Steve Fothergill is an economist working at Sheffield Hallam University. Most of Steve’s work has been within the field of urban and regional development, particularly in the UK context, including studies of cities, rural areas, coalfields and seaside towns.
This interview was conducted on 22 September 2021.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your role?
I really have been around in this area for a very long time, and I’ve written on all sorts of aspects of UK regional development, labour markets, different sorts of places, coalfield cities, rural areas, seaside towns – you name it I’ve been there at one time or another. But the academic side is only a part of me, because, since the late 1980s, I’ve also occupied a position outside academia. From 1988 onwards, I was the national director of something called Coalfield Communities Campaign, which is the Association of the local authorities in former mining areas. At that time they weren’t former, some of them were still alive and kicking. As an officer, not as an elected member, I’ve led the efforts to regenerate the former mining areas. I also remain the national director of the successor body to the community campaign, an organisation called the Industrial Communities Alliance, which represents the local authorities in Britain’s older industrial areas. With that hat on, I’ve been deeply involved in lobbying on local and regional economic development as well, not least talking to cities and local growth units over months and years. Over the years, I have had dialogue with lots of the key players on all of this.
Q: I wonder if you could give us a big picture of your sort of overall assessment of regional growth and development policy over the last 40 year or longer?
Well for a start, I don’t think you can think about this just in terms of the last 40 years because British regional economic policy goes back much further than that. I mean, the first steps in that direction were made in the 1930s, and we had quite strong and active regional policy in the immediate post-war years. Then again in the 1960s and ’70s, this has been an ongoing saga.
Britain really invented regional policy; I think that would be fair to say. Look the big picture, it’s an extraordinarily extremely simple one, in that the original economic base of many parts of Britain has fundamentally been destroyed. The old industries, the industries that underpinned the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th century, coal, the textile industry, large parts of steel industry have gone as well, heavy engineering, shipbuilding. These have gone and they’ve gone from particular places. From really the interwar years, that began to create, serious regional inequalities. We’ve had successive iterations of urban and regional policy, which ultimately, I suppose, have been addressing the long-term consequences of that fundamental decline. The reason for being in some places, simply disappeared. The coal mining communities only existed because of coal mining, in many instances, and their reason for being went.
Taking the grand view again, if you look over that long period of time, we’ve probably made very substantial progress. The former mining areas or the older industrial towns becoming complete ghost towns. It’s not the sort of phenomenon which I understand affects certain parts of the United States where in a mining town the coal mine closed and all the population disappeared. There is still a fundamental underlying economic weakness in many of the places we’re talking about because we’ve always been running hard to catch up. We never quite got there, despite all the best efforts of regional economic policy, which I think the evidence suggests has been positive. Different initiatives more positive than others, we’ve never eliminated the fundamental problems of unemployment, worklessness, lower productivity, employment etc. So, you’ve still got the inequalities there, which over my working life in this field are not actually fundamentally different in terms of scale from perhaps what they were when I started in this field in the mid-1970s. But had we not had all those efforts, things would have been a lot worse in the less prosperous parts of the country in many respects.
The biggest single achievement of British regional policies has been to stabilise the population distribution. I think if you have not had all of this effort, you really would have had much more large-scale population migration out of the North and much more going down to southern England. It has happened up to a point. I mean, you have had that with Britain’s population structure – places that were big in the early 20th century in northern Britain are now still pretty big, but I’m not negative about what’s been achieved overall, but it’s been a long slog.
Q: One of the interesting success stories is the convergence in regional unemployment rates that. What’s your view on that?
Be careful of the numbers. One of the main effects of job loss in old industrial Britain has been to divert people out of the labour market altogether and to hide a great deal of the unemployment. A lot of people who don’t know about what’s been going on the labour market look at the sort of low unemployment data and think, oh, it isn’t actually that bad. But look at the wider numbers out-of-work on benefits particularly, extraordinarily large numbers out-of-work on incapacity benefits, people of working age out of the labour markets on the sick.
Now, if you go back to the late 1970s, we had about 750,000 people, adults of working age, out of the labour market on incapacity benefits. Now that rose to a peak of 2.7 million out of work on incapacity benefits in the early 2000s, and it’s still at 2.3 million people, out of the labour market on those benefits. Now I’m not saying all that increase is hidden unemployment, but a substantial chunk of it is. When you look at the geography of where it is, it’s sort of self-evidently a problem of the weaker local economies. The places where the economy is strong, you get incapacity claimant rates of 2-4%. In the places where the economy is weak, you’ve got incapacity claimant rates of 8-10%. At one time it was even higher than that, 15% of all adults of working age, out of the labour market on the sick.
