Where’s our levelling up, Whitehall…?
Liverpolitan Contributor
If you’ve had the good sense to avoid much of the news media over the last year, one of the major political announcements beyond the pandemic has been that of major relocations of the Civil Service from London to the regions.
The so-called ‘levelling up’ agenda is the narrative driving this major change in policy and we’ve been watching keenly ever since to discover how ambitiously and fairly it is being implemented. This is clearly long overdue in a nation that is one of the most politically and economically centralised countries in the western world, and comes 15 years after it was last seriously discussed following the Lyons Review, which largely failed to deliver any meaningful change. Opponents of the idea usually point to the Office for National Statistics move to Newport, which failed to generate much of a boost to its local economy, but I’m not sure what they really expected from relocating such a specific service function to a mid-sized city with little potential to leverage commercial multiplier benefits. Other relocations of civil service jobs and functions have shown limited success due to them effectively being the outsourcing of lower grade roles rather than senior policymakers with real influence. The Government’s own statistics show that over two-thirds of the most senior civil servants remain based in London.
Before we explore this theme further, one of the many impacts of the pandemic has been to change where people want to live and work. This is not to argue that traditional offices, or the town and city centres where they are located, are set for a prolonged demise. Far from it. Offices will continue to thrive as centres for work, but in a repurposed way that maximises a more flexible, collaborative and agile working culture. But increasingly, London does appear to be falling out of favour. Over the last year many thousands of people have escaped the capital for a better quality of life in towns, cities and villages all over the UK. This includes many who have moved back to the Liverpool Metropolitan Region, so it was no surprise to read a recent article in This is Money showing that house price growth in Liverpool over the last 12 months has been the highest of any city in the UK, and more than five times that of London. There are numerous reasons for this, but one significant contributing factor is undoubtedly people escaping the high prices of the capital to return back to where they grew up or attended university. One could describe this as a reversing of the brain-drain effect that all cities have suffered to London over many decades.
Location of Senior Civil Service roles
Source: Moving Out: Making A Success of Civil Service Relocation; IFG Insight November 2020; Institute For Government
There is no doubt that the Liverpool Metropolitan Region has a compelling case for people to relocate to as a great place to live and work. It’s human nature for us to be drawn to water, so the great natural assets we have in the River Mersey, Wirral peninsula and the miles of beaches and sand-dunes on the Sefton coast are a huge draw. Only a little further afield - a mere stones-throw away - lies the mountains and coastlines of North Wales. Then there is the depth of the arts and culture scene and their institutions, quite possibly unmatched in any other city outside London. Liverpool is probably the most architecturally significant regional city, with more listed buildings than any other, and is home to many beautiful parks. It also has a thriving independent food scene and a nightlife that is frequently regarded as the best in the UK. There is good reason why the people who visit Liverpool often come back time and time again. The start of this shift in focus away from the capital is hugely important to our nation and its economic and cultural future.
Back to the levelling up agenda, and it’s worth considering the moves of the BBC. Although not directly controlled by the state, large swathes of the institution have already upped and moved to Manchester/Salford over the last decade to ‘benefit the North’. It now provides jobs and opportunities for more than 3000 people in that city region and has added significant multiplier benefits to its local economy. Currently, the BBC only employs around 30 people in the Liverpool Metropolitan Region, although there is some talk that they might open a small training hub both here and in Hull. This is a matter which I’m sure we’ll come back to in the future. Meanwhile, back in 2018, there was the competition between the major regional cities to secure the new Channel 4 HQ, a selection process which did not give the impression of being particularly fair or transparent. Although the government does not get to tell these organisations where to move, as publicly-owned bodies their decision-making often follows the political theme and thought processes of the day.
The start of this shift in focus away from the capital is hugely important to our nation and its economic and cultural future.
What department relocations have been announced so far?
