Professor John Tomaney is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. Previously he was Henry Daysh Professor of Regional Development and Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), Newcastle University. He has published over 100 books and articles on questions of local and regional development and conducted research for organisations including UK Research Councils, government departments in the UK and elsewhere, the European Commission, the OECD and local and regional development agencies.
This interview was conducted on 27 April 2023.
Q: What was your role in growth and regional policy and economic geography over the past few decades?
I’m a Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at University College London, where I teach Urban and Regional Planning which I suppose indicates my interest in this topic. I’ve been involved in a range of organisations and debates over the years on this topic. I participated in the UK 2070 commission, which was chaired by Bob Kerslake; I’ve been trustee of a number of hyper-local type initiatives in the Northeast – Red Hill, where I’m chair of the trustees and, much more locally, I’m a chair of a small-scale social enterprise active in former mining villages in County Durham. I have an academic interest, but I’m also involved in a very local way in things that are going on which I think adds to my perspective
Q: When you look back, what do you think have been the key achievements over that period and what has been the recurrent frustrations?
In terms of the broad pattern of urban and regional inequalities, we’ve made very little impact on these over the period that you’ve talked about. We have very entrenched regional inequalities in some key respects and they’re worsening with a London and the South-East versus the rest pattern. It seems to me to be deeply entrenched and very difficult to shift.
If there has been a shift in terms of that broad static picture, I think it’s been the resurgence to some extent of northern city centres: Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and so on. I think that’s significant. But in many ways, that just adds an additional layer of geographical inequality into the picture. These changes are presented as potential drivers of regional development, but actually, in most of these cases, it’s very difficult to see how the growth that’s been captured in the city centres is getting very far beyond that. Certainly, thinking about some of the villages in Durham that I’ve been spending a lot of time in, the city centre is as far away as London, really. It’s very difficult for young people to access whatever opportunities might be being created in the centre of Newcastle if you live in Stanley or Bishop Auckland or whatever.
There’s some dynamism there. Much of it, of course, is property development. Although it’s often presented as tech or creative industries or whatever, a lot of it is property-based development of one kind or another. Obviously, there are certain kinds of economic activities that take place within these new commercial spaces, but they’re not necessarily that productive. A lot of it is retail, hospitality and so on.
What’s also important in these big northern cities, despite the appearance of private enterprise, is the role of the public sector, and that varies a bit between cities. It’s possible in Manchester that the private sector is playing a bigger role in what you see happening in the city centre; but in a place like Newcastle, for instance, very often the cranes you’re seeing on the skyline are heavily underpinned by public money, one way or another.
That’s my sort of broad take on the pattern of economic development that’s evolved over this period. That’s more or less been underpinned by policy. Certainly, the idea that cities drive economic development is obviously a very powerful one, not just in the UK, but internationally. I think the ideas of Ed Glaeser and people like that have been very influential in shaping the way in which policymakers think about these issues locally and nationally. Having said that, one of the problems – with the possible exception of Manchester – is that the depth of thinking locally about economic development in place in many cities and regions isn’t really there, and it’s a reactive policy rather than a strategy. Nevertheless, I think this idea that cities are where it’s at – ‘city centrism’ as one of my former colleagues has described it – is a key underpinning of policy. It’s been the framework within which a lot of this development is taking place across governments over this whole period. So even if Regional Development Agencies, for instance, were promoting ideas about innovation and industrial policy – ‘small i small p’ industrial policy – in practice a lot of what they were doing was fueling property development of one kind or another, particularly in the big cities. That’s my take on how the regional geographies shaped up and the policies shaped up. Obviously, I’ve simplified massively and there are all kinds of nuances that I would set out if I had 10 weeks to discuss it in my university course.
Q: You mentioned prevailing economic and policy trends, is there anything you want to add at the outset around politics and the pressures that led to those policy outcomes?