But don’t get obsessed by the unemployment figures alone. These people are neither counted in the claimant unemployment data, because they’re not on unemployment benefits, nor are they picked up in the labour force survey measure of unemployment because most of them give up looking for work, because they think, I’m never going to get a job around here. I’m 55, I’ve got health problems, I’m done for in the labour market, is the thinking. Then when they don’t look for work, they don’t qualify on the ILO unemployment criteria. So never get the impression that actually the worklessness problem has been solved. I mean, the claimant unemployment differentials may have narrowed, but even now the average out-of-work claimant rates in large parts of older industrial Britain is sort of, it’s around about 12-13% mark. So, it’s one in eight of all adults of working age out of the labour market on benefits. Yeah. I’ve done a lot of work on all of this and spent a lot of public money researching the phenomenon.
Q: Looking back to when you were starting your work on the scene, what did you expect to happen? What was your prediction about where areas could get to, and how’s that been borne out?
I never started off thinking that some of these old industrial areas in Britain, the weaker economies are irredeemable basket cases. They’re not. I mean, even when I started, there was plentiful evidence from the experience of very successful regional economic policies in the immediate post-war years and in the ’60s, that regional economic policy does work. It does bring jobs to these places that otherwise wouldn’t have been there. There was some classic work done in the 1970s by a pair of Cambridge economists who ultimately became my great friends, Nicky Kaldor and John Rhodes, on the evaluation of regional policy, which very convincingly demonstrated that several 100,000 more jobs were now located in the development areas, because of regional economic policy. Yeah, it works. So, I didn’t think, ‘Oh I’m looking at something which is a basket case on a never-ending downward spiral.’ No, no, no. In truth, that has not actually proved to be the case. They’ve not been on that never-ending downward spiral.
Q: What would you say is the right unit of analysis for this question?
Local economies operate at the sub-regional scale. So that’s a scale that’s not at the standard statistical region level, but it’s bigger than local authorities. So it makes sense to look at things, look at Greater Manchester as a whole maybe, or South Yorkshire as a whole, rather than individual boroughs within the Greater Manchester. Some categories, like Yorkshire and the Humber, in terms of a functional economic region, don’t make a lot of sense. The standard statistical region disguises a big contrast between on the one hand, say South Yorkshire, which isn’t actually doing very well overall and has got big problems, and on the other hand, North Yorkshire, which on many statistics, frankly, looks like a piece of southern England outside London, it’s just as good as. So sub-regions are the way to go.
Q: Do you think that the rise of London and the relative success of London has helped or hindered the rest of the country?
Right now, let’s again take the long view on what’s been happening to London. When I started in this game, London was seriously on the skids in terms of population and unemployment. Indeed, that was true of all of the big cities, they were the major centre of job loss. I did a lot of work, government-funded work indeed, on what was then called the urban-rural shift. The movement of jobs away from the cities towards, towns and more rural areas. Bear in mind that London turned around about the early ’90s – about ’92, ’93ish, London’s turnaround comes. It was still on the skids in population terms, right through the ’80s. It was about seven million people, just about 6.9, I think it was the lowest it got. It’s now up to about nine million. It had fallen from nine million, at the end of the 1930s. Nine million down to seven, back up to nine again. That’s roughly the trajectory of London.
The other big cities, incidentally, turned around a little bit later. Around about the beginning of the 2000s. I could go on at length about what probably underpins that turnaround in both cases but let’s not go there for the moment, because it’s not quite what you’re asking. But you’re asking, has that been good news or bad news? Well, in terms of measured regional inequalities in Britain, it’s widened the gap. Especially over the decade, 2010 to 2020, the cities have really begun to pull ahead massively from smaller places. London’s growth in the last decade prior to the pandemic has been truly spectacular in terms of job growth. I look at the numbers and absolutely, wow. But what has this done for the rest of the country? The answer is, well, in tax terms, I suppose, helped the exchequer and all of that. But in terms of the geography, it’s not done a great deal, because London’s expanding demand for labour has principally been met, this is all pre-pandemic, by massive inflow of migrant workers from outside the UK and to a lesser extent, by rising economic activity rates amongst the London population, more women working particularly, by more commuting in from the surrounding areas.
