Yvette Cooper has been the Member of Parliament for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford since 1997. She currently serves as Shadow Home Secretary. Previously she served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2008-2009, Work and Pensions Secretary from 2009-2010.
This interview was conducted on 30 May 2022.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
I’ve been the Member of Parliament for Pontefract and Castleford for 25 years and we have been arguing for 25 years, if not more, about the need to tackle regional inequalities to get growth and better-quality jobs in an area where we’ve seen the coalfields replaced and industrial jobs lost. Then from 2003 to 2005 I was a junior minister in what was then the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, now the Local Government and Levelling Up department – probably the department that has had the greatest number of name changes ever in the history of departments. Following that, from 2005 to 2008, I was Housing Minister and then Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Work and Pensions Secretary in the last Labour government.
Q: What is your overall assessment of growth and regional policy as it has impacted upon your constituents over the last 40 years?
Overall, we have seen some areas where we had great policies which made a difference for a while that were then withdrawn. We’ve seen areas where the ambitions just weren’t big enough. We’ve also seen areas where problems have just not been identified or addressed. I would put in the first category: the Regional Development Agencies [RDAs], the Coalfield Regeneration Task Force and then the Coalfield, Regeneration Trust, a series of programmes that I think did have an impact, did make a difference, some of which have been cut back since. In the second category, the lack of scale of ambition that we needed: linking Manchester and Leeds, which was the big thing that we should have done in terms of narrowing regional inequalities and hasn’t been done on anywhere near the scale that was needed. In the third area, growing problems that I don’t think anyone has identified: the widening gap between cities and towns. The focus that there’s been in addressing regional inequalities too often just looking at cities without recognising the very different economic patterns happening with towns. I think there’s just been a total failure to deal with some of those issues.
Q: On your second category, good but not ambitious, are you solely speaking about public spending and the regional pattern of spending there or are you thinking more broadly?
The thing that worked very well was city regeneration. If you look at central Manchester, the centre of Leeds, the centre of Liverpool, we had phenomenal changes under the last Labour government that were very successful. Regeneration plans that involved both public and private sector working together definitely drove job growth and regeneration of housing, infrastructure and buildings and so on. There was clearly strong public sector engagement in that but also strong private sector involvement as well. There were clearly examples of that kind of thing working. I think the ambition behind The Northern Way that John Prescott set out, again, was absolutely right and was an attempt to draw together both public and private.
If you want to tackle the scale of the regional inequalities – and the need to not have everything across the whole economy sucked into London but instead have strong regional growth across the north of England – you just needed a much bigger, coordinated push. We should have been driving transport links between Manchester and Leeds so that you could build a much bigger labour market. We should have been setting up an MIT for the north in Manchester or in Leeds, rather than just allowing Oxford- and Cambridge-centred university-driven technological development in a circuit around London. We should have said, ‘No we need intervention to have a big MIT for the North.’
It needed a big push to pull everything together, to drive big progress. There is a strong argument for just moving entire sectors from London to Manchester. I argued at one point that we should move Parliament to Manchester: not just talking about the House of Lords, move the entire parliament and the Treasury and all the government departments, move them to Manchester, move them to Leeds, do something big and bold to change the dynamic of the country, the way the country sees the economy, and sees the sort of drivers of growth, and also the way that government then sees the country. I think you’ve just got to be prepared to do big things. I think we had big ambitions in the Labour government, and we had programmes that were making a difference. But it didn’t go far enough. Then the Conservatives in the Coalition government just cut it right back. Although George Osborne talked about the Northern Powerhouse, what you saw in practice was huge cuts and the loss of the Regional Development Agencies across the North. That was quite damaging to what was in place in terms of the Northern Way and Northern Growth strategy. I think we went backwards.
Q: Do you think that the focus on London has hindered the rest of the country?
I think the things that we did in the early years after 1997 in terms of regeneration around London were really important. The introduction of the London Mayor, the regeneration along the South Bank, there was a lot of important regeneration that took place in London and rightly so. It’s a good thing that we have a capital that is strongly growing and can be an international powerhouse.
