Newington's Katie Combes looks at the future of the Northern Powerhouse and the upcoming mayoral elections in the North West.
In just over six weeks’ time on 4 May, people across the North West will go to the polls to elect metro mayors for Liverpool and Greater Manchester. The candidates are busy looking to the future, setting out bold visions for the region in their manifestos, but with Brexit dominating the agenda, interest from Westminster in the Northern Powerhouse project seems to have waned. So where does that leave the Northern Powerhouse?
It would not be surprising if Theresa May’s administration ditched a policy so closely associated with George Osborne – who himself has re-focused on London as the Evening Standard’s new editor – and which offered Labour the chance to hold onto power on its home turf.
But has it really died?
There has undeniably been a marked shift in rhetoric under the new administration. The Spring Budget saw the Government launch the Midlands Engine strategy and begin the process of agreeing a further devolution deal for London, while the North failed to get a look in. Planned devolution deals in the North East and across Yorkshire have also stalled. But there is an element of political necessity rather than ideology behind the shift.
Both Business Secretary Greg Clark and Communities Secretary Sajid Javid are personally committed to decentralisation – with Clark cutting his teeth as a minister leading devolution work as Cities Minister from as early as 2011. However, as the realities of Brexit have taken hold, the Government has turned its attention to securing the future of the country as a whole, through its Modern Industrial Strategy, which seeks to “drive growth across the whole country” and to make a “country that works for everyone”.
The Conservatives have also recognised the need to shore up support in their own heartlands – the Shires – many of which felt left out of the devolution agenda without the prospect of a credible deal for rural areas on the table. This shifting focus was demonstrated by the recent completion of a devolution deal for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
But this shift has not dampened the enthusiasm of the candidates and others in the North. The mayoral candidates' manifestos read more like those of a political party seeking to a win a general election and including policies that go well beyond the remit of a metro mayor.
Newington recently organised a health and social care hustings for our client AbbVie where Conservative Candidate for Mayor of Greater Manchester Sean Anstee argued that the ultimate ambition for devolution was that “no decision about Greater Manchester should be taken without Greater Manchester”. His manifesto also includes pledges to lobby the Government for further powers over education, transport and taxation, indicating that he wants devolution to go further and for the region to have greater autonomy.
The Labour candidate Andy Burnham’s manifesto also sets out far reaching plans to make Greater Manchester “a beacon of social justice” with policies designed to tackle youth unemployment, to help young people get on the housing ladder and to revolutionise the delivery of health and social care. He has also backed some of the ideas from IPPR North’s Taking Back Control in the North, which proposes a super-region with a “Council of the North”.
With the Labour Party still in disarray, Burnham is positioning himself as the man who can rebalance the country from South to North. Both he and Steve Rotheram, Labour’s candidate to be Mayor of Liverpool, have talked about the need for greater collaboration between the two cities using “their combined weight” to push the Government to deliver the ambitions of the Northern Powerhouse.
Whoever wins in May, what is clear is that the candidates in the North West have no intention of letting the Northern Powerhouse die a death. The newly elected mayors will be keen to use their powers and freedoms to maximum effect – as well as pushing for more. The genie is out of the bottle and the Government will find it very difficult to put it back.
