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The new North-South divide has a solution: give cities more power

People wear face masks as they walk in Liverpool. The leaders of Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle city councils wrote to the Health Secretary with concerns about a rise in cases: PA
People wear face masks as they walk in Liverpool. The leaders of Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle city councils wrote to the Health Secretary with concerns about a rise in cases: PA

In the 1850s there was a rush of pained articles about the North-South divide. The population of Manchester had grown four-fold in half a century and writers in the impoverished South began to worry about northern prosperity. The cotton trade though, turned out to be no competition for London and the North-South divide turned right round. Now it is back in the news and in a virulent form.

Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Nottingham have the highest Covid-19 infection rates in the country. Hospital admissions are growing at an alarming rate in the North-East and North-West of England. Unless the current trend is interrupted, admissions in Manchester will be back to their April level by the end of the month. A local lockdown is already in place, as it is in plenty of towns and cities. Fifteen million people in the UK are under some form of lockdown restriction and not one of the hotspots is south of Solihull in the West Midlands.

New restrictions are on the way, probably as soon as Monday, and they are likely to introduce a three-tiered system in which freedoms vary according to the gravity of the local outbreak. Merseyside and other parts of the North-West will see pubs, restaurants, cafés, leisure venues and hairdressers closing. There will be a successor to the furlough scheme to subsidise employment and local authorities placed in the top-tier will receive an additional £2 per head from the Treasury.

The problem with this is not the restrictions on liberty, or even the associated economic damage, as bad as that will be. Perhaps it is all sadly necessary. The problem is that policy which ought to be conducted locally is instead emanating from the command and control mission of 10 Downing Street, and very erratically at that.

The mayors of London and Manchester, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham, have both repeatedly said there is no conflict between North and South. When Charles Dickens published Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel of that name in his periodical Household Works in 1854, the different regions were like distant nations to one another. In a country shrunk by transport and technology that is no longer true.

London is a template for other cities to copy, rather than a rival. Other mayors should have the same power

Most notably, London and the regions of the UK are joined financially. In a normal economic year, London and the South-East contribute £10 billion to the national exchequer.

No other region of the UK has raised more than it spent in any year since the turn of the century. London pays a quarter of all income tax which is more than the North-East, the North-West and Yorkshire and Humberside put together. A quarter of all corporation tax comes from London, more than twice as much as any other region. A quarter of all business rates are raised in London and a third of all stamp duty. When all tax receipts are added up, London contributes a fifth of the total and the South-East provides the same again.

Philip Collins
Philip Collins

London is, in most respects, a template for other cities to copy rather than a rival. One of the ways in which the other British cities need to become more like London, and Covid ought to be a catalyst for this, is that the same powers enjoyed by the Mayor of London ought to be extended to other metropolitan areas. There is a divide between North and South which is measured by the powers wielded and it needs to be closed down.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, has quite rightly demanded that the test and trace system would be better everywhere if it were under local control. The incidence of the virus varies a lot even within a region. The metropolitan mayors are best placed to respond. If anything salutary can come out of the experience it would be that more power flowed to City Hall and to the city leaders of Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle and Bristol. There is a devolution bill on the stocks which ought to grant greater control over council tax and business rates and more freedom on how revenue can be used.

When the final reckoning is done on the way that the coronavirus has been handled it is inevitable that the concentration of national power in Westminster will figure as part of the problem. London itself has an anaemic form of city power and it should be stronger. So it should in every other city. The best way to treat the divide in wealth and health is to divide up the power.

Philip Collins is founder and writer-in-chief of The Draft