However, in terms of the things that drive growth – such as investment in university-based research, infrastructure, Crossrail versus the Manchester-Leeds electrification high speed rail would have been much more important than any of the connections to London – there’s always a risk that things get pulled into London rather than the North.
Q: Why do you think it was under New Labour that the level of ambition you now think was needed wasn’t there? Would Labour have carried on expanding RDAs? Or would the Treasury Green Book rules and Whitehall bureaucracy have prevented sufficient resources being allocated to rise to the ambition?
We did make progress on city regeneration, significant progress around coalfield regeneration; for example, in my constituency at Glass Houghton by 2010 there were more jobs above ground on that site than there had been below ground when the pit closed. That was a big shift and Labour would have become increasingly focused on it, saying ‘Okay, we’re making some progress, but this isn’t the scale of progress that we need and we need to go much further.’ There was a lot of talk about the Northern Way, the need to boost the northern cities. Different Cabinet members at different times were talking particularly about Manchester-Leeds and linking the northern cities. I think that would have happened.
I think the Treasury Green Book rule was damaging. It meant there would be things that ministers never saw because it would all happen within the Whitehall machine with projects assessed as to whether or not they were going to deliver big returns according to the Green Book, an assessment based, to be honest, on the idea that those areas that were already growing fastest were going to deliver the fastest increases in growth. That stuff wasn’t transparent for ministers – ministers would not have seen it directly unless they were digging into the detail of the way in which the machine and the process was working.
The other thing is structures: what you need is determined leadership to drive things, consistent leadership across the North. I know I keep coming back to it, but I do think that the Manchester-Leeds connection at the heart of it, right across from Newcastle, Sheffield, to Birmingham and the Midlands. Obviously, it’s a network, but I don’t think there’s ever been a structure that has allowed for somebody to drive that Manchester-Leeds relationship. Even now we’ve got two different mayors covering it and very limited engagement from the government or government departments. Even where you get engagement from one government department you then don’t get engagement from another. I think this process is still too fragmented. Unless you’ve got leadership from Number 10 or Number 11 Downing Street, the progress on that is going to carry on being too slow.
Q: How did your perspectives on local government capability or the regional infrastructure develop through the 2000s?
I think the RDAs played a really important role, and the loss of the RDAs was really damaging. The ability of the RDAs to decide to focus on a big picture thing that was going to affect the whole region, or for a couple of regions to work together intensively on something, was quite an important one. Obviously they didn’t have a full framework of accountability, partly because of the history of what happened with the regional assemblies. But as economic drivers I think they were really important.
At the moment, the focus ends up being too limited in terms of geography. For local authorities or for a mayor, they have a focus in terms on their areas, their communities, which is incredibly important, but not on something that might affect the North of England as a whole or might affect a bigger area.
When we shifted from the RDAs to the Local Enterprise Partnerships [LEPs], the things that we noticed were: first, the scale of investment was obviously massively cut, investment available for regional economic growth and regional economic projects just suddenly disappeared; second, no one was interested in towns anymore – we had a whole RDA-backed process around the urban renaissance of towns going across Yorkshire. What was the purpose of towns now? What should each of the town’s opportunities be for the future? How did you pull communities together to support different kinds of jobs in the future? That was being supported by Yorkshire Forward, by the RDA, and all of that totally disappeared.
The LEPs were only interested in the cities. Both private and public sectors were only interested in the cities. That was partly a version of the Treasury Green Book approach, which is, ‘Well, you know if you invest your money in the centre of Leeds, which is already growing fastest, you’ll probably get the fastest returns,’ as opposed to thinking about a long-term plan linking Pontefract, Castleford, and so on.
