Where’s the plan, the vision – the story, if you like – for England (and Britain)? It’s been a leading question troubling me for the past year, compounded by the worrying outcome of county and mayoral elections in England on the first of May.
I fondly believed – naively it’s turned out – that this Labour government would have that story, namely a strategy for our three nations, in a back pocket, with the pre-election words of the economist Will Hutton still ringing in my ears at the launch of his new book, This Time No Mistakes, a year ago: ‘A Starmer government will be as radical as the Attlee government after 1945,’ he predicted. To be fair, they’ve still got nigh on four years to prove Will right!
Living in a part of the country adjoining a string of ‘red wall’ seats, won back by Labour from Conservatives in July last year, I should have been surprised when a Trumpian Reform UK, seemingly awash with funds, took countless seats in north East England, and gained one county council, Durham, once Labour’s most solid bastion.
But, in truth, I’d been increasingly concerned, and writing, for some months that the absence of any regional strategy, addressing a widening London and South East versus rest-of-the-country divide, would cost the government dearly. And so it’s transpired. The political messaging has been dreadful.
For instance, in a major announcement last February championing the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, a new multi-billion pound Lower Thames Crossing and, of course, expansion of Heathrow as the government’s new plan for growth – in effect, a strategy for the greater South East – the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, a Leeds MP, was rumoured to have dropped a proposal for an investment summit to highlight other regions.
Put bluntly, the government seems incapable of devising a strategy for England as a whole, moving at least to replace some of the regional structures removed by the Tory-Lib Dem government after 2010. As the Cambridge economic geographer, Professor Ron Martin, noted in the introduction to a lengthy British Academy report on regional development four months into this government: ‘Labour’s new industrial strategy contains nothing remotely resembling a regional strategy.’
Martin noted that geographical inequalities have become dramatically higher in 100 years. In 1921 GDP per capita in London was 37% above the national average, while the North East was 27% below; a century later London had increased its GDP to 76% above the national average – and the North East, with Reform UK eroding Labour’s vote, has fallen further behind to 37% below. You might well ask how Reform, dedicated to a small state and low taxes, can redress that balance. Best leave that to another day. But you’d be right to question this government’s direction of travel.
Rather than bland pronouncements of pursuing ‘change’, it’s time to make regional policy – addressing the overall state of England – a central mission of this government. And that means planning in the widest sense. Let’s put meaningless slogans – the ‘builders’ versus the ‘blockers’ – back where they belong…in the dustbin of myth-making.
It’s an open secret that Sir Michael Lyons’ New Towns Taskforce has been thwarted by the absence of any regional strategic planning and that, consequently, town and city extensions seem the most practical way forward instead.
Beyond that, it’s time to embed regional policy at the heart of government, and address the over-concentration of economic and political power in London and the greater south east. That means examining the state of England, and Britain, through a different lens, with a department of state dedicated to the wider economy – a revamped Department of Communities, Housing and Local Government for starters, alongside a re-born national regeneration agency – while addressing the deep seated social issues, the alienation, exploited by parties of the far right. There’s another England out there, desperate for help – and action from the government – before it’s too late. Let’s call it social planning with a purpose.
Peter Hetherington is a former chair of the TCPA
