 40 years of repeatedly testing this strategy. And it doesn’t work.
Regeneration, inclusive growth strategies and all the other paraphernalia of 21st century economic development have failed utterly to provide the slightest jot of betterment to the communities that regeneration was supposed to make great again.
It doesn’t work because simply making places look better doesn’t change the fundamental reasons for the North’s economic problems. Even if the zoom zoom whizz whizz projects are built - high speed rail, tramways, concert halls and football stadiums - there won’t be any renaissance until we pull the right levers…
Spatial planning
Tax
Regulation
Energy
Britain has a spatial planning system made in London. Worse, lobbying from hundreds of anti-development groups gave us a planning system designed to prevent any development and, if some development sneaks under the radar, to make sure it is so loaded up with restrictions, conditions and charges that the project only works if it gets subsidy.
If the North is serious about growth it needs to tell London that it is quite capable of writing its own - pro-development, pro-economy - planning framework. It won’t - because Andy, Tracy, Oliver and Steve think having a liberal planning system will lose them votes.
Tax. Imagine a world where rates of fuel duty, tobacco duty and duty on booze weren’t decided by the chancellor but by local councils. And that this money was collected locally and spent locally. In Denmark - a high tax country - half of income tax is collected and spent by local councils. Imagine that?
Consider a tax system where Manchester or Leeds could remove taxes preventing businesses from investing in R&D? Or have a two year tax moratorium for people setting up a new business?
If the North is serious about growth - wants that renaissance - Andy, Tracy, Oliver and Steve would be demanding that Parliament give them real control over taxes, not just to raise money but to allow local choices about who pays and how much they pay. They won’t.
Think of a North with local control of the things that regulate the lives of residents and businesses, the thousands of petty controls overseen by worrywarts and fussbuckets. Regulation means higher prices, and slower economic growth - in the UK we’ve lost an estimated 6% of GDP just from new regulations introduced since 2015. And the impact of regulation on prices makes those hard up men and women in the North’s towns and cities literally poorer.
If the North were serious about getting that renaissance then its leaders - Andy, Tracy, Oliver and Steve plus Ben and all the others - would, every time they got near a public platform, be demanding that the anonymous men in those Whitehall offices give the North control over the regulations that govern so much of our lives. But they won’t.
We’ve heard how the North’s heavy industry and manufacturing has, in many cases, all but died. And that energy costs are right at the centre of that collapse.
So why are the North’s leaders holding seminars about getting to net zero rather than demanding the end to an energy system giving Britain the highest industrial energy costs in the world? Why are those leaders spending millions on ‘climate change’ and nothing at all on arguing for the North having cheap and abundant energy?
An industrial strategy is nothing without control of energy policy. Why aren’t the North’s mayors campaigning for fracking, urging the government to open up the North Sea and demanding that the nuclear programme is accelerated? Without cheap and abundant energy there will be no Northern renaissance.
I understand why none of this happens. Not just because Andy Burnham wants a bigger job. Or because Tracy Brabin prefers talking about the arts. It doesn’t happen because nobody thinks making these arguments will work. And making them means less regeneration cash to spend on pet projects. We won’t get a Northern Renaissance.”
The subsequent debate washed around ideas of ‘reindustrialisation’ and ‘real jobs’ idea that, if we took a breath, we’d quickly realise are a combination of fantasy economics and a delightful nostalgia for the old days when men walked to the factory in their thousands to ‘make things’.
It was glorious to hear Andy Preston saying we need to stop going on about building railways - to which I’d add trams - and that the Manchesterism boom that Andy Burnham talks about is achieved not by innovation and entrepreneurship but by state subsidised property development and the, in effect, intellectual asset stripping of all the region’s smaller towns.
Worth noting that the appause I got came when I asked why the Mayors of the North were spending millions on climate change strategies rather than calling for cheap, abundant energy.
On the other hand and as an occasional visitor from down south, northern cities have something still going for them. Maybe some more youth and energy, maybe they’re just more affordable and offer a better quality of life. Westminster pushes in the opposite direction by making it harder and harder to conduct any business, whether manufacturing or professional.
We have to stop pushing economic growth and development as some kind of end in it their own right, as a societal good that delivers a better future for all of us. We've gone way beyond what is sustainable or within the limits of our planetary boundaries and there needs to be a reset to plan for the future. Deregulation is not the answer because it just creates more unsustainable problems and leads us into a bleak future. Maybe have a read of the Nature security assessment and you'll see what I mean. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nature-security-assessment-on-global-biodiversity-loss-ecosystem-collapse-and-national-security