Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford: "beyond revival" - "residents should move south"

[bluestreak]

Blimey! No wonder the Tories turned their back on this report! It's suggesting transferring the money IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!

Let us take the case of Guildford to give
a sense of scale of the incentives that could
be offered to local people to support development.
Imagine that we were to add
10,000 houses to Guildford. This is clearly
a substantial number and under the current
system would lead to extensive protests.
But each house that is built adds approximately
£140,000 in value to the land on
which it sits. Let us imagine that the community
captured £100,000 of that value,
with the remainder going on buying the
land and providing the infrastructure. That
means that Guildford Borough Council
would be sitting on a total profit of £1 billion,
or around £15,000 per resident. Thus
the council could ask local people whether
they preferred to be given £15,000 a head
and accept 10,000 additional houses, or
whether they preferred to keep Guildford at
the same size and make no windfall gain.
As MPs and local councillors across
Britain know, local residents do not like
development but nor do they like council
tax. Guildford would only have to allow
500 new houses a year to abolish council
tax altogether. It seems likely that the people
of Guildford would trade a 1 per cent
increase in housing for a 100 per cent
reduction in council tax. As Bevan showed
60 years ago, stuffing people’s mouths with
gold is a very effective way of securing
agreement. The difference here is that the
gold is created by the process, it does not
require any rise in taxes elsewhere because
the process is self-financed.​

 

[bluestreak]

Be good if more govt agencies and charities moved out of london. A lot of charities spend a fortune on plush london headquarters. A few govt agencies have already moved but many more could. Private companies will follow where the money goes.
But lets not forget that London also has the areas with the highest unemployment in England.

You're wrong about that, charities go where the money is. E2a, but if we could keep this about this report, which I assume you aren't reading, and not about how Charities are responsible for all the nations ills, that would be quite good for the thread.

Also, you're wrong about the unemployment figures, unless this is too out of date.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Liverpool pisses all over Leeds.

Mind you, so does Hull.

Having lived in both, you'd be wrong on that one.

 

[bluestreak]

Bloody hell, who'd have expected this recommendation from a Tory think-tank.

We need to change that. If London is to
expand, then a proportion of the new houses
have to be reserved not simply for social
housing, but for social housing for people
who do not currently live in the area. If we
imagine that people from Blackpool move
to an expanding Bromley, then if
Blackpool’s skills mix is not to change it
must lose the skilled and the unskilled in
equal measure. That in turn requires that
Bromley offers social housing to people
from Blackpool in sufficient quantities.
Social housing makes up around 1 in 5 of
Britain’s housing stock. As a rule of thumb,
therefore, 1 in 5 net new houses in growing
areas needs to be reserved for social housing
tenants from areas whose populations are
not increasing.56 In addition, local authorities
may want to provide additional social
housing for local residents.
Requiring an expanding Wandsworth,
Woking or Witney to offer significant levels
of social housing for people from
Walsall, Warrington and Wigan will not be
popular, and it will not happen unless local
councils are required to do so. If we do not
require expanding areas to offer social
housing to people from economically
declining areas then we will create a spiral
of decline in those places. As now, the
skilled will leave, leaving the unskilled
trapped in a town that remains poorly
located, and has an ever lower skills base.

 

[Kanda]

Bloody hell, who'd have expected this recommendation from a Tory think-tank.

No-one really cos all they done was knee jerk instead of read the full report

(excluding yourself of course )

 

[_angel_]

Do they stay in Bradford though?

I think the case is that too many leave because they can make money elsewhere, so that the companies won't come in the first place in order that an environment can be created where the graduates stay!

How do we get companies to come to the North and create centres of specialisation? Do we pay them to? I'm not sure I like the idea of spending public money on bribing companies. But if that regenerates poor areas then perhaps it's worth it?

Leaving aside the whole insulting of Bradfordians en masse as being illiterate plebs, Leeds has a ten minute commute by train to Bradford. You do not have to live there to work there. It's well connected for other west yorkshire towns and cities and Manchester.