It was also because the public sector shrunk back into the cities as well. The scale of cuts to public services meant we also saw public sector infrastructure and jobs all shifting back to the cities. Our local councils had to cut huge numbers of staff, they moved them all back into Wakefield, back into Leeds rather than previously having offices or different groups of staff in different parts of the districts. The courts closed. We saw Magistrates courts closed. That also meant that local solicitors would reduce in number and move into Wakefield or Leeds – move into the big cities. You had a combination during that period from 2010 to 2015 where both public and private sector pulled away from towns and started focusing particularly on cities instead. Now that gap between cities and towns had probably been going on for some time before that in terms of economic growth being city focused rather than in towns, particularly industrial towns, where industry manufacturing, industry jobs have been reducing and where it was a bit unclear what new jobs were going to come into towns to take their place.
It hugely accelerated after 2010 as a result of the shift from RDAs to LEPs and the increasing focus of private sector investment in concentrated labour markets. The low-skilled jobs that were increasing were often those service jobs where you needed a big city in order for them to develop. The higher-skilled jobs were often university-linked, also city-based as well. So, whether it was high-skilled or low-skilled, we saw job growth in the cities and the towns losing out.
But it felt like the institutional structures accelerated it and government policy accelerated it as well. All the stuff about city regions, the ideology behind the LEPs being about concentrating on the cities, meant that we saw these widening inequalities within regions as well. I did some analysis a few years ago which looked at job growth comparing cities to towns based on a classification done by the House of Commons Library. It divided things up by constituencies and local authorities that were then classified according to whether they were city or town. Then looking from 2010 to 2015 at the job growth and economic growth, it was really a stark divergence that was taking place. That was underpinned by economic forces anyway, but it was also reinforced by government and public sector decisions and structures that then made the problem worse.
The consequence of all of that is you have a lot of towns that ended up feeling like they had lost their sense of purpose, particularly industrial towns that lost their industry who will say, ‘Ok, what happens next? Where are the new jobs coming next?’ Market towns that have lost their markets because everybody is shopping online, what happens to them now? Seaside towns that have lost their holidaymakers because people are travelling further afield. What some of that RDA work was doing up until 2010 was talking about what is the purpose of different towns with different geographies, different circumstances. All of that’s totally gone. The stuff that the Conservatives have been doing since is wholly inadequate to address the kinds of challenges and opportunities that we should have for towns in the future.
Q: How much of this is your perspective on the Yorkshire RDA in particular? Do you have a sense from when you were Chief Secretary to the Treasury of how they varied across England?
Mine is very much driven by the Yorkshire RDA working with Yorkshire Forward. I did have some engagement with the RDAs but not for a long enough period, and not in enough detail, to be able to give you a useful answer.
Q: Do you think the RDAs, and subsequently the LEPs, got the balance right between investment in skills, infrastructure, and business clusters?
I think their biggest failure was not to be able to combine the three in a proper vision. There’s a fourth dimension as well, communities and having strong places to live: housing, schools, the local environment and making somewhere a nice place to live. I think you’ve got to have something that pulls all four of those together. Too often each of them is thought of in isolation, whereas it’s the interaction which counts, which is about what is the purpose of a place.
If you think about my constituency, we’ve got four towns close to Leeds. We should be able to benefit from the job growth in Leeds. But for Normanton, there is only one train an hour into Leeds, which is totally bonkers because it’s only 20 to 25 minutes on the train. If it was that distance from the centre of London, there would probably be a train every five minutes or a tube train every three minutes. Yet we’ve only got one train an hour. The commuting infrastructure, part of the purpose of towns around such a big city, is inadequate. We’ve also got loads of brownfield land and so the opportunity for new job growth. But what we’re getting is predominantly distribution, big warehouses.
A lot of those jobs will be automated within five to ten years and yet we’ve got a huge dependence now on distribution jobs rather than having a mix. There’s no active engagement in terms of, ‘OK, how do we use these brownfield sites for a mix of different kinds of jobs? How do we get the sort of different jobs being created in our towns, not just in Leeds? With us not simply being the location for transitional jobs that will end up being automated in a few years’ time?’ There’s no business vision or strategy. There’s also no stretch in terms of new small business growth that could grow in our towns. Our broadband and online infrastructure is lagging behind the city. Why not boost it so that we could have more small businesses generating more of our own jobs as well?
