Levelling up is easy....
My childhood was spent moving around the UK as my father’s job moved. He made cigarettes for Rothmans and the secret to cigarette production is ever faster and ever more accurate machinery. Therefore Rothmans moved around the country to where ever the subsidies and capital allowances were best, basically the taxpayer paid for their new kit and the company then moved on to somewhere with even better subsidies.
If levelling up this time is going to work, then just subsidising firms to re-locate won’t work. Regional Development Agencies don’t seem to have achieved much over the decades either, I have been to the same run down parts of the UK many times to find the latest incarnation of the RDA saying, this time they were turning the corner.
The answer, it seems to me, is to spend the money on transport. There isn’t a motorway between London and Edinburgh, let alone London and Norwich; high speed rail is decades behind the rest of Europe, internally regions are badly connected. There are far too many regional airports; Edinburgh and Glasgow, Leeds and Manchester, really? Pick one and make it a major hub.
UK infrastructure spending is woefully low but London’s Crossrail is still the largest project in Europe, Crossrail 2 would suck even more of that spending into London. This could be a win win, Nimbyism is alive and well in the home counties but people are also worried levelling up means ‘their’ money being spent ‘Up North’.
So cancel unpopular projects in the South and start new ones in the North, build infrastructure and they will come.
https://jonty.substack.com/