 

[bluestreak]

Page 39 starts talking about how to create economic powerhouse clusters in the manner of london in other areas too, creating similar economic hubs that drag people in. So it's not just London, but using the particular skills clusters that areas already have to attract similar and related industries. It proposes that Oxford and Cambridge can be expanded gradually to be cities of 1m+

 

[_angel_]

Page 39 starts talking about how to create economic powerhouse clusters in the manner of london in other areas too, creating similar economic hubs that drag people in. So it's not just London, but using the particular skills clusters that areas already have to attract similar and related industries. It proposes that Oxford and Cambridge can be expanded gradually to be cities of 1m+

Pffffffffft! There aren't enough homes in Oxford for Oxfordians as it is, hardly think they're going to welcome the north turning up on their doorstep.

I'm sure the compilers of this 'report' would be first to moan when they're concreting the meadows to make room for houses.

Where are they going to live?

 

[bluestreak]

Fair play, _angel_, an expert on the North I am not, and whilst I'm reading this and commenting on the contents, I'm not about to take it as scripture rather than opinion.

Also, thoughts anyone?

Box 2: Hastings – connecting the connectables
Britain can effectively be split into two parts, which we term “connectable” and “unconnectable”
Britain.
By connectable we mean primarily but not exclusively connectable to London. We know that
London is not only the richest place in Britain but that it has a proven track record of raising up the
communities that surround it. Places such as Guildford and Windsor have high skilled populations of
their own: they would be affluent wherever they were. But there are many areas, particularly east of
London, which do not have particularly highly skilled populations and yet are reasonably successful.
We think, for example, of the Medway towns. In the 1980s Medway lost two major employers:
the Royal Naval dockyard and Metal Box. In the 1980s, therefore, Medway had much in common
with many industrial towns in the North of England, which were losing their manufacturing bases.
But Medway today is a reasonably successful place. It is not the most affluent place in Britain by any
means but nor is it struggling. The reason for Medway’s revival has little to do with Medway, and
everything to do with London. As anyone who has stood on Chatham station in the morning will
know, commuting is a fact of life for many Medway residents. Proximity to London has kept
Medway afloat, and prevents it from entering into a spiral of decline.

Medway, then, is an area whose connectedness to London has ensured that it remains economically
viable despite severe shocks in the 1980s. There are other places that are poor in southeast
England that could be connected. In our original sample of urban regeneration towns we would
point to Hastings as an example. But it is not the only one: Thanet towns such as Margate are another
example. These are places that can be regenerated. The way to do so is simple: increase their connectedness
to London. Given that commuters into London overwhelmingly travel by train, the obvious
way to increase the connectedness of places in the South East is to improve the quality of train
links between them and London. At the moment the direct train from Hastings to London takes an
hour and 51 minutes and stops at between 11 and 13 stations. Given that the distance between
Hastings and London is only 62 miles this means that the train is running at an average speed of 34
mph. Were trains to Hastings to run at the same speed as trains to Swindon, the train journey would
be cut to 47 minutes, similar to the tube ride from Shepherd’s Bush to Canary Wharf.
But Swindon is lucky in two senses. First, the train line out of Paddington was exceptionally well
engineered. Very few trains out of London manage the speeds of trains to Swindon. Second, trains
to Swindon are fast because Swindon is on the mainline to Bristol, Exeter and Cardiff. No matter
how well we reconfigured the railway system, Hastings will never be on the way to anywhere: it is
the end of the line. This means that the quality of the railway that is viable between London and
Swindon is not viable between London and Hastings, and never will be. Being on the coast is a major
disadvantage today.
Realistically therefore, Hastings will never be as well-connected to London as is Swindon. In all
probability, Hastings will never be as rich as Swindon. The challenge is to cascade wealth from
London to places that are well-connected around London and then on from those places to Hastings.
There are two obvious candidate intermediate places: Brighton and Dover. Brighton is in many
ways a successful city. It is well connected to London, and to Gatwick airport. But it is surprisingly
badly connected to the other towns along the South Coast, in either direction. Not only is there no
motorway link there is no continuous dual carriageway either. In fact, fewer than 7 of the 36 miles
between Brighton and Hastings are dual carriageway, and even that comes in two parts, and is punctuated
by roundabouts. It is even worse going east from Hastings: there is no dual carriageway on the
route between Hastings and Dover until you reach the A20 in Folkestone. Given the poor quality of
the roads, it is not surprising that the RAC predict that it will take an hour to get from Hastings to
Brighton, and over an hour and a quarter to get from Hastings to Dover, despite the fact that these
journeys are only 36 and 46 miles respectively. The rail connections are even worse: it typically takes
one hour and five minutes from Brighton and one hour, 40 minutes from Dover, with a change at
Ashford.
Nor are the connections going north from Hastings any better: there are no dual carriageways
between Hastings and Ashford or between Hastings and Maidstone and only three miles of dual carriageway
between Hastings and Tunbridge Wells; the train lines on these routes, where they exist, are
also slow. Hastings, then, is not connected, but it could be. It is perfectly possible to imagine the dual
carriageway between Dover and Portsmouth, which would connect towns such as Hastings to the
Channel Tunnel and the ferries to Europe on the one hand, and begin to create agglomeration
economies between the otherwise rather isolated towns of the English South Coast on the other.
It would be particularly beneficial for Hastings if Brighton were to grow. Perhaps surprisingly,
Brighton already has trains that are fast enough to make the journey from Brighton to London the
third busiest in Britain.61 That line is sufficiently well used (even more so between Gatwick, East
Croydon and London) that increasing the speed of trains on that line is likely to pass cost-benefit
analysis.62 This in turn would allow Brighton to grow and create a South Coast agglomeration area,
to the benefit of Hastings and other relatively poor coastal towns, which could then orient themselves
towards Brighton. For Brighton the problems associated with being on the coast are trumped by its
connectability to London, and it has the potential to create regional spillovers to other towns in the
area.

