The latest instalment of our weekly series, in which we use the Centre for Cities’ data to crunch some of the numbers on Britain’s cities.
See that man over there, waving manically while swimming around in a pool of cash? No, not Tony, the other one. George Osborne. Remember him?
The once-chancellor and Chief Machiavel of Westminster is still around, and is now at the reins of a think-tank founded to promote the Northern Powerhouse and work with businesses and investors to lobby for its execution.
Sadly, the political will to implement the policy amongst those with any actual power – read; not George Osborne – seems to be fairly close to nil. We’ve heard plenty of “Brexit means Brexit”, but when was the last time you heard “Northern Powerhouse means Northern Powerhouse”, huh? Yeah. Didn’t think so.
Part of the problem, of course, is that such a vast undertaking as transforming a vast number of the country’s cities involves various strands of thought. As much as it pains me to say it, you can’t just throw money at a couple of infrastructure projects and hope that everything magically sorts itself out. It’d be a start, but the problems that make the Northern Powerhouse project both so necessary and so challenging are far more varied and numbered. And here’s where the data can come in handy as a quick way of running through these issues.
The simplest way to look at all of these city metrics is with a national map. Each individual dot represents a city, and the colour of the dot varies according to the level of the metric the map is set to show. And for the sake of avoiding arguments further down the line, my definition of the cities covered by the Northern Powerhouse and also covered by the Centre for Cities’ data runs as follows: Blackpool, Preston, Blackburn, Burnley, Bradford, Leeds, Wakefield, Barnsley, Doncaster, Sheffield, Huddersfield, Manchester, Wigan, Warrington, and Liverpool. As they say on the interwebs, don’t @ me.
Obviously, economic foundations are important here, and warning first: many, many maps follow.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities
A splurge of green around the Northern Powerhouse area shows that the claimant count for unemployment benefit, taken from data in November 2016 – the most recent month available, is higher than in other areas of the country.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities
You can see the same problem another way. The welfare spend per capita, measured in 2014, is similarly high in the area – though not quite as dramatically as the claimant count.
Clearly, employment is somewhat more of an issue here than elsewhere in the country. And much of that is likely to come from longer-term issues than just ploughing money in.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities
The working age population with no formal qualifications, with data from 2014, tends to tick up a fair amount of green dots across the Northern Powerhouse belt. But it’s clearly not just that the labour force isn’t necessarily qualified enough to take on the kind of digital age start-up quango jobs that power places like the Silicon Fen and the Silicon Roundabout and anywhere else you can shove “Silicon” in front of.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities
The level of people born outside the UK also suggests that the employment market doesn’t support enough capacity to encourage and foster immigration – whereby foreign workers fill gaps in the market that the local population can’t or won’t do.
But there are some more alternative ways of looking at the Northern Powerhouse. Through, say, broadband.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities
A map of superfast broadband from 2015 shows a clear glut in the South East, whilst the Northern Powerhouse area is speckled with yellow dots, indicating poorer coverage. And that infrastructure matters – it encourages businesses to set up shop, makes operations quicker and more efficient, and generally makes stuff happen.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities
Similarly, looking at the number of patents granted per 100,000 people in 2014 shows that the hothouses of innovation tend to be further south. Or in Aberdeen. Again, a smattering of yellow dots indicates that fewer patents per capita come from cities in the northern belt.
And finally, for those avid readers who go home deeply disappointed unless there’s at least a cursory mention of public transport in a CityMetric article, here’s this.
Click to expand. Image: Centre for Cities
The national picture of the proportion of people who commute by ‘private vehicle’ as per 2011 data – aka, mostly just driving your car but also hypothetically taxis – shows a glut of green dots in the northern areas.
And why does that matter? Almost every other way of getting to work is more conducive to working. Walking or cycling to work gives you a perky burst of fresh air, enabling a peachy start to the day, whilst travelling by public transport gives you crucial downtime where your brain can switch off, listen to music, potentially have a nap, and generally free up more concentration time for the bit where you actually do your job. Whereas when you drive, you’re sitting hacked-off in a metal box in a traffic jam, forced to concentrate to make sure you don’t – you know – crash.
The problem is that when George Osborne launched the whole Northern Powerhouse back in the land before time, he essentially just meant “let’s do some economics and try and make things better”. The only problem with that is that it’s incredibly complicated. But hey – if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that duplicating the same noun either side of the verb “means” solves all political issues, so I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end.
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