Policy Exchange Report on Cities
I haven’t had time to properly digest the Cities Unlimited report from Policy Exchange yet - too busy writing a conference paper - but the fact that David Cameron has felt the need to dismiss the work of his closest think tank as ‘insane‘ says it all.
For those not familiar with the report, here’s a snippet from The Times:
David Cameron has been embarrassed by his favourite think-tank after it suggested that Liverpool, Sunderland and Bolton should be abandoned because the North would never improve. The Tory leader, who begins a two-day tour of the North today, firmly rejected a report by Policy Exchange, which suggested that the Government should help northerners to relocate to Oxford and Cambridge. It suggested that Britain’s two university towns are likely to be able to “form the basis of strong, successful, substantial cities”. Singling out Sunderland as an example of a town in decline, the report says: “It is time to stop pretending that there is a bright future for Sunderland and ask ourselves instead what we need to do to offer people in Sunderland better prospects.”
Wow! I’ll probably have more to say later, but given Sunderland is my hometown I feel duty bound to challenge some of the report’s claims! The short boxed case study on Sunderland in the report itself is woefully inadequate.
Firstly, the authors have no understanding of Roy Keane (very important in my book), quoting him in support of their thesis as follows:
Sunderland suffers from very poor economic geography. It is a long way from most places. It is not somewhere that outsiders consider a desirable place to live. Roy Keane, Sunderland Football Club’s manager, commented on the difficulty of attracting good players to the Premiership club despite offering equivalent wages to clubs in the South: “I find it surprising that geography seems to play such a big part … Retire at 35 or 36, you can live wherever you bloody well like – London, Monaco, wherever – and any half-decent footballer will be a multimillionaire anyway. Why is there such a big attraction with London? It would be different if it was Chelsea, Arsenal or maybe Tottenham, but when they go to a smaller club just because it’s in London, then it’s clearly because of the shops.”
This was a joke guys - a sly dig at some players who wouldn’t sign for us because we were (then) officially the worst time in Premiership history x 2. (And, BTW, it’s Sunderland ASSOCIATION Football Club: if you’re gonna have a dig, get it right.)
Secondly, they are under the impression that the only economic change since the 1970s has been the arrival of Nissan. While over-hyped for sure, it’s odd that they made no mention of Sunderland winning the digital challenge competition, being named as one of most connected cities in the UK and a leader in the take up of digital television and broadband internet. Certainly there is a long way to go here before these technologies can be said to have had a major impact on the city’s economy, but things have happened that needed to explored, understood and acknowledged in the report, and all of them have happened in the last ten years, aided by regeneration money.
Thirdly, their discussion of the transport infrastructure - mocking the pathetic number of trains a day to London and their tardy speed and, similarly, pointing to the better Metro links in Newcastle and so on - totally misses the point. It is precisely because of the lack of investment in the transport infrastructure that the city has suffered so badly in the post-industrial era!
Fourthly, and relatedly, so much of this is about politics and political institutions but this goes uncommented. Sunderland’s transport infrastructure has been poor compared to Newcastle’s because Thatcher scrapped the Tyne & Wear Metropolitan Council when it was half way through a twenty year transport investment programme centred around the Metro; at this stage the Tyne section was well developed but the Wear section still to follow… consequently, Sunderland paid for Newcastle-Gateshead to get the Metro from the late 1970s/early 1980s but didn’t get it itself until a few years ago, after Labour came back into power in and began to plough in the regeneration funds that Policy Exchange dismisses as ineffective. The authors, of course, seem unaware of this and even mock the direct Sunderland-London train for being slower than the London-Newcastle and Metro to Sunderland route…. well, without the regional regeneration money it would have been a bus to Sunderland for us all…
Worse still, the report, badly abuses the notion of path dependency, using it an overly-deterministic way that fails to account for the influences on the branching effects of economic and social policy development. Chief amongst these is the UK’s overly centralised political system; the authors of the report completely write politics out of the picture though - the word itself hardly gets a mention in fact. It’s hardly surprising that a region with no political institutions of any significance should become one in which businesses do not tend to locate their headquarters and key decision makers. The authors of the report seem to think that successful cities are large ones, drawing this conclusion on the basis of their earlier work in which they examined a series of successful cities from around the world; but most of the successful cities they highlight are close to key political decision makers, being capital cities, regional capitals with significant powers or strongly represented at the national level as part of a federal system of politics.
Still, at least the report brought an editorial from the Guardian in praise of Sunderland…. which rightly suggests the report’s authors might want to relocate to Vorkuta.
Final word to Jams….