 

[bluestreak]

I'm sure the compilers of this 'report' would be first to moan when they're concreting the meadows to make room for houses.

Where are they going to live?

Well, that's just it. They ADVOCATE turning the meadows into suburbia! In fact, as I posted above, they advocate paying off the residents by using simple bribery to accept the increases in size to the town.

This report is primarily about HOW to create these new clusters of housing in the places where there are jobs and an established strong economic base.

 

[bluestreak]

Here we go, page 43. It seems they advocate similar projets around Leeds and Manchester, for a start, perhaps turning the whole areas into single communities rather than localised smaller ones.

 

[bluestreak]

Some of this report seems like madness, and some seems like genius. But it's certainly not as it's being reported, that's for sure. And really the long and the short of it is not that they're saying everyone in the north needs to move to the south, but that London should be the pattern for cities like Manchester and Leeds to absorb their poorer neighbours and by doing do make them part of a stronger and more attractive to investors region.

Right, I'll finish this later.

 

[treelover]

I wonder what the brilliant Marxist Social Scientist Mike Davis, who wrote the excellent analysis of urban cities and regeneration, 'City of Quartz' about Los Angeles (which of course as part of California has seen many internal migrations) amongst others, would make of this. Internal migration has long been a feature of US society and its clear that this is also part of modern day global neo-liberal thinking: it fits my theory we are going back to the I9th C in so many ways, when for instance, workers migrated en masse to the Kent coalfields. I agree with DASH,, the next stage is to regionalise welfare benefits, a step they have already moved on with the Local Housing Allowance, which is set by local authorities and will I suspect see a series of cuts over time.

 

[_angel_]

Some of this report seems like madness, and some seems like genius. But it's certainly not as it's being reported, that's for sure. And really the long and the short of it is not that they're saying everyone in the north needs to move to the south, but that London should be the pattern for cities like Manchester and Leeds to absorb their poorer neighbours and by doing do make them part of a stronger and more attractive to investors region.

Right, I'll finish this later.

In some ways, Bradford is kind of a commuting town for Leeds, already.

People that can't afford to buy in Leeds, but work there live there.

 

[mauvais]

As someone else said, the theory's clearly based on the idea of the free market magically resolving everything. For instance:

Sunderland has received much regeneration funding, but the most interesting aspect of the city from the point of view of regeneration is the arrival of the Nissan car plant ... After an investment of £2 billion in the last two decades, it is now Britain’s biggest car plant by both output and exports, and on any measure is a major success. ...

And yet for all this, Sunderland remains poor. With gross value added per person at 16 per cent below the UK average, it is in the poorer half of our regeneration towns sample. A recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation study found that the majority of the population was poor, and numbers had increased over time. The sheer scale of the problems that Sunderland confronts despite a success such as Nissan should give us pause for thought. If direct investment of £2 billion, a plant employing 5,000 directly and a further 7,000 indirectly, cannot revitalise the city, we need to ask whether it can reach the national average level of GVA, wages and living standards while remaining its current size.

There's plenty of telling hints in there to chew on, but most significantly, what has business investing £2bn into one manufacturing plant got to do with GVA at a regional level?

