North-south divide is far from being resigned to history
As this story indicates the north-south divide is perhaps our best example of spatial thinking. It makes good copy. Trying to address regional disparities in economic performance can be a “fool’s errand” and the failure to achieve it was a key factor in the decline of the Regional Development Agencies. I feel a more fine grained approach which looks at the different settings that affect economic performance at the more local level is likely to be more insightful and more fruitful. We are more likely to regenerate areas in rural Northumberland or small towns in Leicestershire than to convince a global market to relocate the financial hub in the City of London to Nuneaton or Brighouse. Perhaps we should think more about the interconnected nature of places – particularly their rural/urban dynamics than seeking to ape Joseph Chamberlain and his Victorian City Building…..
Five years on and the government seems to believe that the spatial rebalancing of the UK economy is well underway, and points to what it claims has been a strong recovery in the regions and cities outside London and the south-east. In January this year, the cities minister, Greg Clark, using ONS statistics, argued that 60% of new jobs since 2010 have come from outside London and the south-east, and that the eight core cities other than London have seen jobs rise by more than 250,000 since 2010. He went on to argue that while the “picture of a north-south divide pulling apart was certainly true in the previous decade … in this decade it is changing. North and south are now pulling in the same direction, which is upwards” (Management Journal for Local Authority Business, 22 January, 2015). The impression given was that the north-south divide is history. But is this true?
The fact is that the north-south divide is a long-standing and highly entrenched feature of the UK’s economic landscape, going back to the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s, the gap has in fact progressively widened. What really matters is not the growth record over just a short period, such as the recovery from the recent recession, but the cumulative growth gap over successive decades.