I think there’s been a large degree of consensus across parties about all of this. The main thing that’s changed is, post-2016, there’s been a bit more concern, a bit more urgency, about addressing the concerns of the left behind. The people who haven’t shared in the growth, which you can see. I think that’s raised a lot of questions about the nature of this economic development strategy. But I don’t think it’s really translated into an alternative policy framework yet. There’s little snippets of it here and there. There’s interesting ideas; but there isn’t a rethinking taking place that I can discern. There are some interesting ideas around, but there’s no rethinking on the part of the political class that I can really see. And I do participate in some of these debates, primarily in relation to things that are going on in the Labour Party, but I’ve been involved in things at different aspects of the political spectrum. Obviously the ‘levelling up’ agenda post-2019, on the face of it, sounds like a departure; but beyond a bit of rhetoric and a lengthy and at times the interesting white paper, it’s hard to see what changed that is affecting the world.
Locally, I’ve spent time in different parts of the country talking to economic development professionals, local politicians, business people. Again, it’s hard to identify very distinctive local economic models emerging, which stand outside of the broad story that I’ve told. You’ve got things like ‘community wealth building’ in Preston, but if you go there and you talk to people and you investigate it in any kind of depth, it’s quite hard to discern what it is that they’re doing there that is different it is from what you’ve done elsewhere beyond trying to procure more locally which is not really a model of a new way of organising the economy. It’s possibly quite a useful thing to do, but my sense is that there’s probably agreement that the old model was flawed. That it created in some ways a new set of problems. There isn’t much consensus about what an alternative to that would be.
Q: Two things happened in the period we’re looking at, a big macroeconomic shock, which particularly hits manufacturing in northern regions after 1979; and growth in knowledge and business services, where London is particularly well placed within the UK to take advantage of that. Did policy offset or reinforce those drivers of regional inequality?
De- industrialization is obviously not something that just happened in 1979 and after. There’s a long history. Back in 2001, when the Treasury produced a series of papers analysing the UK s productivity problem, there was one on regional productivity and it pointed out that the broad pattern of geographical inequalities in the UK was established in the end of war period with the collapse of traditional industries. You add the West Midlands to that with the collapse of the car industry in the 1970s. There’s a very long history to this, and I think sometimes that’s not sufficiently grasped.
I was thinking about this the other day in relation to County Durham when interviewing some people in a community centre in a village called Eldon, a tiny former mining village. Their opening gambit to me was that their village was assigned category D status in the 1951 Durham County Development Plan, which meant that the pit had already closed , and category D meant it was going to be starved of investment and services and the expectation would be that the village would die. So we’ve been struggling in certain parts of the country with these problems for a very long time.
There’s a long history of policy failure before 1979 to deal with some of these issues. Arguably things have got worse in relative terms since then. People now have central heating and carpets, but the sense that the gap between their lives and the lives of people in the centre of Newcastle just feels as if it’s gone wider. And this is all about feeling, about the affective nature of these processes, these are very powerful because they underpin political disenchantment. But also because they impinge on the policy responses. If you can’t persuade people in these places, who’ve had all sorts done to them in policy terms over many generations, that policy is of value, then you’re struggling in how you deal with these things.
The deindustrialization shock is huge, and we’ve been dealing with it for a very long time, and I think we’re nowhere near finding adequate solutions to it. Many of the solutions that we have come up with so far are just missing the target continually. On the knowledge-intensive business services argument, there’s clearly a way in which some of that growth can be captured by certain kinds of cities outside of London and the South. But the central difficulty is that it’s never going to be on a sufficient scale to address these underlying problems. In a sense, they exacerbate. The more successful you are in concentrating knowledge-intensive business services in city centres, the more you widen gaps with the surrounding areas. There are fragments of interesting ideas around about what you do about that, but I don’t see that’s really being taken up in any sort of serious, analytical way. How do you use that growth in city centres to stimulate development outside of the city centres? Is that growth in those city centres ever going to be on a scale that would allow that to be a realistic strategy?
Q: And you think policy may have made those drivers worse?