In recent months, we have seen news of a new Treasury campus being established in Darlington, albeit with a little nod and wink from Rishi to his Conservative Tees Valley Metro Mayor friend, Ben Houchen. Meanwhile, Leeds was gifted the UK Infrastructure Bank plus a new Bank of England hub, both of which are likely to provide an extremely positive influence on the prosperity of that city and its suburbs. In time, we’ll see how evenly the funds it distributes are spread around the nation. More recently, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) announced increases in its regional headcount, with Birmingham and Salford/Manchester being by far the greatest beneficiaries. The Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (HCLG) is moving to Wolverhampton. Peterborough will also secure over a thousand new roles from the HM Passport Office and the Department for the Environment.
What does that leave left for the other large cities so far overlooked?
The fear is that the bigger prizes are already gone. Recently, the Leeds-based think tank the Northern Policy Foundation graded all of the major northern urban areas on their overall suitability for large-scale relocations. Liverpool scored rather well. It then went on to suggest suitable locations for departments based on seven grading indexes. Defence in Preston, Education in Lancaster, Crime to Newcastle, Infrastructure in Warrington, and then Liverpool as the most appropriate location for the various Health and NHS Departments. This was partly based on the city having more specialist hospitals than any other outside London, its research-intensive universities (notably the University of Liverpool and School of Tropical Medicine) and one of the largest biopharmaceutical manufacturing clusters in Europe. It’s hard to disagree with any of that. But what else could we have on our ‘levelling up equitably’ list’?
Department of Culture, Media and Sport
Liverpool has a rich history and expertise in both culture and sport. In 2008, the city of Liverpool was awarded the prestigious title of the European Capital of Culture and, according to our local leaders, encouraged by central and regional government to focus on culture and tourism rather than business to drive future prosperity. As unthinkable as that strategy is to most intelligent people, for the Government to not award this department here would be a huge disappointment. And media? This is an area where the Liverpool Metropolitan Region is seriously underserved, but housing that Government function here could provide some counterbalance to the poor treatment the city region and its people have suffered at the hands of regional and national media over many decades. Perception is critical to any region’s prosperity and with better representation we’d hope to see a gradual improvement in the way media institutions depict our region. A more equal playing field would also provide opportunities for our future generations.
Department for Transport
I won’t go into the hugely damaging side-lining of the Liverpool Metropolitan Area by HS2. That will no doubt feature elsewhere. Nor that Liverpool is statistically the poorest connected out of all the core cities by rail. But, over the last 20 years many other regional cities have benefitted from significant amounts of capital expenditure with whole new tram systems, new railway routes and underground lines. Although we have a local rail network in Merseyrail that is the envy of many others, having to wait 10 years for each new (typically small-scale suburban) station seems more like levelling down and does a huge injustice to a network that covers an area of nearly 2 million people. Would such disparity be allowed if the government department responsible for it made its home in the place it has seemingly ignored for so long?
The above are, perhaps the most obvious examples, but there are others that we could make a genuine and compelling case for…
National Cyber Force
It has already been announced that this new function will have a permanent new base in the North West of England in a so-called ‘cyber corridor’. With Manchester already having been gifted a new outpost for GCHQ, including its Accelerator programme, as well as other support to the local business community, surely locating the new National Cyber Force in the Liverpool Metropolitan Region is right to achieve levelling up fairly? We are already home to a thriving tech and start-up scene. Our four universities develop large numbers of quality graduate talent. And with large historical and civil service links to the Ministry of Defence, it would seem entirely logical and equitable.
Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)
As well as a leading research-intensive university and health and biotech sectors, the Liverpool Metropolitan Region is also a leading player in advanced manufacturing and robotics, and is home to The Hartree Centre, a research facility for the advanced high-performance computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), which is based in Halton. It is well known in university circles that those in London and the South have traditionally secured greater allocations of research funding and investment than those in northern cities. It was at the time of the new Millennium that the Government took the decision to move the Synchrotron Radiation research facility from Daresbury to Oxfordshire, along with £500m of investment that came with it, so maybe now it’s time to correct the mistakes of the past and truly level up…