Heathrow expansion: ‘North won’t accept the crumbs of the South’s cake’

The Chancellor’s announcement of a massive injection of investment is acknowledgement that the market is not able on its own either to deliver growth or social justice.

The government needs to intervene and reshape Britain. But serious questions remain.

The decision to press ahead with the expansion at Heathrow together with other London airports will trouble voters in London, environmentalists and others.

Taken together with the decision to go ahead with CrossRail it will further damage the fragile economic relationship between London and the rest of the country.

We definitely need growth. But also we need to see that any new prosperity is spread equally. Without fairness, then we will not overcome the loss of trust in politics which is so evident in large parts of the country and risks being exploited by the Right. Many voted for change at the last election. They need to see it and feel it.

I represent a constituency on the former West Yorkshire coalfield. The breakdown of trust in a political elite centred in London and the South East was already palpable even before the latest announcements. But the vast amount of new investment will take place within a narrow band in a 60 mile radius of London.

It may be that this new infrastructure spending will spur growth in certain parts of the country. But will it help areas like the North? The reverse is the case. Money has been sucked out of the Regions and into the South East for decades.

‘Northern cuts are being used to increase investment in the South East and London’

Long term cuts to transport spending in the North are being used to increase investment in the South East and London.

Beyond this regional imbalance there is a process which is equally toxic. Our poorest constituents are being told that they face huge cuts to the welfare budget and winter fuel allowance.

It isn’t a large step of the imagination for voters to come to draw the comparison between the billions of cuts which they face and the billions which are still being poured into the South East and London.

Look at the differences in spending. Under the Tories, it was outrageous that transport spending per head in London was £906 but it was only £321 per head in Yorkshire. It has been calculated that if we want to “level up” transport spending alone in the North, we would need £86 billion more, just to be at the same point as London.

This spending gap impacts on so many local communities. In my constituency, Normanton and Hemsworth, it takes 1 hour and 27 minutes to travel between the former pit village of Upton to the city of Leeds with buses and trains which often only run once an hour.

In London by contrast, it takes 1 hour 20 mins to go right through the whole of the capital from Reading to Shenfield (57 miles) with on average 128 trains a day!

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Not only does it take longer to get anywhere, there is greater unreliability on trains in the North. The Guardian reported in 2022 that “the stark regional divide in railway reliability across Britain has been laid bare, with figures showing 20% of TransPennine Express (TPE) trains were cancelled in November, compared with 2.3% on one commuter line in and out of London and 4.5% on the London Overground.”

These differences have a massive economic and social impact. Better and more frequent transport links mean people in the south can access up to seven times as many jobs by public transport than in the North.

Lack of mobility in regions like the North of England have dramatic consequences for growth. Former Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, estimated that “the cost to the northern economy of our shamefully poor transport is £16 billion in lost growth per year”.

An alternative approach to the economy which would be fairer and have a greater impact would be to invest in the regions. So, it was disappointing to see the announcement by the Government of potential cuts to major projects in the UK falling on the North. For example, “Network North”, an £8.3 billion fund for local transport infrastructure which was meant to offset the cut to the northern leg of HS2, looks likely to be scrapped.

However it appears the government will approve a third runway at Heathrow, a second runway at Gatwick, terminal expansion at Luton and HS2 from London to Birmingham, CrossRail amongst others. There was only one project in the North included; an upgrade to TransPennine infrastructure.

‘Regions outside of London have been starved of funding for a decade’

Of course, our capital city needs investment but so do all the other regions of the UK many of which have been starved of funding for a decade under the Tories.

The mention of investment outside of London is very welcome. But the North will no longer accept a few crumbs off the top table whilst the South East gets the whole cake.

That is why I am calling for economic justice for all of our regions and nations.

Take local councils, across all areas according to the IFS in the period 2010–11 to 2024–25 as a whole, councils’ overall core funding is set to be 9% lower in real terms and 18% lower in real terms per person this year than at the start of the 2010s. However, the cuts fell more harshly on the most deprived communities and the North, holding back any sort of growth.

Capital and current spending is also skewed towards the South. In Yorkshire and the Humber public spending is £12,186 per person, in London it is £14,842, which is 15% higher than the UK average.

In order to reconnect with working class communities and rebuild trust in politics, the Labour government must avoid buying into the economic orthodoxy of the Treasury whose restricted vision never seems to extend far beyond the M25. We need massive investment in the regions. The new Labour Government cannot simply be managers of an unjust and unfair economic system which has left so many people behind.

Over the last century the North usually stood solidly behind Labour. Now Labour must stand behind the North.

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