We need to talk more about tackling Britain’s regional inequalities

Inequality is shaping up to be one of the key issues of the coming General Election. The public are more concerned about it than they have been for years, and we on the left – seizing this renewed public interest with both hands – have started to talk once again about inequality, and all its manifestations: from the gross gap in wages between boardroom directors and the people who clean their offices; to the rising inequity in workers’ rights between the salaried rich and those on the bottom rung, unable to progress beyond zero hours’ contracts.

But I want to see us talk more about another inequality, intimately tied to those described above, and equally damaging to the fabric of our whole society: the inequality between regions.

Late last year, to get to the heart of this issue, I agreed to put together and edit a Unions 21 report on tackling Britain’s regional inequalities. It includes contributions from a range of authors, including other politicians, think tank specialists and trade unionists. Today, we publish this report on Unions 21’s website.

The report starts with a foreboding finding: on a whole range of measures, Britain is more regionally-divided than it was thirty years ago. A Survation opinion poll, commissioned especially for this report, found that a plurality of voters agree with this view. This rises to a majority in the case of northerners and Labour and UKIP voters.

And no wonder. Many parts of the UK still haven’t recovered from abandonment in the 1980s. From the 1970s through to the early-1990s, some regions’ GDP Per Capita actually declined relative to the rest of the UK. The recession has seen GDP Per Capita fall much faster in some regions than others, whilst the post-recession recovery in Gross Value Added (GVA) per capita – well underway by the time Labour left office in 2010 – has been most marked in London and the South East.

This only reinforces the argument which Labour has been making for the past five years. The Coalition, despite their claims to the contrary, have done nothing to fundamentally re-balance the economy away from service-led growth, and towards broader-based economic development that reaches every corner of the country. Nothing has changed. The same deep-seated problems in the British economy are still with us. They won’t go away unless Britain gets a Government that is genuinely committed to addressing them.

Our report doesn’t claim to have all the answers to how Britain gets out of this quagmire. Nor are we under any pretence that these issues it can be resolved overnight. But I do think that three broad policy solutions, which are at once national and local, are called for.

First, we need a Skills Strategy for the Regions, with a particular focus on fostering the technical and vocational skills necessary to re-balance the economy. Too often, skills policy has been dictated from the centre, without any space for local economies to invest in the skills of their own workforce, to meet the needs of local businesses. This has led to nation-wide, generalist skills policies being transmuted across the UK where in many localities, we should be investing more in apprenticeships and vocational opportunities. This needs to change, and we need local consortia of businesses, government and trade unions to play a part in developing a tailored skills policy – the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) has been pioneering a similar project, but they need the funding and support necessary to carry it forward.

Second, and linked with this, we need devolution to the regions. People forget the revolution in localism that New Labour led, and we ignore at our peril the record of the centralist, domineering Conservative Government they replaced. London was given its own Assembly and its own elected Mayor; and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were given their own Parliaments. But the English regions outside London got a raw deal: regional assemblies were rejected by the North Eastern public, and whilst Labour’s devolution measures elsewhere in the country have proven resilient, Labour’s experiment in Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) were all too easy for the Coalition to unravel. The next Labour Government needs to complete the revolution by giving English regions the same power and autonomy as the London Assembly. This can be done by devolving powers to local authorities – Labour’s pledge for a funding devolution of some £30billion is thus a welcome move.

Finally, central Government needs to be acutely aware of the specific problems and needs of different regions in the UK; and it needs to commit to tackling them to reduce regional inequities. Take housing: as Clive Betts MP argues in his contribution to the publication, there are differences between regions in terms of the level of housing needs, with relatively fewer new households forecast for northern regions of the UK. Deprived neighbourhoods are more concentrated in northern regions, whilst a greater proportion of southern households are in arrears, their housing costs rising faster than their wages. Both problems – two sides of the same coin – call for different and complimentary policy solutions. We should be mindful of these issues, and should be weary of transmuting national policies across every region of Britain when, in reality, some local authorities should have different priorities.

Britain doesn’t have to be this regionally-divided. The situation in other countries, as well as our country’s own history, shows us there is an alternative. If we manage to crack it, and reduce the inequities between regions, I believe that the whole country will benefit – not just those parts of the country which have fallen behind in recent decades. It is thus a national priority, for the sake of the whole of the UK, that we work to foster a fairer economy, achieving broader-based growth that reaches every corner of the country. 

Diana Johnson is the MP for Hull North and the Shadow Home Office Minister for Crime and Security