It is depressing to learn that the Treasury is essentially constraining any capital spending from the Department of Housing, Levelling Up and Communities. Whereas when Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State there might have been some optimism that he ‘got’ the need for investment in left-behind regions, the way the Department’s budget has so far been spent has suggested that there is not such a strong will overall across Government, and notably within the short-term financially-focussed Treasury. As Jack Shaw for the IPPR put it
‘Contrast the culture of innovation supported by EU funding with the Shared Prosperity Fund’s culture of bean-counting.’
The loss of these EU Structural Funds is a real blow for many areas, since these were allocated inversely according to the local level of economic development, as measured by GDP per person. Regions which were classified as less developed received proportionally more funding. The same relationship does not exist in allocations from the replacement Shared Prosperity Fund, as many commentators have noted. The more deprived areas are losing out to better-heeled regions in ways that are hard not to see as driven by political imperatives more than the need to level up. Furthermore, again to quote Jack Shaw,
‘the methodology underpinning the Shared Prosperity Fund bears limited relation with its stated policy objectives.’
An interesting recent report from the Centre of Cities, which contains a wealth of data to digest, highlights the inequalities across the regions, or more specifically across cities up and down the land. I live in Cambridge, a superficially wealthy city, though a previous report from the same organisation has identified it as the most unequal city of all. It has a great number of citizens with high levels of education, but it also has high levels of pollution together with exorbitant house prices which are second only to London. My city is not particularly typical. It seems to sit near the top or bottom of just about every figure of merit this report analyses. It sits at the very top of cities when it comes to rate of growth of the population over the decade to 2021, with an increase of 17.9%, closely followed in second place by Peterborough at 17.2%. The area is booming (which of course drives the prices of houses ever upwards), with the highest number of ‘new economy’ firms. However, our roads are choking us, public transport is still woeful into the city centre – although the council wishes to introduce a congestion charge along with improved transportation links – but cycling is available to anyone fit enough, including students, who happens to have the luxury of living close enough to their place of work to make that feasible (but beware that pollution).
Skills and education are taken seriously in Cambridge. At 3.4% of the population, it has one of the lowest rates in the country of workers with no formal qualifications. In my College we take apprentices seriously in teams like maintenance and catering, so even those who join us not having thrived at school can hope to gain useful qualifications, whether or not they choose to stay employed here. At the other end of the scale, Cambridge has one of the highest levels of the population with Level 4 or above qualifications at 63.5%, beaten only by Edinburgh and Oxford.
That high level of skills in the Cambridge population is of course immediately relevant to the city’s success. At the other end of the scale, Burnley has more than 5 times as high a percentage of people with no qualifications coupled with less than half as many as Cambridge with Level 4 or above education. Burnley, like many another northern de-industrialised city, has fallen into a low skills, low wage equilibrium. For families where the breadwinner lost their job in the mines or mills a generation or more ago, there may be a feeling of helplessness, a belief that a decent job is not there for them, with little concomitant motivation to stay on in education to gain qualifications that may take them nowhere, or to upskill later in life. The Centre for Cities report has a lot to say about these people who are demoralised to the point of not attempting to enter the workforce or to seek a new job when they lose theirs. These are people they call ‘involuntarily inactive’.
One of the problems with the Levelling Up White Paper is how little it had to say about skills. There has been a little more information published recently about the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), although how helpful that will be in practice for those involuntarily inactive in regions where skilled, even semi-skilled jobs are in short supply, remains to be seen. Who will want to take on a substantial loan in mid-life with no certainty of a well-paid job at the end, a situation made even more unpalatable if there are several family dependents? Helpful though the LLE may be for some, it is far from a universal panacea to resolving the distressed face of places like Burnley.
Along with upskilling must be the creation of relevant jobs in local industry. All the evidence is that anchor industries play a crucial role in the economy of a city, not least because non-graduates are much less likely to move away from their home towns than those with higher qualifications. Lincoln has thrived through the combination of a new(ish) university and employers like Siemens, a vision vigorously pursued by their former VC Mary Stuart.
But sometimes there are employers seeking a skilled workforce who cannot find them. To return to my own local area, but moving a bit further from Cambridge, at a recent meeting organised by the Royal Society in Norwich, we heard from a company based in Suffolk about their employment needs. Here was a firm, with a full order book, but it couldn’t attract the skilled and semi-skilled people it needed, with local youth not seeing being a machine operative, for instance, as of interest to them. The area is not rich in alternative industries, but still they could not attract those leaving school, and local courses were not particularly geared to their needs. Further education colleges in the area, as elsewhere, are now even more hampered in development due to the government’s recent reclassification of them as public sector. This change means they are now subject to strict government lending restrictions and effectively barred from taking out commercial loans, making capital expenditure almost impossible, preventing them from expanding or changing emphasis in their courses. This particular Suffolk CEO who spoke, felt that developments at Sizewell C, not that far away, would suck up many of those who might otherwise have thought about joining their company – and additional skilled labour for the construction of the site would need to come from much further afield.
Only if we start to see joined up thinking across Government – from the Department of Education, through DHLUC to the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – will there be any hope of seeing improvements in our urban areas, ensuring a match between the skills provision and local need as well as decent funding to go along with this, thereby creating jobs and hope where currently there is little of either.