It’s had no positive impact on much of northern and midland Britain. There’s an article by myself and Tina Beatty in Regional Studies. I think it’s a 2020 article, about 18 months old, which documents all of this and the labour market adjustments of the last decade or so. I’m not making this up. These are hard numbers that I’m talking about here in terms of what’s going on. London’s growth has been great for some Londoners at least, I know it’s got problems with lots of others. London has become detached in some respects economically, and in the labour market terms from much of the rest of the economy beyond the South East of England.
Q: So that’s interesting to hear that you don’t think it’s had benefits. It’s also interesting to hear implicitly that you don’t think it’s had a cost on the rest of the country. I mean, one other possible view is that London’s growth has come at the expense of the rest of the country. Do you agree with that view?
Yeah, I mean, areas that are growing tend to attract more investment. Not least investment in bricks and mortar in London for example. Yeah, so in that sense, London’s growth has sucked in a disproportionate share of investment over recent years. Certainly, that’s the case with some aspects of public sector investment. The scale of public spending on something like Crossrail is colossal compared with the much more modest sums spent on comparable infrastructure investments in the North of England or Scotland and Wales. There has been a crowding out in that sense. It’s become detached, I was meaning it’s become detached from the way the labour market dynamics have operated.
Once upon the time, you would have got growth in London sucking in northerners, but that tap was turned off. I was one of the first to identify it. The guy called Bob Rowthorn, who you might have come across, he’s a really good Cambridge economist who first identified this in an article he must have written 10 years ago or more, he noted that net internal migration in Britain had stopped being from north to south. It had come to a halt and that London’s growth has been fuelled, was being facilitated, by international migration. In that sense London’s growth has no longer been jobs for people elsewhere in the country.
Q: When we think about the different ingredients for regional growth and development, we can think about things like skills, human capital, infrastructure, transportation, investment in business clusters, industrial policy and R&D. Do you think we’ve had the balance roughly right?
Growing jobs is the key. Sometimes the answers to your questions may be in the detail of what exactly the initiatives were, what we’re talking about, because there were good and bad investments in infrastructure. There are good and bad methods of trying to support business as well. If you want to want to understand what’s happening in the UK regional economy, it’s the economy stupid. It’s jobs and businesses that drive the system. If you look at parts of the country that have a really rather lower proportion of the population who are graduates, let’s say, or highly skilled workers, you can’t blame that on the nature of the population. What actually happens in those places is, if they’ve got a weak economy, the highly skilled people move elsewhere to work.
The Welsh valleys, for example, have a very low proportion of graduates and it’s not because the schools are appalling or the raw material going into them is appalling. You go off to university from the Welsh valleys and you’ll never come back, because there’s nothing to come back to in the Welsh valleys. You end up in cities in England or wherever it might be, where there are graduate-level job opportunities. I don’t buy into the argument of blaming the victim of saying, ‘Oh, your problem is you’re all thick in that area or you’re poorly qualified.’ No, no, no. The driving factor is the strength of the local economy. I think you might find my views differ there from one, from Henry Overman in particular, if you spoke to Henry at LSE, he has a radically different view on things. But I think he’s wrong.
Q: Some take the view – upskill the workforce, build the infrastructure and the business will come. What do you think of that?
I don’t buy into that. I mean certainly there is an element of a feedback loop: certain sorts of businesses do need to be able to access certain sorts of skills to make it worthwhile them locating in some places. But if you train people up in some high-level technical things, nanotechnology, whatever, I have a daughter who’s a nanotechnologist, it doesn’t mean to say the nanotechnology jobs are going to come to where that person is, that person is going to go to where the nanotechnology jobs are. That’s the way that labour markets work, particularly because the migration, the flexibility and fluidity in the labour market, particularly occurs among high-skilled workers. These are the people who move around, young, higher-skilled workers. The people who don’t move around, or find it less easy to move around, are those with lower skills and particularly those who are getting on a bit in years who put down very strong roots in places. I don’t rule out the fact that, let’s say an investor wants to build something in the Welsh valleys or in North East England, that they should be helped. Make sure that the local colleges and so on are providing the skills, the workforce that they need for that those particular activities. But just training people for stock without growing the businesses to absorb people, I think is starting at the wrong end of everything.
Q: What specific policy interventions do you think are successful in growing those businesses, then?
