Rav Casley Gera

A new report argues that fifty years of urban policy have failed to revitalise the economies of Britain’s Northern towns. If they’re right, the very future of our Northern cities may have to be rethought

Those who know me will be surprised to hear I’ve been reading a Policy Exchange report recently. PE, for those who don’t keep up with the ever-growing roster of UK think-tanks, is the leading centrist (read: sane) entity amongst the conservative ‘tanks. Unlike its crazier cousins, such as Civitas and Politeia, Policy Exchange serves as more than a mouthpiece for bored minor ex-ministers and a peddler of slightly silly state-the-obvious reports.¹ Despite the concerns of the Fourth International, PE is essentially a serious enterprise. And, determined to be taken as seriously as lefties such as IPPR, PE has taken the radical step of commissioning and publishing actual academic research, by actual academics.

This report, into the history of Britain’s urban policy, makes depressing, if fascinating reading. Five or six decades of urban policy, it argues, have essentially failed. Attempts to encourage, or even compel, businesses to open new factories in depressed areas simply prevented investment, the report states, and may have cost the country jobs overall. Despite the interference of more than 30 different government agencies in the last 20 years, Liverpool remains plagued by poverty and crime. And while they may enhance quality of life, it’s by no means clear that cultural institutions - the current regeneration fad - bring meaningful long-term economic benefits.

Ultimately, the report argues, to try to artificially kickstart the economies of Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and other depressed northern towns is simply to miss the point: these cities are poor for a serious economic reason. Not just the collapse of manufacturing, which could theoretically be replaced by other industries. Quite simply, they’re in the wrong place. Northern towns, in most cases, developed because of their access to the sea, through harbours, rivers and canals. In the age of shipping, this made them ideally placed for taking part in international trade. But now that goods are increasingly carried by road, and trade is more than ever with continental Europe, it’s the South that reaps the benefits. While the Northern cities languish, one of the fastest growing towns in the UK is Milton Keynes, the former laughing stock, now invaluable for distribution thanks to its central location and hub-like position in the road network.

The implication of this - and the failure of government policy to transform Northern cities in a lasting way - is a radical and scary one: that any attempt to rescue Northern towns as majors cities should be abandoned. Depopulation and migration to the South should be accepted as inevitable. Rather than spending billions trying to make these economies viable sources of employment for hundreds of thousands, we should let them shrink to a more sustainable size. Once, it made sense for cities like York and Durham to be the largest in the country; no-one tried desperately to sustain their importance as the industrial giants developed. Markets made these cities large, the report suggests, and markets must be allowed to shrink them again.

The government rejects the report’s findings, of course. But assuming the report’s analysis - prepared by an economic historian at LSE as well as Policy Exchange’s staff - is correct, the ramifications are faintly frightening. The South can barely squeeze in enough houses as it is, especially in the face of local opposition. And the tasks of managing such population decline in the North would be hugely difficult, with badly underpopulated built-up areas having to be cleared and demolished to prevent them becoming hotbeds of crime. But the vision of a bottom-heavy UK, with the South an extended mega-conurbation around London and the North a largely reclaimed rural zone, is a fascinating one.

Of course, there are lessons here for other countries . In the US, Detroit has struggled to cling onto its population in recent years in the face of the collapse of its manufacturing industry; its current population of just over 900,000 is around half that in 1940, when the city’s role in war manufactures earned it the nickname “the Arsenal of Democracy.” But perhaps it has to get much smaller before its population meets equilibrium with the jobs realistically available. And what about New Orleans? As the city rushed to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, few stopped to ask if a city in the path of regular hurricanes might be better off abandoned.

As people become ever more mobile, it’s likely that cities will grow and shrink in response to economic trends faster than ever before. This could require a revolution in building, with cheap temporary buildings replacing grand civic projects. The implications of this for the quality of the built environment are, obviously, pretty unpleasant. But it might be better than the alternative: the endless, desperate struggle to artificially inflate depressed regional economies; the vast vistas of abandoned buildings, built to last generations but no longer required.

Even if we were prepared to face the implications of essentially abandoning the idea of the Northern city, it’s hard to see the idea gaining political traction under Labour, with its dependence on Northern votes. And the Conservatives, too, couldn’t afford the fury massive influxes of Northern migrants would create in the South. But political opposition might not make any difference. Just as government intervention has failed to stem the economic decline of Northern cities, nor can it stem their depopulation. Manchester and Liverpool have both lost almost half their populations since 1930. Whatever the government thinks, it seems the fifty-year battle to rescue the economies of the North may already have been lost.