In some respects, they have. Manchester is a place I’ve looked at in a bit of detail. What you get is this explosion of development in the city centre. Cranes on the skyline. But the content of that development is often less impressive on closer analysis than it appears at first sight. A lot of it’s not knowledge-intensive business services; or its activities counted as that, but on closer inspection fall very far short of any realistic definition of what those things are. A lot of it is adding residential stock to a city region which already has a lot of vacancies. So what problem is it solving? The main sort it plays is underpinning a story about urban regeneration which doesn’t bear that close analysis. That’s not to underestimate what’s being achieved. One of the problems about raising these issues is that as soon as you start to raise these issues you’re accused of undermining efforts to promote urban regeneration. Clearly, some good things have happened and people have benefited. But in terms of fixing the deep problems you raise, I think we need some rethinking.
Q: If you look at the pattern of votes in the 2016 referendum you referred to, there’s a very clear city-urban versus non-city town, as well as urban-rural area divide across all parts of the country. But economically the big divide is less between cities and towns and more that Manchester and the North West, Newcastle and the Northeast are so behind London and the South-East. What are your views on that?
I agree with Phil McCann’s analysis. This idea that London and the South has ‘decoupled’ – I think that’s the phrase he uses – from the rest of the economy. You don’t have to go very far from the centre of Newcastle to find communities which are in desperate straits. Within the city itself, its just a 10-minute walk. I’m not over-selling what’s happened in the centre of Newcastle. The same is true in Manchester or Leeds. The big divide is between London and the South and the rest. I teach in London, so every time I raise these issues, I have lots of students in my classes who say, ‘Yes, but have you been to Tower Hamlets?’ I show them the difference between North and South Kensington. But the options you have to deal with the problems of Tower Hamlets outside of Canary Wharf or North Kensington are very different because of the level of wealth that you have close by. If you live in Hartlepool, what is the solution? There isn’t a dynamic or a wealthy economy nearby that you can plug into. I agree with McCann and the implication of what you’ve just said: that the big issue is a regional divide in Britain. I agree that that towns versus cities thing doesn’t quite work.
Q: So there’s something cultural or political in the cities v towns debate which isn’t reflected in the economic numbers?
It’s become a political discourse, towns versus cities, and I think it precludes a better understanding of the dynamics. It’s actually a regional problem. But you have a political counter-narrative, for reasons I don’t fully understand, which is trying to suggest that the issue is about cities versus towns. The Centre for Cities, for instance, is a really good example of a place which really wants to disavow the idea that there’s a regional dimension to this problem because its whole agenda is about the city.
Q: What do you think are the main investment levers to focus on?
Obviously I’m not against investment in R&D and innovation and the creative economy, which are central policy targets terms at the moment; but they don’t do anything for the places which are most left behind. What’s missing from the debate is a focus on what Rachel Reeves called, in a good pamphlet that she wrote a few years ago, the ‘everyday economy’.
There was an idea that we put some big science facility in the north, and this will be the solution to the problem. Fine. Try. Go ahead and do that. But if you’re in Eldon, where I was the other day, the major complaint is that you can’t get a bus after six o’clock in the evening. Even if you were to invest massively in R&D in the nearby places or any other kind of major economic activity, it wouldn’t be of any use to large numbers of people in that village because they couldn’t get there. They become very car dependent places and are massively hit by rising energy prices, disproportionately in some respects.
It’s in this sphere of the everyday economy where I think we need a plan. The everyday economy exists everywhere, but it’s disproportionately important in those places which are most cut off from the centres of growth, the places where high-productivity industries are not located. This is the germ of truth in the community wealth-building idea or the foundational economy. Rachel Reeves dabbled in it a bit, when she was in exile from the front bench. Now she’s the Shadow Chancellor, I’m not hearing as much about it as I did a few years ago. There’s a little bit of it that creeps into Lisa Nandy’s book, a germ of truth in what she’s getting at, around the agenda of building assets, supporting high-quality local services, that provide very basic things well. Not advanced things. Very basic things, like bus services. You hear this a lot when you’re in these villages: the problem is the buses don’t run here, or it takes me two hours to get to a hospital appointment in Bishop Auckland. It’s not rocket science to fix this stuff, but it would make a big difference to the quality of life, the well-being, of people in those places in a very short space of time.
