City versus town? It might seem a facile debate in a small country where the interests of both should be aligned. What’s the difference, apart from size? Quite a lot, actually. For the past few decades, lobbying by a group of large cities has placed big population centres at the forefront of what remains of urban policy. Larger cities were seen as the engines of growth, portrayed as the economic saviours for surrounding communities. A contestable point, certainly. But these cities found a welcoming ear in government.
The government responded with devolution deals to create combined authorities, led by mayors, in six city-regions, including Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and Merseyside. But Theresa May went cool on the idea, instead preferring to reinvigorate “Brexit Britain”: those places which voted leave in June 2016. The PM even popped into a village up the hill from my Tyneside home to reassure the north (62 of the 73 local authority areas in northern England voted leave) that she was determined to deliver equity across the country: “It is my mission to make sure that ... no community is left behind as we plan both our domestic agenda and our Brexit strategy,” she said.
Domestic agenda? Dream on. Few, if any, policies – aside, ironically, from EU funding – are in place to address deep-seated problems such as unemployment, vacant and partly abandoned town centres, and poor housing in these “left-behind” places that time, and governments, have largely forgotten. Yet in the north alone, these non-metropolitan areas have a population of 6.3 million. What’s more, a commitment to replace EU regional funding, used to help revive collapsing economies and communities in run-down areas (worth £1.2bn annually) with a “shared prosperity fund” has been kicked into the long grass. A government spokesman told Society Guardian ministers recognised the importance of reassuring communities on the future of such funding, post-Brexit. Hence, they were making progress in designing a new system.
But domestic government has ground to a halt. The “left-behind” areas remain sidelined. Civil servants speak despairingly of “strategy stasis”. The state, nationally and locally, has been hollowed out. Swaths of the country are being hammered by the continuing impact of austerity on local councils. Research by economic geographers at Cambridge University underlines how town halls in the poorest parts of England, mainly in the north, have been hit disproportionately by the deepest spending cuts – with yet more to come – while the south has generally been treated much more leniently. So much for the PM’s pledge to end austerity.
In 2017, frustrated by government inaction, the Town and Country Planning Association (of which I’m a former chair) and Newcastle University held a conference to address the challenges facing these “left-behind areas”. Alasdair Rae, a leading mapping geographer at the University of Sheffield, pointed out that these areas are wrongly viewed as the UK equivalent of the rust belt in the US, whereas they should be more accurately labelled a “necklace of neglect”, long-forgotten by a metropolitan elite obsessed with boosting big city economies. Meanwhile, Andy Pike, a regional specialist at Newcastle University, argued that an obsession with boosting “city centrism” has failed to provide a “spillover” to peripheral towns. “Growing disparities ... suggest that the wider spread of benefits have not reached the people and places left behind or sufficiently connected them to central urban prosperity,” he said.
Naming these places can be invidious. But from west Cumbria, to east Durham, South Yorkshire to the Potteries, East Lancashire to the West Midlands and seaside towns, there are plenty of places – starved of council resources compounded by government inaction – with potential for renewal. Sometimes local endeavour is working wonders.
Once governments could respond with a range of initiatives and organisations to partner these places, from a national regeneration body to nine regional development agencies and specific government offices in eight regions plus London. All have been abolished.
Something has to give. How about a new, national department for the regions to coordinate strategy and address the left-behind places? Even active government might be a start. Remember that?
• Peter Hetherington writes on communities and regeneration
