Britain's North-South Divide Revisited
A “Policy Exchange” Report Questions Urban Regeneration Policy
For decades, geography teachers drew a line across the map of Britain from the Severn estuary in the west to The Wash on the east coast: by and large, the cities and towns south of the line were characterised as modern, progressive and prosperous while those to the north were out of luck. Old industrial cities like Liverpool and Manchester boomed in the nineteenth century but declined steadily throughout the twentieth, with a legacy of falling employment, derelict buildings and social dysfunction.
Regeneration policy was supposed to change things. Since the 1980s, and especially since the Labour government came to power in 1997, massive investments of public funds have brought new life, hope and jobs to the centres of former mill towns like Blackburn, east coast ports like Hull and the old north-eastern industrial and ship-building cities like Sunderland.
Limits of Regeneration
But has the money been well-spent? In 2008 Policy Exchange, a London-based think tank, has produced a series of three reports that review the evidence and question the sustainability of current approaches to regeneration. The third report, “Cities Unlimited”, was released in August.
The study focused on 18 towns and cities that have received substantial amounts of regeneration funding, 16 of them north of the line from the Severn to The Wash. They were compared with national average migration, employment, production and income statistics, and with the performance of a group of six towns and cities that were classed as successful but had not received regeneration assistance.
Individual regeneration projects had indeed succeeded in improving facilities and creating jobs. But the study’s main finding was that these local successes were simply too small to make an impact on far more powerful market-led trends. As a result the “regenerated” cities as a whole have continued to fall behind both national averages and, far more markedly, the successful sample, and inequalities of opportunity have continued to grow.
Controversial Recommendations
Controversy surrounding the report has arisen as much from its sometimes emotive terminology as from its findings and recommendations. It paints a bleak picture of poor towns that will continue to get relatively poorer, their people having low skill levels and either leaving for a better future elsewhere or living on benefits, and with no realistic prospect that they can catch up with London and the south-east. Moreover the government’s parlous financial situation raises doubts over the scale of any further regeneration programme.
The two recommendations that have attracted most attention, almost all negative, have been to facilitate migration out of less dynamic areas by relaxing planning restrictions in London and the south-east in order to dramatically increase the amount of land available for new housing; and to provide for the construction of as many as a million extra houses in or near each of the potential economic “power houses” of Oxford and Cambridge.
Commitment to Localism
But the report’s third recommendation has almost equally far-reaching implications. Studies in other countries have shown that democratically accountable local authorities are usually far better than central governments at designing and implementing regeneration programmes. Applying this lesson in Britain, the report says any funds available for regeneration should be allocated to cities and counties, who should be left to devise and manage activities that meet their particular situations and needs without interference from London.
The report’s authors acknowledge there is little chance that its analysis or proposals will get a serious hearing immediately, not least because almost all the senior members of the present Labour government represent constituencies in the cities where regeneration funds have flowed most freely.
Political Associations
And David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, was quick to distance himself from the report. He hopes to make political inroads in the northern cities at the next election and not surprisingly described as “insane” the report’s proposals to encourage those cities’ talented young people to leave.
Nevertheless Britain does face a genuine housing shortage and as yet no coherent policy has been proposed to deal with it; regional inequalities have increased since 1997; Policy Exchange is believed to have Conservative Party links; and both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrat Party favour the devolution of power to local governments. If the Conservatives continue to ride high in the polls, fragments of the Cities Unlimited report might well reappear in government policy documents in the not too distant future.
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