Time for real 'levelling up' - move Parliament and Whitehall to Bradford

Relocating the elite functions of parliament and Whitehall away from the narrow and shallow world of would make a significant and permanent positive impact

We should move Parliament and the central functions of our government (what we might loosely call ‘Whitehall’) out of London. To be more specific we should move the whole shooting match to Bradford. I do appreciate that this sounds crazy but we urgently need to reset the relationship between the process of government and our nation. Making the dramatic choice of relocating the functional seat of government would help make that reset.

The catalyst for this being possible right now is that the Houses of Parliament are falling apart:

Away from the grand chambers of the House of Commons and House of Lords, away from the lofty corridors, away from the imposing committee rooms with their carved doors, the palace is tatty, dirty and infested with vermin. Its lavatories stink, its drains leak. Some of the external stonework has not been cleaned since it was built in the 1840s, and is encrusted with a thick coat of tarry black that is eating away at the masonry. Inside the building, intricate fan vaulting is flaking off, damaged by seeping rainwater and leaking pipes. Its Gothic-revival artworks are decaying: in the Lords chamber, the once-golden sculptures of the barons who signed the Magna Carta are now dull grey, pitted and corroded.

A couple of years ago a report from MPs said repairing the parliament buildings could cost £22 billion and take 76 years. Even the best cost estimates were for nearly £10 billion and this doesn't account for the additional costs of housing and securing MPs plus their entourages elsewhere for the duration of restoration (up to 20 years). The sheer scale of the restoration means that MPs, perhaps understandably, hesitate to sign off a scheme at a time when the nation’s finances are in a poor, indebted state and the general public continue to face the crunch of inflation. Now is the right time to make the radical decision to move the operation to Bradford.

More specifically still, parliament should be moved to Goitside in Bradford. This area (a couple of minutes walk from City Hall) contains a series of mid-Victorian mills and warehouses along the ‘goit’ as well as open space and some more modern buildings. It is more than big enough for a parliament building and the necessary offices for MPs, ministers and elite civil servants. And you could probably buy it for less than £100m. If we took the multi-billion capital receipt from selling off all or part of Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster that money would go a long way to getting a modern, high quality and beautiful new building in Bradford. The state might even turn a  development profit!

I can hear the screams of pain from those having to choose whether to move to Britain’s best Victorian city or find a new London job. These screams will be even louder than the screams we heard when that most London of our national institutions, the BBC, relocated some of its operations and staff to Salford. And lots of wise experts will explain how relocating to Bradford would mean the government couldn’t recruit the sort of clever people who work for the government when it is in London. Others will explain that the particular skills involved (understanding parliament, working with ministers, servicing MPs) simply aren’t available in that decrepit, intellectual desert we call Yorkshire.

The problems with previous programmes to relocate parts of government outside London has been that they lacked ambition, scale and focus. Bits of government and assorted government agencies were spread across the nation. Most of the relocations made business sense insofar as the relocation of back office and administrative services to places with lower rents and cheaper labour makes sense. But these relocations changed nothing about the fundamental relationship between state and people or the fact that London is untypical of the nation. London’s exceptional nature would be less of a problem if it didn’t result in policy prescriptions that reflected London not the UK. Britain’s transport policy would probably look and sound very different if those doing the policy were based in Aspatria rather than Horseferry Road.

Moving parliament and the core functions of government to a new location is not the same as moving the Office for National Statistics to Newport or a few treasury wonks to Darlington. By making a new administration capital we act to rebalance Britain and Britain’s government away from London and the narrow concerns of London’s elite. And to provide a bit more context (for those who think Bradford is distant and inaccessible), we should remember that the United States’ capital city is less than 250 miles from its financial ‘capital’. Bradford City Hall is 203 miles from the Houses of Parliament. Nobody in the USA says that having its political and financial centres this distance apart makes for a loss of agglomeration effects or worse government. Germany and Italy aren’t made worse by having their political, financial and cultural hearts located in different places.

Relocating the elite functions of parliament and Whitehall away from the narrow and shallow world of SW1 is not a panacea for Britain’s economic and social challenges but it would make a significant and permanent impact on what gets called levelling-up. Political power, unlike financial or cultural power, is something wholly within the control of government and, while I understand the importance of tradition and history, the need to move out (currently temporarily) from the Palace of Westminster presents a one-off opportunity to make a genuinely transformational change to the UK. And those who suggest that the functions of government have to be located in London are guilty of the worst sort of static thinking.

If London is the magically creative city its fans tell us then losing politicians shouldn’t be a problem. Nobody suggests New York, Toronto, Milan or Sydney are less dynamic because national government institutions aren’t based there. And nobody suggests that the USA, Canada, Italy or Australia are worse governed or less successful because all of their elite eggs are found in one basket. The benefits for Bradford, and more broadly the North of England, from relocating parliament to a brand new home on Goitside would be enormous, far outweighing the short-term cries of pain from those who think my city is too far away, provincial and naff. Moreover, if the impacts of elite institutions on agglomeration are true (something I am sceptical about) then we can expect a huge long-term economic impact of relocating parliament to Bradford. And instead of all Yorkshire’s cleverest moving to London, some of those clever people, as well as others from across the nation, will live, work and play in a great northern city rather than an over-expensive, crowded London. We can but hope.