To some extent, the Tories were on at this in 2019 with the levelling up agenda. They haven’t done anything much about it, but they were identifying stuff that was important. It’s in that space where I think policy has been lacking. If people developing an alternative to the current model don’t have things to say about that, any talk about addressing the productivity problem, high tech, investment in R&D, it’ll just go over people’s heads. The other thing that the Tories had lots to say about a few years ago was the whole ‘High Street’ agenda. Again, this is not something which is at the centre of economic development policy, but it makes a big difference if people see investment in their local high streets. It lifts their mood. This is something that I’m seeing in some of the organisations that I’m involved in: quite small-scale things can have quite big impacts. They’re not necessarily hugely expensive to do, and they’re not solving the fundamental productivity problems. Without bringing people on board, showing that policy is making a difference to their lives, you’re never going to be in the position to bring them around to these bigger questions. That’s the conclusion I’ve arrived at.
Q: Those big economic shocks were not unique to the UK and were common across the OECD. Are there places that have done this better? What could the UK have learned from them?
I’m very interested in what’s going on in the US under Biden. The Inflation Reduction Act needs careful consideration and evaluation. Among the projects I’m working on is an ESRC funded project looking at the problems of left-behind places comparing France, Germany and the UK. All of these countries have left behind places, they all share similar challenges, but the context within which those challenges play out, are very different. In France, it’s very much about the accelerated decline of rural France. In Germany, you’ve got the problem of the East. Also the deindustrialising places in the West as well. What’s different in terms of how this plays out really reflects the structure of the state in those places.
If I was looking for examples of places which have managed these processes better than us, it’s a bit of a cliche to say it’s Germany but if you look at the way in which, for instance, the restructuring of coal and steel was done in the Ruhr compared to the way it was done in the North-East of England, there’s huge differences. I’m not saying that everything about Germany is perfect and everything about Britain is terrible, but there are lessons to be learned about how you can manage that process actively in a way in which I think is more effective.
The way in which you deal with what I called earlier these affective dimensions, the way people feel about things, is really important. So left behind is not just a material condition, it’s an affective one. People think that nobody cares about them. Nobody listens to them. Nobody considers their feelings, their history. Deborah Mattison’s book on the Red Wall has a section where she says people in Stoke feel really aggrieved that they’re no longer the world’s centre of pottery. Maybe not everybody, but large numbers of people do. You find that in the North- East and former coal mining communities. If your past is being trashed and disrespected, I think that’s part of what feeds this sense of resentment. Dealing with the basic fabric of the place, the built environment, essential services, getting those right is important because it’s about dealing with the things that matter in people’s lives. The Germans, for instance, did a lot more about protecting the historic built environment that was associated with the old industries than we did here. An organisation like the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation, which in some ways personified the approach to this which was ‘demolish everything’. It wasn’t because it had to be demolished to facilitate new forms of development, it was because it symbolised an old world that had to be erased. I think there’s something in all of this that we have to think about in terms of economic development policy. I’m not advocating a programme of nostalgia, I’m just saying that you’ve got to find ways of bringing people with you, otherwise, they just disengage from the whole process even from efforts to regenerate the places that they live in.
For instance, somewhere like Bishop Auckland, you’ve got a private philanthropist who’s investing millions and millions in the town; and the level of scepticism locally that we find when we interview people there about what’s going on is extraordinary. You’d think people would be welcoming with open arms this investment, but many of the criticisms they’re making are pretty reasonable, This is not for us. Oh, he’s opening restaurants we can’t afford to eat in. He doesn’t listen to us when we tell him it’s not going to work. These sorts of problems are not around the periphery. They’re absolutely at the centre of the problem of what you do about these places.
Q: Earlier you presented a narrative overwhelmingly of continuity from the 1980s to today and consistency across the core thinking of governments. Are there moments that you would want to draw out of evolution and change over time, across either different administrations or as the policy challenge has changed?
I’m always in danger of overemphasising continuity because I live in an academic world which fetishizes the latest thing. I get papers to review about the latest policy initiative a and I’m thinking, ‘Why am I even sitting here reviewing this because it will probably not be here in two years time – and what have we learned as a result of your very detailed study of this topic?’ When you step back and take the bigger picture, it’s harder to see what the differences are.