I’m quite a fan of various forms of selected financial assistance or, it comes under lots of names, investment aid. Making it worthwhile under what were EU state aid rules, which are now about to become UK subsidy control rules, making it worthwhile for firms to invest in less prosperous areas. Making it worthwhile for Nissan to stay in Sunderland, rather than open up some plant in Slovakia or whatever else might be the alternative. That’s a useful activity, but equally, and this is where the devil is in the detail, down this list of what works and what doesn’t, I’m not particularly a fan of blanket subsidies, you end up with a lot of deadweight. You’re throwing around too much money. But selective controlled assistance is a good idea to businesses. Just one form of support. I’m also a fan of land and property development. It’s a precondition to having jobs in places, and the market doesn’t always work, the private sector market doesn’t always work to deliver business space in the places you want.
Q: It’s a coordination failure, right?
No, it’s a gap funding problem. There’s a need for gap funding. The economics just don’t stack. The cost of bringing forward the development is greater than the cost of the completed development. So, the private sector doesn’t do it. So, you will find that in large parts of old industrial Britain, places like the Welsh valleys, where the private sector simply won’t touch speculative office or commercial floor space because they can’t make it work. It then becomes a vicious cycle, because once you haven’t got that floor space, then firms that look around and want something that they can occupy pretty quickly and expand into, there’s nothing for them. Yeah. I once wrote a book about all this property and industrial development stuff.
Q: I’m interested in the distinction you’ve made between, say, the 1990s enterprise zones and the ’80s enterprise zones. What makes an enterprise zone work well?
When they first dreamed of enterprise zones, they thought – and this was Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine in the early 1980s, around 1983ish – they just put lines around the map and said, in these particular disadvantaged areas, you have all these sorts of incentives. Now the incentives are worthwhile, but they’re only worthwhile when you get the preconditions right. For a site development to take off and for businesses to come in, you’ve got to make sure there’s good access, the site has got to be cleared and developed, ready for development with all the utilities, and so on. The ’80s experience of enterprise zones was very iffy. By the time you get to the second-generation enterprise zones in the ’90s, I think they’ve learned some of the lessons and they realised, put your lines around the map once something is ready to take off.
One of the great success stories, which is quite close to where I’m based, was in the Don Valley in South Yorkshire, part of the old Yorkshire coalfield, where they gave it enterprise zone status. The new access roads were coming on stream, the old sites have been cleared and were now ready for use and development, and it really took off. There were many thousands of new jobs created in the Don Valley enterprise zone. The fault with the newest generation of enterprise zones is that the incentives are very weak indeed, compared with the old ones. There was some serious heft behind the old incentives, you’ve got 100% capital allowances for investment in building. You got 10-year rate free holidays. Now the rate free is a deduction that isn’t very much in terms of your rate bill in the new interactive enterprise zones. The EZs are really a marketing tool now, it’s a badge, rather than a genuinely powerful economic incentive. Yeah, so that’s how it’s evolved. The enterprise areas which come into all of this, which were the Labour thing in the middle period, though they’ve still got that enterprise word in them they were not really like enterprise zones, they were something quite different and frankly, ill-conceived. I would blame your colleague Ed Balls, because I think they were his idea, but I mean, enormous dead weight, they didn’t go very far or last very long.
Q: One of the big critiques of opportunity zones in the US, which have been conceived in a somewhat similar way to enterprise zones in the UK, is that they’re mostly subsidising investment that would have happened anyway.
This is my criticism of any sort of non-discretionary financial incentive to investment. It is better to evaluate each potential investment on its merits. If a firm wants 15 million to expand a plant, you ask the question, well would you have done this anyway? Make your case that, if you don’t do it here, would you be doing this in Slovakia or in China or whatever? You’re saving a lot of public money. Huge amounts of public money were wasted at one point in time when we had automatic public grants. I’m thinking back to 1970s when some of the investment that went in associated with the North Sea oil industry happened to be in areas where you were eligible for automatic grants. But that investment couldn’t have gone anywhere else other than the Shetlands because that’s where the oil came into. So, the oil companies were thinking, thanks very much, that’s £100 million. Discretionary grants, I think are the way forward in terms of direct support for business investment. A little bit different when it comes to enterprise zones or enterprise areas. Clearly, you do want to send a signal in terms of, ‘Come here and you will get help.’ But more generally, with business investment and the big amounts of money, serious amounts of money you don’t allow Nissan to automatically get 10 or 50 million quid or whatever, you have to get it to make its case. Then you judge whether or not it’s a sensible investment.
Q: What’s your take on how you navigate the relationships between different areas within a sub-region? So, the political version of the question is, do you focus on Sheffield, or do you focus on Doncaster? Do you go for a city-led strategy, or is there something else?
