Andy Burnham has spent recent weeks touring the country to press for a serious regional policy, but a Guardian columnist recently raised a difficult question: how do we actually reduce the magnetic pull of London? It is a problem that has plagued economic strategy for decades, and finding a starting point is proving harder than the goal itself.
Austerity measures have had their day. Officials cannot continue tightening public expenditure and hope growth arrives to justify the cuts after the fact. War, pandemic, and geopolitical instability have compounded a decade of stagnation. A strategy built on waiting for confidence to return on its own is not a strategy at all.
There is sympathy for this instinct. This region has lived through exactly this cycle before. Those who remember the ‘D-village’ policy—the plan to run down pit villages judged unlikely to survive colliery closures—will recall that it was the resilience of the people in those communities, not the policy itself, that got regeneration moving. Miners, shipbuilders and steelworkers retrained and rebuilt.
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The question now is the same one the columnist is asking on their behalf: rebuild toward what, and with what strategic backing?
Speed against a clock
The most instructive precedent in the North East is not recent. It is the mid-1980s, and the creation of the Tyne & Wear Development Corporation (TWDC) alongside the arrival of Nissan. What made TWDC work was not simply money. It was a single-purpose body with statutory authority, land assembly powers, a financial budget and a fixed five-year term to deliver.
That last point matters more than it is usually given credit for. A body operating against a sunset clause behaves differently to one with an open-ended mandate—it moves with urgency because it has to. Layered alongside the fiscal incentives of the Enterprise Zones, the two initiatives performed well enough, independently, that both had their lifespans extended. The lesson was not the policy instrument itself. It was delivery, with determination, against a clock.
That is the piece too often missing from today’s regional policy conversation. We have heard for years that productivity growth is the route to the investment that then fuels further growth—a perfectly sound proposition in theory, but one that has left large parts of the country waiting for a virtuous cycle that keeps failing to start. Piecemeal initiatives, however well intentioned, tend to displace activity rather than create it.
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Local ownership
A genuinely national economy needs a genuinely national strategic plan, not a series of disconnected regional gestures. Delivery of that plan, though, cannot simply be imposed from the centre. It has to be owned by the people and institutions in each region who stand to benefit—which is precisely where the harder work lies.
The Development Corporation model that delivered so effectively in the 1980s was, in truth, a centrally driven instrument with limited local democratic input. Recreating its speed and statutory muscle while genuinely rooting decision-making in the region is a considerably harder combination to achieve than either quality on its own. It is also, I would argue, the actual task in front of Burnham and the metro mayors: proving that devolved leadership can move with the same determination as a time-limited corporation, without a sunset clause forcing its hand.
The recent publication of the new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF)—the first complete rewrite since 2012—replaces the old “tilted balance” with a permanent presumption in favour of sustainable development, and pushes councils toward a considerably more front-loaded, rules-based plan-making timetable. It is a genuine attempt to strip discretionary delay out of the system.
But it is a planning-speed lever, not an investment or fiscal one. It will help projects move once the money and the will exist. It does nothing to conjure either. That is the gap that true collaboration between public and private sectors has to fill.
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The public sector holds the assets and the statutory and fiscal levers—planning reform among them. The private sector holds the capacity to raise finance and deliver at pace, provided it has confidence in the plan in front of it. Neither works without the other, and neither has moved fast enough on its own in this region for a long time.
Leadership and authority
We have done this before, with a fixed mandate and a fixed deadline, and it worked. The policy tools available now are, if anything, more sophisticated. What is still missing is the willingness to give a body—regional, accountable, and time-bound—the authority and the confidence of the private sector to act on it.
That is the leadership question the columnist is really putting to Burnham, and it is one the whole of the North East has a direct stake in answering.
