Actual truth about the report on our Friends in the North

Aug 21 2008 Agenda

According to a recent report, it’s grim up North and people should consider moving to the more prosperous South. Those were the headlines that greeted the study. But according to Chris Game, it wasn’t quite the true picture, even if our politicians were in denial about it.

Rule one for politicians asked their opinion on some new information that challenges their partisan views of the world: never decline on the grounds that you’ve not had the chance to read it. On the contrary, admit cheerfully that you’ve not read it, but give your unequivocal opinion regardless.

Rule two: for the substance of your response, deploy one or more of the following tactics. Shoot the messenger – preferably metaphorically. Again metaphorically, bury your head in the sand, as ostriches are mistakenly supposed to do. Say something really silly.

Encounter all three behaviours at once and it’s a fair bet that the information in question contains at least something worthwhile. So it was with last week’s report on urban regeneration, Cities Unlimited, published by the independent think tank, Policy Exchange.

The Post, appreciating the report’s potential relevance to the West Midlands, ran a front-page story (August 14), based on Jonathan Walker’s interview with one of the report’s authors, Dr Tim Leunig of the London School of Economics.

The article summarised the report’s analysis that there are some towns and cities – mainly but not exclusively in the North – that, despite receiving billions of pounds of targeted regeneration funding, are not catching up with economically more successful places, particularly in London and the South-east. In fact, the gap is widening, and some of these regeneration towns are becoming relatively more deprived.

In the report’s sample of 18 towns subject to regeneration initiatives – including Coventry and Walsall – growth rates and personal incomes fell further behind the national average between 1997 and 2005, skills bases declined, while unemployment remained some 40 per cent higher than the national average.

Moreover, though housing in these towns and the cost of living generally were relatively cheap, their populations fell by five per cent. And, the report’s authors suggest, even more would surely move elsewhere, if only they could afford it and weren’t caught in a kind of poverty trap.

The report asserts, therefore, that this strand of the Government’s regeneration policy, aimed at stimulating a convergence of struggling and successful urban areas, is failing – inevitably, for it ignores the realities of economic history and geography. The tough truth is that some of our once booming industrial and manufacturing towns are now poorly located and equipped, and in some cases too small, for the demands of a 21st Century service sector economy, and not all can be regenerated.

That critique alone would probably have provoked a row. On one side would be Labour outraged.

On the other side would be Conservative embarrassment, from politicians who can hardly buy a vote in some of these areas, and who know that, partly for that very reason, neither their past Governments nor their present leaders have produced any regeneration policy worthy of the name, failed or otherwise.

But there was more: the policy recommendations derived from the analysis – or, rather, the single recommendation that predictably was seized on. Alongside continuing attempts to induce some South-east firms to move to where land and labour are cheaper, there should be a substantial house building programme in London and the South-east to accommodate the significant numbers of people who might be encouraged to relocate from regeneration towns to areas with more buoyant prospects.

OK, I confess – unlike the rent-a-quote politicians, I’ve cheated by actually reading the report, so I do know that encouragement was the concept used. There was no suggestion of anyone being forced to move South or anywhere else, either Tebbit-like by bike or by any other mode of transport; or that Liverpool, Hull, Sunderland, let alone the whole of the North, are worthless and should be closed down.

Still, what do such details matter if a quote is needed? It is time to attack the messenger – from both flanks. Instant problem, though: Tim Leunig, as a respected academic with an international reputation, also a parliamentary and government department adviser, is not the easiest target. However, Policy Exchange (PE), the report’s publisher, is a different matter.

PE is currently about the liveliest and certainly most rapidly growing of our policy think tanks. Independent in the sense of working with policy makers from across the political spectrum, the policies it chiefly seeks to influence are undisguisedly those of the Cameronite centre-right.

Easy, then, for Labour. Attack PE and get Cameron at the same time. Never mind the evidence; forced migration is a daft, callous idea, typical of a party with no knowledge of urban problems and no political interest in regeneration.

Trickier for the Tories, but the boot has to go in, and with force. PE is entirely independent, nothing to do with the party. This report is ‘complete rubbish’ and its ideas ‘insane’.

This last response – by Cameron himself, as it happens – is a classic, combining all three of the politician’s tactics: rubbish the messenger, head in sand, and sheer silliness. Presented with a 66-page report, backed by two previous volumes of analysed evidence, our would-be Prime Minister feels it appropriate to diss and dismiss the whole thing. Interesting! Actually, there was plenty of even better silliness. My favourites were the recitals of all the wonderful things the North is responsible for – as if having created trade unions, the Manchester Ship Canal, Lancaster bombers, the Beatles (inevitably) and Oasis (I’m not joking!) somehow made modern-day economic decline and systemic unemployment OK. Best of all was the list that included, with great pride and no apparent appreciation of the irony, the Industrial Revolution – the underlying cause of the very problems the report is addressing.

So why am I bothered about politicians behaving like … well, like politicians? Because in this case their exclusive focus on the imaginary ‘forced migration’ idea means that the report’s genuinely disturbing data and much of its analysis have gone completely unaddressed, including, in my view, the most important bits.

For example, there is the dependence of the report’s prescriptions of there being a major growth of housing in and around London – by redesignating land currently restricted for industrial use. In a striking statistic the authors estimate that, by expanding London suburbia by one mile and increasing commuter journey times by about one minute, it would be possible to add some 400,000 homes for more than a million people – a policy choice that certainly won’t go away, however difficult politicians may find it.

Even more fundamental, though, is the theme running through the whole report of the need for devolution and stronger urban government. It is one of the key factors – emphasised also by Professor Michael Parkinson in his reports for Birmingham City Council on the State of the English Cities – explaining why some UK towns and cities have been less successful and entrepreneurial in dealing with industrial and economic change than their European counterparts.

Most European city governments have more powers, more financial independence, more control over their regeneration policies, and less central government direction and intervention than, for instance, Birmingham does. To quote the report: ‘Our studies of cities around the world demonstrate that local communities manage their affairs better than a distant central government could ever do’.

That is perhaps the most powerful message of this report – that a single, top-down, centrally directed regeneration policy is unlikely ever to be as effective as policies developed, resourced and implemented by strong and locally accountable governments of individual towns and cities themselves. Now that really is a scary message for national politicians – no wonder they were so anxious to divert our attention.

* Chris Game is lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham. A selection of Chris’s Post columns is available at: www.inlogov.bham.ac.uk/staff/Game.shtml