Then there’s no link with the training and skills strategy for the area. We’ve still got the glass industry, so some important industries in the area. We’ve got huge potential because we’ve always been a big energy generator with the Ferrybridge Power Station site that we could be linking into renewables and green manufacturing. We could also be thinking, ‘OK, how do we make our towns the very attractive places to live that also can support housing so that if people get higher qualifications, get a job the other side of the Pennines, they don’t just move into the cities to do those jobs because they actually want to stay put, even if they’re commuting part of the week, in order to do them?’
Q: What do those ambitions mean for the devolution of decision-making? Should more of those decisions be made at a local level?
There’s a mix of things. Infrastructure decisions are better taken at a regional, or sub-regional level, in terms of trains and so on. Currently the train stops at Knottingley because it’s at the end of West Yorkshire, even though we should have the train going on to Goole because there’s a big Siemens site developing there. Everybody wants it, but the funding decisions are split between West Yorkshire and East Yorkshire so at the moment there’s no proper plan for doing so. I do think there is a regional way of thinking that’s missing; but it’s also about the scale of investment in the North versus the South.
Q: When you were Housing and Planning Minister, were there policy initiatives that you pursued that were designed to address this?
At that time, we were first making the argument about the scale of housing growth. It was after my time as a Housing Minister when it became clear that the focus on housing growth should be for bigger conurbations and not for smaller towns. I think that probably made some towns unsustainable because they weren’t thinking in terms of the sustainability of places.
One of the things that has never been taken seriously enough is the importance of planning and regeneration, jobs, and skills in government, local, regional and national. Most planning departments are over-stretched, and don’t have the time, or resources, or skill mix to be able to a do that big picture vision for a town and to be able to actively engage with particular sites and think, ‘Okay, we’ve got too much distribution, what’s our vision here, what can we do?’ Some of that is about planning. Some is about regeneration. Those skills tend to be hugely undervalued, and those departments tend to be often quite overstretched.
Q: Was there one idea or innovation from your time in government which you think really worked?
We had a programme that Yorkshire Forward ran that ended up being curtailed because of the financial crisis, then change of government and the end of the RDAs. It was called the Urban Renaissance programme. We had it for the five towns locally, four of which I represent. They were doing it in Barnsley as well. It was an interesting project which I think had huge potential.
We had big public meetings that lots of people come to, with people talking about economic regeneration and the purpose of the towns, ‘Here’s our history that we’re proud of, but what is our economic purpose and direction and what are the things that we value?’ One of the conclusions that came as a result of all of these discussions was that we needed much better transport links between the five towns, to make them operate as a stronger economic unit rather than single towns that are just isolated spokes from Leeds and end up not getting much say at all. If you could combine the economic strength of the towns, then we’d have more impact.
We also looked at important environment issues around town centres, around what do you need to do to make the most of Pontefract town centre: the connections between the old medieval marketplace and the castle down the bottom of the hill and how it was the road between the two that needed to be regenerated. In Castleford, the key thing was reconnecting the town centre to the river – you wouldn’t necessarily know the river was there at the moment. It was a mix of different things, but what it did was bring together issues around infrastructure, transport, the local environment and what you need to do to make each town a place everybody wants to live in and have strong communities.
But underpinning all of those was about what’s our economic purpose in terms of how we get the jobs of the future, how we get businesses wanting to invest here, how we get a sense of our economic role, and our future in the context of ‘Here’s our history, here’s our strengths.’ Some of that included discussions about skills, discussions about Wakefield getting a university. It discussed skills, it discussed infrastructure, all together. Now that was just a particular thing that was done by the RDAs at that time. The strength was that it brought all of it together and talked about the purpose of a place.
