The Convention of the North last week had a ‘great buzz’, according to the Liverpool Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram. But would the excitement survive the keynote address from levelling up secretary Michael Gove?
With Everton set to play Newcastle that very night, there was a fair amount of football banter at the event in Liverpool. This Convention fixture had the potential to be a tricky one. But only a week after the publication of the heavily trailed Levelling Up White Paper, many of Mr Gove’s core messages seemed to be landing well with some of the leading voices from the North.
Introducing the secretary of state, Mr Rotheram emphasised the North is ‘starting to cohere around a single message and a single voice’. While he welcomed levelling up, he stressed that ‘you and your government can’t do it without us – we need to work in collaboration. Levelling up has to be about more than just shiny buildings’.
Mr Gove’s speech contained an admission that the ‘free play of market forces’ would result in ‘inequality growing, and in particular geographical inequality growing as well’. He said the North needed to be firmly where the action is if the UK wants to catch up with its competitors economically. He also confirmed an interest in at least ‘looking at’ devolving more fiscal powers locally on business rates and land value uplift.
Under plans unveiled in the White Paper, Greater Manchester Combined Authority will become a ‘trailblazer’ along with the West Midlands, with beefed-up powers. Mayor Andy Burham highlighted if not a complete meeting of minds then at least some common ground between himself and Mr Gove. ‘I was encouraged by what we’ve just heard from the secretary of state. He is talking a language I can relate to. It’s the delivery now that we need to see. Hopefully we will.’
He stated that the pandemic has hit the North harder than other areas of the country, ‘and that’s because of some of the underlying inequalities – it’s been a really tough two years for people and it will carry on being tough’. The priority is to ‘build more health in our homes and our workplaces, and in our communities’. One key issue concerns the move to new integrated health systems (ICSs), and whether the North can come up with a model that ‘really puts innovation at the heart of them’.
He continued: ‘Can we really cement the relationship between health and local government so we can address some of those inequalities in health that are in our communities?’ The mayor added: ‘Imagine if we could get more of our fair share of [research & development] funding into those ICSs, into our universities, then I think we could do something seriously innovative.’
He highlighted the drive to retrofit homes as a major opportunity to innovate, create good jobs for people, and improve health.
Cllr Richard Wearmouth is deputy leader of Northumberland CC and cabinet member on North of Tyne Combined Authority. He said education, skills and work are a critical to levelling up, ‘because if we don’t get education right in our most disadvantaged communities and our forgotten towns then ultimately the whole pack of cards on this will fall down’. A failure on this would mean ‘we won’t have brought about the deep-rooted and permanent change for these communities that we need’.
While there was undoubtedly agreement within his policy breakout group that the skills gap needs to be closed, the discussion did not result in much confidence that could be done from the top down – ‘we’ve done that for decades and it’s got us nowhere fast, or at all in some cases’.
In his view, a key task for Mr Gove and the metro mayors is to ‘break down those silos in government, and make sure that we get funding devolved’. He has seen what he calls a ‘real reluctance from the Department for Education to take their claws out of the cash and allow it to cascade down to the regional level’.
On transport, mayor of West Yorkshire Tracy Brabin said it was ‘really great to see the Government and the White Paper have a positive mission for a London-style transport network’. But she added, it’s difficult to believe the North is heading towards that ‘when we have an integrated rail plan that Steve Rotheram always says is sub-optimal and is not necessarily delivering what we need’.
She added: ‘We need those powers, we need that devolution. We need the Government to understand that if you do believe in levelling up then transport is absolutely at the heart of it.’
And the fundamental issue of what Centre for Progressive Policy co-director Zoe Billingham has called fiscal firepower hung over the Convention, in the wake of a White Paper that had no fresh funding to offer. The risks of what Ms Brabin called a ‘cycle of promises and no delivery’ are real ones.