I am writing these words on the train up to Leeds, while Grant Shapps is stood in the Commons announcing that this line will not get dramatically faster. When I arrive, after a connection to Huddersfield, I will take a 20-minute bus ride which is twice as expensive and 10 times less frequent than the route I used to live next to in London. It is also run using an antiquated ticketing system that slows everything down, as passengers fret about which returns can be used on what route while losing their crumpled strips of paper.
On the way down, I tried to buy a single from Huddersfield to Wakefield: £4.50, the machine said, but just in time I caught the small print at the bottom of the screen which said: “Not valid for travel via Leeds.” Since direct Huddersfield-Wakefield trains no longer run, the only way of making the journey was via Leeds. So I had to queue at the counter and buy a more expensive ticket which, although it was not peak hours, for some reason had to be “Any Time.” That 13-mile trip took 45 minutes, a pace a good cyclist could run close.
Apologies for this deluge of dull details, none of which are exceptional. Travel is far easier in my neck of the woods than in, say, desperately congested Bradford up the road—one of the biggest losers from today’s cancellation of the eastern leg of HS2. Moreover, I’m a lucky person blessed with many of life’s privileges who freely chose to move back up to the glorious north, with full knowledge of all the implications for travel, work and everything else. But I still worry about the great wealth and opportunity gap between our regions.
The ambition of “levelling up” deserves—or perhaps that should now be “deserved”—to be taken more seriously than the average political slogan. Why? First of all, because the specific disconnect between Britain’s poorer northern communities and the prosperous south is an injustice that cries out for action: it is a major contributor to inequality across the country as a whole. Secondly, and just as importantly, this regional inequality aspect is, by far, that which most troubles the public. Recent polling by King’s College London for the Deaton Review at the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that 61 per cent of voters rated regional inequality as a “most serious” matter, as against a mere 22 per cent who felt the same way about the generation gap, which has been the chief pre-occupation of most think-tankers in recent years.
Third and finally, there have been moments when it looked like Boris Johnson—whose bumper parliamentary majority is built on his stunning gains in the industrial Midlands and north—understood his mandate as being tied to the project, and seemed determined to deliver. He was, Sebastian Payne reported for Prospect a few months ago, “obsessed” with Ben Houchen, the Tory mayor for Teesside who has built extraordinary popularity through his hands-on industrial policy. Last year, the renowned Sheffield-born economist Paul Collier, not an easy man to impress, wrote in our pages that the government really did look to be ditching “Thatcherite… market fundamentalism” because the new electoral map left it “pinioned” to England’s northern communities. Whitehall’s recent recruitment of Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s brilliantly creative (and northern-born) former chief economist, to work on the cause was another reason for hope.
For all these reasons, levelling up deserves—or deserved—a hearing. But as the miles of the East Coast Main Line whirr by at the same speed as they have done since I was four or five years old, my own hopes are starting to fade. It is not so much the HS2 decision as the mindset it betrays. The cost-benefit analysis for the new line as a whole was always contentious, and arguably outright dodgy. But I just cannot see how the settled argument for sinking untold billions into the first section of the line to Birmingham is anything other than weakened if it only continues from there—as it will after today—in one direction rather than two.
The decision surely turns less on the relative merits of this part of the scheme than on the Treasury’s reversion to type, with the overriding concern being to ration public outlays, and the return on public investment being relegated to a second-order concern.
That conclusion is re-affirmed by other decisions. Ministerial talk about non-HS2 transport and rail schemes inevitably abounds today. But Andrew Adonis, the former chair of the National Infrastructure Commission who first drew up the HS2 blueprint as Labour’s transport secretary in the run-up to the 2010 election, has written this week: “the Treasury hatchet which felled HS2 East has also felled the major scheme widely touted as its ‘better’ replacement: a new trans-Pennine line from Manchester to Leeds.”
And northern communities are the big loser in the second, seemingly unrelated major modification of a government policy this week—this one involving social care. In a late departure from Andrew Dilnot’s decade-old plan for elderly care, which Johnson had made such a point of embracing back in September, the government is now legislating so that the means-tested element of support available to those with modest assets will not count towards the total care bill to which the Dilnot “cap” will be applied. More concretely, what this means is that the benefits of the cap will be concentrated on those—mostly southern—pensioners with greater assets. Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation bluntly sums up the result: “If you own a £1m house in the home counties, over 90 per cent of your assets are protected. If you've got a terraced house in Hartlepool (worth £70k) you can lose almost everything.”
Taken in combination, what this week’s announcements on care and HS2 really suggest is a lack of focus. When the challenge is reversing well over a century of relative northern decline, that is disastrous: everything depends on steadiness of purpose. When Gordon Brown’s Treasury wanted to tackle poverty, it made sure that every Budget contained a chart showing where the gains of every policy would be felt across the income spectrum, a useful way to keep official minds focused. If those in government who are still serious about levelling up want to hold feet to the fire in the same way, they must do something similar—perhaps appending to every green and white paper a map of the regions detailing how the benefits break down.
As things stand, it may still be too early to dismiss levelling up as an entirely hollow slogan. But as the wheels whirr on to Leeds, the agenda of Westminster is rapidly beginning to feel further away.