No, it’s horses for courses. Cities have particular strengths and disadvantages, whereas the converse is often true in smaller places. I mean, one of the great advantages that smaller places can offer is that they’ve got lots of land for development. You couldn’t hope to want some of the massive Amazon sheds that have been going up in recent years in the heart of the big cities. They’ve gone up in the Darlingtons and the Doncasters, Peterboroughs and places like that.
On the other hand, if your business is something which relies a lot on networking with other similar businesses, then city centres, or urban areas, are often the better location. If you need to draw on an exceptionally large pool of labour, generally from a city centre you’ve got potential –you can pull in people from all over the place – whereas out in a smaller place, you might not be able to do that to the same extent.
That maybe applies if you’re really going for certain specialist labour in particular. There’s an article of mine in Cambridge Journal of Regional Economics, CJRES regional economics society, one I did with Donald Houston, about 2015 or thereabouts, which sets out all of these arguments about what’s good for cities, and what sort of activities are best in cities and what sort of activities are best outside. To some extent, what we’ve been observing in the relative growth of cities versus smaller places over the years actually is the extent to which different sectors of the economy have been driving the growth. I mean, there’s work recently done by Champion and Townsend on what’s been going on in the cities, what underpins their good performance over the last 10 years. And yeah, a lot of that is in consumer services, in business services, etc. Growth by its nature is going to happen in cities. Other sorts of growth will happen in other sorts of places. I’m not plumping for either the cities or outside. I think you have to be a more sophisticated understanding, what’s good for what sorts of places.
Q: Implicitly within that you end up having the smaller towns within conurbations, their industrial structure would tend towards jobs that at the moment are lower paid, is that fair?
Well, yes and no. I mean, take manufacturing industry. Manufacturing is quite a high payer relatively. A lot of the service sector and the hospitality type of things, leisure and hospitality is poorly paid. Leisure and hospitality tend to gravitate to city centres, to the big places where people go for their nights out and whatever else it might be. The manufacturing goes outside. So, it’s a bit more complex than condemning all the satellite towns to low-wage, low-grade employment.
Q: Do you think the continued decline of manufacturing employment is relatively inevitable?
Well in Britain, it’s gone a lot further and faster than in just about any country.
Q: Was that also inevitable?
No, I mean, I strongly disagree. I look at Germany’s experience, and I think Germany is proof that it is possible to have a large and healthy manufacturing sector, and the German economy has all sorts of strengths because of that as well. They’re running a trade surplus of about 7% of GDP. This is driven by their success in manufacturing. Having said that, the relative growth of productivity and manufacturing versus services does mean that even if you do quite well in manufacturing, you’re always going to tend to get that shift in the balance of employment, away from manufacturing towards services. It’s just a question of the speed at which it goes and how far it goes, and so on. Once upon a time when I started in this game, I think probably manufacturing was 35-40% of all employment. It’s now below the 10% mark.
Q: You can take the view that the decline of manufacturing in the UK could have been a lot slower and we could have followed the German path. Is there a future for increased high-tech manufacturing or growth of the biotech sector and bio manufacturing?
Well, I think there must be. I think there needs to be. I mean, I really wonder how long you can sustain an economy like the UK on the basis of it being driven by borrowing. We’ve had a funny period this last 18 months, public or private borrowing and an ongoing trade deficit. I’m thinking current accounts. An ongoing trade deficit implies that you get more and more indebted to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world owns more and more of your resources. You’re shelling out more interest payments and royalties and dividends to other countries. I’m rather gobsmacked that we haven’t hit the buffers earlier, or sooner on all of this. But it seems to me Britain’s economic model is fundamentally flawed in that regard. Germany, you think their overall rate of growth hasn’t been a lot faster than ours, it’s probably been much the same over the last 20 years. But my God, if the Germans wanted to, because of their very strong trading position in the world, they could run a big programme of public spending and tax cuts, and still be prosperous and make their way in the world, and everybody in Germany would be living the high life.
Q: I think this German-UK comparison is sort of central to all of this. Also, because the Germany regional inequality story is obviously very different.
Yeah, the Germans have done a remarkably good job in hauling up the former GDR.
Q: The differences in the UK are the same as the differences between the poorest parts of East Germany, former GDR and West Germany.