Obviously, having said that, one important difference is ‘devolution’. I use the term very advisedly because the level of political power that’s being devolved is very limited. The significance of it can be easily overstated. Hence the inverted commas. But it is significant. It is a response to a longstanding critique, which is that you can’t legislate local economic development from Whitehall. You need institutions at the appropriate scale to create genuine local economic development policy as opposed to creating institutions which are rolling out nationally determined policies. I think that’s significant, although its significance is frequently overstated.
I think it’s clearly a very immature set of institutions. I’ve been watching the stuff which has come out recently about what’s going on Teesside – the more you read, the more horrific it sounds, and I suspect there’s more to be said about it. These are institutions which are deeply flawed. Part of the problem they face is that they have to oversell what they’re doing in order to justify their existence and the argument for additional resources, which is really what’s needed in order to have genuine local economic development policies.
Going back to the difference between asking what lessons are to be learned from other places, one of the chief lessons that I would learn from Germany, and I’m summarising here because I know there’s a lot of criticisms of the German system: the existence of strong sub-national structures of government is really an important ingredient in assisting this more active management of deindustrialization, which has occurred in some parts of Germany. Deindustrialization is probably not the right word to describe Germany, obviously, but I’m thinking of places that we’re looking at in the Ruhr in particular. The fact that you had strong institutions which had an intimate knowledge and the resources to act in those places was, generally, a good thing. When you have very weak and thin and immature institutions, they’re very easily captured by local elites, which is essentially what you’re seeing on Teesside at the moment and which you can use for very self-serving purposes. We’re at an early stage, but I think there’s a lot of promise in terms of what devolution can deliver; but it will have to start delivering stuff very quickly before it’s just seen as yet another thing that’s been done to places without really delivering much.
Q: Do you think there has been a lot of change over the period or consistency?
I’m a massive supporter of devolution. I’m also a supporter of RDAs , but of course, they didn’t last beyond 2010. That was a signal, really, wasn’t it, that you have a trend, and around that trend, you have developments. You have the creation and destruction of all kinds of organisations and policy frameworks, and this churn, I think, is part of the problem now.
One of the problems about living in an elective dictatorship is that governments just come in and decide what they’re going to rip up from what’s been established by the previous government. On the RDAs, the central argument of the Tories was that they haven’t achieved anything. We’ll they had, they only existed for 10 years, and they were dealing with problems that had taken a century to accumulate, so why would you have expected them to have made significant difference in that time? They should have been given longer. Certainly, there were probably things the RDAs were doing which they might not have been usefully employing their resources on. You could have adapted their structures to give them a more appropriate focus.
Q: The alternative view is that they were disconnected from elected local communities, and that was a flaw?
You could have dealt with that. What did over 10 years was create institutions that were building up knowledge, building up expertise and then destroyed them. You know, what’s the point? And you replace them with these things called LEPs, which are pretty useless, and are, as far as I can see, for the chop now.
Certainly, within institutional structures, there’s a lot more stability than we’ve had. We need these institutions to grow in power and strength over time. They need to be accountable to the places in which they’re acting. That, to me, is an absolutely critical ingredient of dealing with these issues in the longer run.
Q: Is the mayoral combined authority the right model, rather than trying to go back to more kind of regional government?
I’m a bit sceptical about the Mayoral model. I’m watching it very closely on Teesside, and it seems to me there that what’s happening there is revealing all the doubts that some people have had about that model, with power concentrated in one individual who lacks sufficient accountability and isn’t really subject to scrutiny. I think there’s a problem there that needs to be fixed. On the other hand, in other places, you can say the mayors are doing a reasonable job: Andy Street in Birmingham and the West Midlands – there seems to be a wide agreement that he’s doing a pretty good job. So, it’s not a party political thing. England, to me, needs a proper system of regional government, but it’s not something I’m going to die in a ditch for. Well, not again anyway.
Q: Do you think that local governments could be doing more to support that local economic regeneration, or are those functions that are best held at a regional level?