It's obviously worked for Nissan - I read the other day that it's the most efficient car production plant in Europe - but why would anyone expect it to change the lives of anyone beyond the limited number of people working there? Who would expect one company, one decision, one plant and 12,000 jobs to suddenly change the entire fortunes of an area with at least 178,000 people?

Some of the report actually makes a lot of sense, and it isn't quite as reported as in the press, but then a lot of it is like the above and doesn't even seem to be coherent with its better points.

Worst of all it seems to set out with such dismal, inescapable failure in mind - that social disparities can't be resolved even on our comparatively tiny island. Ironically you'd be hard pushed to find such a defeatist attitude even in the places it sentences to death.

 

[mauvais]

I haven't finished reading it so I may refine my views, but I have to say I find the concept hilarious & offensive in equal measure.

It's extremely funny not least because these people don't appear to have ventured beyond the Watford Gap, never mind lived there and certainly not understood what people there actually want or even have. It's fair enough I guess - they might be eaten by dragons or get gravy on their suits. It's a good joke when Tory planners base their ideas around how the north was 'unlucky' to lose its manufacturing prosperity.

It's also pretty offensive simply because policy twonks actually believe this stuff, whether they say it or not, and make planning & funding decisions based on it. Contrary to what it says about regeneration investment, there isn't anything that compares to the money government & business ploughs into the South East. The main type of regeneration we get is by property developers and causes significantly more damage than good. That's not to say regeneration isn't working, but it works in spite of these things, not because of it.

If you take for example Manchester's Hulme, which was arguably the worst bit of Manc in the 80s - impossible to miss poverty. It's now been regenerated/yuppified into somewhere 'nice', but because the people have just been shifted out, the problem's rotated somewhere else - Longsight, Gorton, Moss Side to name a few. You can see this repeating now in Salford and elsewhere outside Manchester. It's the wrong kind of investment.

I don't see internal migration as the answer. There are better examples of working regeneration outside the UK - taking my limited knowledge of France as an example, Toulouse & its aviation/military-based turnaround worked, and Sofia Antipolis is another interesting case in Nice - this isn't to say there's no Paris/elsewhere divide. Here it seems to me that since or even before the Thatcher era the British have largely given up on any serious attempt to distribute sustainable prosperity around the country.

It strikes me that the report is very much something that began with someone's prejudices and tried to build a supporting theory. Instead of the brilliant idea of, err, moving everything to London, you could maybe look at sensible & sustainable investment, not just in specific regions but in the infrastructure it needs to survive like the rail network, but then that wouldn't fit the model.

Finally, on a rather lighthearted note, this is an interesting & very readable counter argument to much of these claims: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pies-Prejudice-Search-Stuart-Maconie/dp/0091910226

 

[bluestreak]

Thanks for that mauvais. I have to say that the idea of moving everywhere to London is not actually what they're saying, but I think it's something that they seem to be laying on thick at first, possibly in order to make people pay attention. However, you are right that they offer the free market as a solution. But then, of course, if you're a capitalist, the chances are that you don't believe that there is any other solution. Lots of us are attacking this plan from socialist viewpoints, but are there any capitalists on here who can attack it?

 

[elbows]

If we work on the basis that the North got a bit fucked because it was industrial heartland and we tried to move on to a post-industrial society, the I wouldnt look to London as a great place to be in future. Britain these days gets much of its GDP from the financial services industry, and if the looming recession hits that stuff hard, for a sustained period of time, London is goin to end up a lot poorer.

And if you believe that Britain is a 'knowledge economy' then geography surely becomes less important. Why crowd everyone together down south when Broadband connections are available up North?

So not only is this report silly, its also about 25 years too late.

Plus if flying becomes more of a luxury in future then whats to say there wont be something of a renaissance for ports and shipbuilding? OK the UK probably gave away its positon irretrievably when it comes to shipbuilding, but I would not rule out the idea that in general the future may have more in common with the past than many expect.

 

[lewislewis]

Everything in the UK is economically skewed towards the South-East of England. There was a recent report by Oxford Economics that showed every single region (& nation) in the UK is a net drain on the Chancellor except for the South-East including London, and that basically that area keeps the UK 'afloat'.

What a terrible idea it was to decimate the UK's industry and convert everything to services and finance etc.

