Interesting comment piece from Jonathan Guthrie in today's FT, picking up on last year's infamous Policy Exchange report Cities Unlimited - the one that said Scousers should move to Cambridge.
Report author Tim Leunig last year concluded that big, well-connected, high-skilled cities in the South East are always going to have an edge over smaller, more peripheral towns and cities in the North. One year on, the impact of the recession is bearing that out - unemployment has increased most sharply in smaller cities like Hull and Barnsley, while London has been less badly hit than expected. But the North-South split in Leunig's report hasn't fully materialised - cities like Milton Keynes and Swindon have both been hit hard by rising unemployment.
Leunig also questioned the impact of regeneration over the last decade, saying that it had failed to narrow the inequality between Northern and South-East cities. He said: "We need to accept that we cannot guarantee to regenerate every town and every city that has fallen behind."
Most controversially, Leunig called for more internal migration from declining cities like Liverpool to more prosperous cities like Cambridge: "If we really want to give people in Liverpool, Sunderland and so on the opportunities that people in most parts of the south-east take for granted, we need to let many of them move to the south-east." Ouch.
My colleague Adam Marshall gave our response to the Policy Exchange report last August. We agreed with a lot of it, like devolving regeneration funds, but we took issue with the bit about moving from Liverpool to Cambridge.
Today, Jonathan Guthrie has some sympathy for Leunig - who was pilloried in Liverpool last year. Guthrie agrees there should be more internal migration. He says that our welfare and housing system restricts labour mobility (true), and suggests that some regeneration funding should be turned into relocation grants for those that want to move cities (unlikely).
This is all very difficult for elected city leaders. As I say in Jonathan's piece: "Local representatives have difficulty finding the realism to tell the story of places in managed decline." Cities with declining populations and underperforming economies - like Stoke - find it hard to accept they may never rediscover strong growth.
We can't give up on these places, but we should encourage them to be totally honest about their prospects. Cities like Barnsley and Wigan also need to work much more collaboratively with their neighbouring larger cities - Leeds and Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool. And as I said yesterday, we need to focus increasingly scarce regeneration funds on the Stokes and Barnsleys much more effectively than we have in the past.
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