Yeah, absolutely. By the way, on measures of inequality within the UK, be always a little bit careful what you’re looking at, particularly looking at the GVA data by say sub-region, because there are some funny statistical things going on. Particularly the way that boundaries are drawn. Production in London is calculated, the GVA figures, as production in London over population in London. It is massively sort of up there because it’s an effect of net commuting in part, and there were some measures which have Greater London, or inner London at about 400 and odd per cent of EU average GVA per head, or GDP per head or whatever it is. But that’s only about how boundaries are drawn. If you draw a boundary around Westminster and the City of London, of course it’s going to have a sky high GVA per resident, or GDP per resident. But it’s a boundary effect. Be careful.
London as a whole has a net commuting inflow, which is quite substantial, that does distort some of the figures. Conversely, that lowers some of the figures in places like Essex and Kent and so on.
Q: Given the emphasis on governance, in the UK in recent years and increasingly in the literature, how do you view governance for regional development?
I take the view that it’s not who does things but what you’re doing. Now, in broad terms, I would certainly subscribe to the view that there is too much central control, and that Whitehall and Westminster could back off a bit and give more discretion down at the regional and sub-regional and local authority scale. Just devolving power is not in itself going to make a huge difference to regional growth and particularly not to the differences between places. It might make better decision-making everywhere, if you really are on about narrowing the differences between places then you’ve got to positively discriminate in favour of the most disadvantaged places, through whatever mechanism it might be. The eligibility for business support, through the new UK Shared Prosperity Fund, when it finally comes on stream. You’ve got to have that discrimination. It’s what you do as much as exactly who’s doing it. But it’s not the solution on its own.
Q: There’s a counterview which is put forward by colleagues at the LSE, where we’ve been trying human capital investment, infrastructure investment, and so on for decades. The reason it hasn’t worked is because of policy and local governance. What is your counterpoint to that?
I’m disputing the fact that all of these policies haven’t worked. There has been real forward progress. Of all the areas I’ve probably been mostly closely entwined with it’s the former coalfields, where the economic base was destroyed not just in the sort of closures of the ’80s, but there’s a longer history of job loss and destruction. Big closures in the ’60s for example, hundreds of thousands of jobs going. In these places it’s not been completely turned around, but they’ve made a lot of forward progress. To trash the previous policy of, ‘Oh that doesn’t work.’ Not true. Not true. It has worked. It’s perhaps not eliminated the differences in places.
Q: What is your view of the devolution of power in the relationship between the various local bodies and centres of power and Whitehall over the time that you’ve been involved with different regional development policies. How effectively did that relationship work? And under what conditions did it work better or worse?
Well, poorly is the general answer in terms of the way it works. Whitehall has been very disinclined to let go and give real discretion down at the local level. Now I can see that discretion has to be exercised within a set of agreed parameters. You don’t want some sort of free for all in terms of subsidies to business. You don’t want North East England competing against the West Midlands competing against South Wales, you’ve got to have some sort of framework. But on a lot of issues, you could give the trust to the local players. It’s heading in the opposite direction at the moment, in terms of the way of the central government’s dealing with Scotland and Wales in particular. Much of regional economic development in the UK, in Scotland and Wales that is, should be, was a devolved matter under the devolution settlement, and the present government is trying to turn the clock back. Say with the replacement for the EU structural funds, you would have expected what would happen is the UK government would have said, ‘Right, that’s your share of the money that would have come from Brussels, here’s the broad guidelines, you get on and manage this in your own way.’ No, that’s not what’s been happening. The devolved administrations are being cut out of planning for the use of these funds. The EU funds and their replacements are one of the really big spending lines on regional economic development. So that matters.
Q: Is there one thing that you think people are underestimating or missing in this debate right now, when we’re talking about Levelling Up and the policy debate?
The Levelling Up debate is a slogan. It lacks clear focus. This slogan coming out of 10 Downing Street without focus. They have the opportunity this autumn in the spending review and the forthcoming white paper on Levelling Up to nail down some details. If they really are on about levelling up between places, as opposed to other dimensions of levelling up, which may be quite legitimate, they’ve been talking about levelling up, everybody’s trying to get in on the act. But if you’re on about levelling up between places, then I think there really has to be an acknowledgement that it means that you should try to do more in the weaker local economies. That whatever is your action in terms of powers to do X, powers to do Y, funding schemes to do this, that and the other, you’ve got to do more in those places. It’s not enough to say, “well, everybody can do all of these things”. That doesn’t level up. It may be a positive step in some regards, but not in levelling up. So, there’s my final word on that one.
ENDS