Well, one of the biggest arguments against devolution is the variable quality of local government – it’s a really big problem and it’s often an exceptionally large problem in the places where the problems are greatest. I’m looking at it from the point of view of the interviews that I’ve been doing recently in County Durham. In principle, of course we need stronger, more autonomous local government, better resourced; but you look at the personnel that exist on the ground and their ability to think critically and act effectively and that’s the flaw in the argument. In the Department for International Development, which of course no longer exists, we talked about programmes for capacity building. I look at some local authorities across England, and that’s what’s needed – capacity building.
Q: There’s no doubt that back, in 1997, Tony Blair’s experience dealing with Durham County Council did not make him predisposed to thinking he wanted to give more power to local government?
It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Somehow we’ve got to get beyond that because without strong local government, we can’t do any of these things. So that’s an area where we need action. I see a lot of good stuff coming out about enabling councils from the think tanks in London and I agree with it all. It’s the same with community wealth-building. How do you do that is a big question. It’s something that I’m thinking a lot about and trying to do stuff about in County Durham. It’s not easy because you’re just seen as being unhelpful by raising these issues. It’s just got to be done very delicately. Trying to build a coalition around this is painfully slow.
Q: How about capacity in Whitehall? Often the academic community talks about Whitehall and Westminster in an amorphous way, whereas the people who have worked in it see it as being much more variegated. What is your view of Whitehall ministers and the civil servant’s attitude towards this agenda and to devolution?
There’s obviously variegation and things change over time. I think probably there is a shift occurring in the direction of seeing devolution as part of the solution rather than as a problem that has to be dealt with by Whitehall. Beyond that, over the course of the history of the modern British state, centralization has been the order of the day. Even in local authorities, where they have the power to act, autonomously or independently, they don’t really know how to do this. It’s more than just Whitehall clinging to power. It is deeply rooted.
There’s a long history to this, and the best thing that I ever read about it, is a book called Territory and Power which talks about why England is so centralised. Under centralisation there was a degree to which, at the local level, you were just allowed to get on with things as long as you didn’t interfere with anything that the central state deemed as important, like, taxes and things like that. It was Thatcher who really disrupted that.
Q: Are you saying that despite the chopping and changing of recent decades – we’re in an era where there might be more consensual support for more devolution?
I support the efforts that are being made to devolve. I think the obstacles are high, but I support the efforts. The pace of movement is very slow, and it’s hard for people to see that it’s making much of a difference. We have the North of Tyne Combined Authority here, about to be extended to include the rest of the North-East minus Teesside. Most people don’t even know that there is a combined authority. They don’t know who the mayor is. The ones who do are not struck by him. We’re in danger – if we don’t accelerate the pace of change and also fix some of the early problems we have created a system which is already just another layer of government which people are cynical about, to add to the existing layers. And the opportunities and the promise of it will not be achieved.
Q: That argues for acceleration?
Yes, we need more of it but we need some risk-taking and we need to value it.
Q: If you look back on the period we’ve been talking about, what do you think is the one thing that has happened that’s a real positive thing to celebrate? And what is the one really frustrating thing which we should regret?
The one thing to be positive about, from a conceptual point of view, is the extension of an understanding of economic development to mean more than just raising productivity. I think it’s really significant. If you look at a place like County Durham, one of the bottom-line social indicators is that people are dying earlier, we have a rate of male suicide twice that of London. Economic development has got to be concerned with that and I think increasingly it is.
The thing that has disappointed me is that the pace and manner of devolution is undermining the case for change. It’s a necessary if not sufficient condition for dealing with these problems. Over 40 years, most of my adult life, the complete failure to deal with the problems of the most disadvantaged places is something which is deeply depressing. Despite occasional signs of progress, things are getting worse, particularly around health conditions, antisocial behaviour and the decaying fabric of communities. That’s despite the best efforts of fantastic organisations, some of which I’m involved with, and which signal the way forward for interventions at the hyper-local level. I think an incoming Labour government has got to have an agenda around what Rachel Reeves previously called the everyday economy and start showing delivery on that very quickly.
ENDS