Northern publishers launch Don't Turn Your Back on the North campaign

It was a day of huge symbolism on December 14, 2019, when hours after starting his new term as prime minister Boris Johnson arrived in the County Durham constituency which for years had been the patch of Labour premier Tony Blair.

The Labour stronghold of Sedgefield was one of a swathe of 'red wall' seats - including Barrow and Workington - where voters cast off decades of tradition to vote Conservative for the first time, ushering in an 80-seat majority for what seemed to be an invincible PM.

Ahead of the first regional leadership hustings in Leeds this week - and follow-ups in Manchester and Darlington next month - major news titles across our region this week put the following five key questions to the two candidates:

• What will you do to make sure the commitments made to the North by your predecessors as prime minister are kept?
• The average worker in the North is 50 per cent less productive than one in London, what will you do to address this widening gap?
• What will you do to address spiralling rates of child poverty in parts of Northern England?
• How far will you go to give Northern leaders control over education and skills, transport and health budgets currently held by Westminster, and will you give them more powers to raise or lower taxes to boost local economies?
• Will you retain a government department responsible for tackling regional inequalities with a Cabinet-level Minister for whom this is their main job?

We will publish the responses later this week. And with Labour making the case that they are now the true party of levelling up we will be asking them to answer too.

The twin headwinds of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis - plus the constant whirr of scandal surrounding the PM himself - have understandably dominated his government's attention and left little bandwidth for the complicated task of undoing decades of worsening inequality.

But as recent reports have set out all too clearly, in many parts of the North the dramatic events of the last two years have actually set the cause back even further.

In Northumberland, one in five school pupils are now eligible for free school meals.

The figures, released by the Department of Education, show eligibility for free school meals in the county has soared by more than 70 per cent in just six years.

And data from the Department of Work and Pensions shows children in Northumberland were living in poverty during the first full year of the coronavirus pandemic than ever recorded before.

13,310 children aged under 16 were living in families with low incomes in 2020-21 – an estimated 25.6 per cent of all youngsters in the area.

John McCabe, chief executive, North East England Chamber of Commerce said: “The media campaign asking for the next PM not to turn their back on the North East is extremely powerful and we fully support it. We need the country's new leader to focus on levelling up our country and let everyone in the North East be the best we can be.”

It is clear that after a pandemic which hit the North’s towns, villages and cities harder than those in the South East, the argument for taking strong, concerted action is more powerful than ever.

Mr Johnson has in the last two years named a key department after 'levelling up' and tasked one of his ministers - Michael Gove - with delivering his agenda, in the process producing 12 missions to judge his success.

Thousands of government workers are moving to Darlington and Leeds from London and the North now has three low-tax 'freeports' on top of the £4.8bn Levelling Up Fund doling out cash for local regeneration projects.

But for the thousands of families across the North still held back by non-existent transport and a lack of jobs and skills, with inflation chipping away at their living standards, the idea that their communities are being 'levelled up' must seem almost laughable.

For those who care about the future of the North - and its ability to contribute to a successful nation – it is clear that levelling up is not just a race yet to be won but one barely out of the starting blocks.

So, with Boris Johnson now on his way out and Michael Gove abruptly sacked it is all the more alarming to read multiple reports in the national press that the agenda could be junked by the next PM.

Though the two remaining hopefuls, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, have made many of the right noises about their commitment to the cause it has been far from a top priority in a debate largely focused on tax cuts and culture wars.

Perhaps, as reports suggest, Tory strategists are worried the perception of favouring neglected parts of the North will cost them as they defend seats in the affluent South East from the Liberal Democrats.

Done properly however, levelling up, or whatever the next PM wants to call it, could help ease those areas’ sky-high housing costs by cooling down the pressure on the overheated regions around our dominant capital.

Bridging the gap between London and the neglected regions is a job of decades and - if the example of East and West Germany is anything to go by - trillions, rather than billions of pounds.

The aim is not just to apply a sticking plaster to the problems communities face in 2022 but to address why Northern towns and cities are more likely to face them.

At the heart of the issue is a problem under the bonnet of the North’s economy. The average Northern worker - for a whole host of reasons - is 50 per cent less productive than one in London, a gap that has widened rapidly in recent years.

There is no escaping the fact that any leader serious about the task of bridging this gap will have to make hard decisions about where and how it spends its money.

And new analysis by the IPPR North think-tank released today shows the gap in public spending between the North and the rest of the country has actually widened during the last three years.

While total public spending in the North was £16,223 per person in 2021, up 17 per cent on 2019, the England average rose by 20 per cent and the London average by 25 per cent to £19,231.

But this is not simply a case of the North with its begging bowl out asking for more cash from the hard-pressed taxpayer.

As Conservative members in the North of England weigh up who to choose as the next prime minister, they should be looking not just at who might help them win the next election but their vision for the people of our proud regions.

Rosie Lockwood, head of advocacy at IPPR North, said: “The North deserves nothing more than the next Prime Minister to step through the door of number ten and set to work unlocking its potential. Northern prosperity is national prosperity.”

Anything but full-throated commitment to this agenda would be a betrayal of the Northern voters who backed Boris Johnson in 2019. 

But worse than that, it would be a sad admission of defeat for the idea that everyone in this country should have a fair chance of success, no matter where they live.

John McCabe, chief executive, North East England Chamber of Commerce said: “The media campaign asking for the next PM not to turn their back on the North East is extremely powerful and we fully support it. We need the country's new leader to focus on levelling up our country and let everyone in the North East be the best we can be.”