Political power and UK government policies are also skewed to the South-East. In places like Wales & Northern England, if they force people on incapacity benefit or income support into poorly paid jobs they will have even less money to spend. It's a bizarre policy that doesn't even benefit capitalism apart from in those few areas where there are lots of jobs going.

- If the Scousers ever get pissed off with this I reckon we wouldn't mind making them the capital of North Wales. ; )

 

[nightbreed]

Well I live in the SE and I want to move to Liverpool. Its shit down here.

Have you ever been to Southampton or Portsmouth?

 

[mrkikiet]

It is slower to take
the direct train to Sunderland than to take the train to Newcastle, walk to the metro stop, and take the metro to Sunderland. By that time the Newcastle train will have reached Scotland.

this is slightly misleading. there is no time required to walk between the train and metro in newcastle, becasue the metro station is IN THE TRAIN STATION. you will get onto the platform for the metro quicker than you will get onto any platform at Kings Cross Underground.

I don't think you can deny that there is a massive brain drain from the north to the south. I can think of one friend that I grew up with who has remained in Newcastle, if you want a graduate job the south is where it is at.

 

[nino_savatte]

this is slightly misleading. there is no time required to walk between the train and metro in newcastle, becasue the metro station is IN THE TRAIN STATION. you will get onto the platform for the metro quicker than you will get onto any platform at Kings Cross Underground.

I don't think you can deny that there is a massive brain drain from the north to the south. I can think of one friend that I grew up with who has remained in Newcastle, if you want a graduate job the south is where it is at.

Er, don't you have to walk down the steps to the Metro station? It's not as though Metro trains leave from the surface platforms - is it?

 

[Jeff Robinson]

The Tory vermin are lower than lower than vermin (and then even lower than that). Drown them all now.

 

[rosa]

Sunderland suffers from very poor economic geography. It is a long way from most places. It is
not somewhere that outsiders consider a desirable place to live. Roy Keane, Sunderland Football
Club’s manager, commented on the difficulty of attracting good players to the Premiership club
despite offering equivalent wages to clubs in the South: “I find it surprising that geography seems to
play such a big part … Retire at 35 or 36, you can live wherever you bloody well like – London,
Monaco, wherever – and any half-decent footballer will be a multimillionaire anyway. Why is there
such a big attraction with London? It would be different if it was Chelsea, Arsenal or maybe
Tottenham, but when they go to a smaller club just because it’s in London, then it’s clearly because
of the shops.”

Sweet suffering Jesus, they're quoting Roy fucking Keane as an expert on the socioeconomic situation in the north-east? I wouldn't have got away with that in first-year economics, never mind publishing it in a supposedly serious policy report.

Plus if flying becomes more of a luxury in future then whats to say there wont be something of a renaissance for ports and shipbuilding?

i can't be arsed trying to find evidence for it cos it's 1.30am but i'm told that the docks in Liverpool are handling more freight now than in their 19th century 'heyday'.

 

[shagnasty]

But should it not be the choice of the people in sunderland etc to decide their future not some wealth prick who.s doesnt even know the areas and probablly only visited the once .what do they know

 

[behemoth]

While the headline sounds like nonsense, the government is already bulldozing northern neighbourhoods; just do a rightmove search for houses in places like Burnley. Northern cities were not always there, waiting for jobs to appear during the industrial revolution. My workplace is full of northern and Scottish graduates, and no amount of government intervention would ever persuade the company to move somewhere it don't want to be. Depopulation in places like Liverpool has been happening for decades.

 

[treelover]

tbh, I think internal migration of labour is a holy grail for most Gov'ts and i think we will increasingly see 'incentives' towards that goal.

 

[samk]

no amount of government intervention would ever persuade the company to move somewhere it don't want to be.

What effect do you thing doubling tax rates for businesses in the southeast and halving them in the rest of the country would have?

 

[behemoth]

What effect do you thing doubling tax rates for businesses in the southeast and halving them in the rest of the country would have?

It would have the effect of ensuring whoever did it would never win another election...ever.

 

[Fisher_Gate]

What effect do you thing doubling tax rates for businesses in the southeast and halving them in the rest of the country would have?

Probably minimal.

Despite the whingeing from the likes of the CBI and BCC, there's no evidence that tax rates have a significant effect on business location. Otherwise every business in the north west would relocate to the Isle of Man. There are other more important factors, like labour/land availability and proximity to market.