That is the question for a lot of towns is, ‘How do you see your economic purpose?’ Our seaside towns, for example. Isolated towns close to big infrastructure, or towns that are close or high-growth cities, like Peterborough and its relationship to Cambridge, where you’ve got huge economic growth and high-skilled jobs in Cambridge, but Peterborough doesn’t necessarily benefit even though it’s really close by. Somehow our structures don’t allow those things to be pulled together in the right way.
We might have just been lucky. It might have been to do with a few key individuals in Yorkshire Forward who drove this and who made it happen and had the skills to pull that together. It’s the only thing I’ve seen in 25 years that had a proper, overarching focus on towns. The government’s Towns Fund does none of that. It’s just something you put in a bid for in a rush. It doesn’t have that sense of purpose and structure. Sometimes areas try to do it through the planning process – but because the planning process is very often divorced from other regional infrastructure issues, regeneration plans and so on, it can be hard to do. It’s something around that I think you need for towns.
Q: Earlier you mentioned the importance of having a strong centre within Whitehall – No 10 or No 11 or the Treasury – that can drive regional growth agenda. What is your experience of Whitehall – are there specific departments which stand out as allies and others as obstacles?
That has varied through time. The Treasury has always depended on whether ministers were committed and prepared to drive things. The Treasury, at an institutional level, never felt like it had a great understanding of place or the importance of it. It needed ministers to say, it needed Gordon to say, ‘This is important, we’re going to back the Northern Way.’ It needs that kind of drive at the ministerial level. Obviously, you’ve got the communities and local government department, it’s always been their job, to look at place. Where they’ve had different phases through the years has been on how much they were able to drive the big picture. For John Prescott, the Northern Way was a big deal. And it was always his. He had the Northern Way. He had the Thames Gateway. He was very focused on spatial projects. Similarly, the Coalfield Regeneration Task Force and the Coalfield Trust.
Q: How about Department of Work and Pensions?
I don’t think they’ve ever had a big spatial focus. Their focus has always been on people and getting people into the jobs that are available, not a focus on what the jobs should be in a particular area.
Q: Has that been a problem? Could they have done things differently? Would it have made a difference for it to have been devolved?
The strength of the DWP is that you can drive change and respond to big changes in the economy, whether that be COVID or a financial crisis. The DWP is a big lever in response to big macroeconomic changes. That’s their strength. We wouldn’t have been able to deliver the Future Jobs Fund, which made a big difference during the financial crisis, if all of that had been devolved to local areas. There’s always been a challenge between the relationship between the DWP work support and training and jobs infrastructure in the area. But during the period where we had the New Deal for lone parents and the young unemployed, the advisors at that time were very integrated in local communities and the local jobs market. I think it would have been possible to build on that structure and framework.
A contrast, I remember talking to a New Deal advisor for the young unemployed who worked in Castleford and used to go and meet 19-year-olds with a tie in her pocket to make sure they had a tie on to go and get their interviews. She was really working hard to get them into a job and wanted them to do their best. Now the 18- to 24-year-olds can’t get an interview in Castleford, or an appointment in Castleford at all, they have to go all the way to Wakefield because there’s no service or support for 18-to-24-year-olds in the five towns. With DWP you do need a national spine in terms of what you do, because that is your lever to respond to big macroeconomic changes. But if you’ve also got an active labour market focus, then you can have other aspects of the work they do can be much more flexible, dependent on the local area, dependent on the community, and respond in terms of the training.
Q: How well do you think regional issues are teased out in parliamentary select committees and debates more generally?
Actually in parliament I think regional issues are talked about a lot, and debated in a lot of detail because you’ve got a lot of MPs who feel very passionately about their constituencies and can tell you all of the issues, all of the things that are working and that aren’t working, what the strengths are and what aren’t. I think that doesn’t get reflected in government in the same way.
Q: What do you think the most important lessons are for us to take away from this hour of conversation?
We need much bigger ambition about the north and northern growth, and that has to be driven by Number 10 and Number 11, from the heart of government – everybody else plays a role, and you need huge amounts of devolution but there has to be a big push; and second, everybody at every level needs to be more aware of the gap between cities and towns.
ENDS