One early task for the EDRC Place Theme has been to come to a common understanding of what Place is and why it matters.  Places play an essential role in all of our lives, they are often a core part of our identity and define our opportunities, how we live, and even our life expectancy. So, understanding how any why places differ and what that means for us all has been the goal of my research of many years. Yet places are only discussed tangentially in politics and policy. From my perspective, the inability of politicians and the public to think and talk about places directly hampers our ability to tackle some of society’s biggest problems. We need more place-based thinking. 

For example, my generation (millennials) often discuss the “housing crisis” and the inability of young people to afford a home. Yet you can snap up a two-bed house in Burnley for £50,000, so there are affordable homes in the UK. The unspoken subtext is that there aren’t affordable homes in the places people want/need to be.  

I have personally used this to my advantage as a Londoner who moved to Yorkshire to exploit the more favourable income-to-cost-of-living ratio. When I visit friends in London with much higher salaries struggling to pay the mortgage on their tiny one-bedroom flat that costs more than twice what I paid for a three-bedroom house, I can’t help but think: we are getting something very wrong. 

So, I would like to offer all political parties a place-based policy that I believe would be both beneficial and promote a broader public debate about the role of places in our politics and society. 

We should move the capital of the United Kingdom to Newton-le-Willows.

At this point, you may believe I have taken leave of my senses, so allow me to explain. 

First, no law says London is the capital city. London is a de facto capital because it is the largest city and is the location of the Government. However, many countries have moved their capitals or have political capitals that are not in their largest cities. Washington DC (USA), Canberra (Australia), Ottawa (Canada), or Brazillia (Brazil), to name but a few. The City of Westminster was itself a new capital moving upriver from the old City of London in the eleventh century. So, moving a capital city is perfectly doable, but why should we do it? 

Levelling Up

While the phrase levelling up is dead it was one of the few areas of current political discourse that begun to address the issue of Place. In practice levelling up seemed to be little more than a slogan and a sprinkling of money to areas outside of London. But it originated from a kernel of truth that the UK suffers from extreme regional inequality. 

People like the Centre for Cities and Tom Forth have written at length about the problems the UK has of an extremely productive Southeast while the rest of the country lags far behind. Ideas like the Northern Powerhouse were supposedly to address this through an economies of agglomeration argument. Essentially that bigger cities are more productive per person than small cities.   

Figure 1: Some examples of the rank-size relationship for several countries.  I have used continuous urban areas rather than administrative boundaries for this chart, as many cities spill over their official boundaries.  For example, Leeds and Bradford, and more make up the urban area of West Yorkshire rather than two cities and many towns. 

The UK is odd in lacking a clear second city. Many countries have a distribution of city populations in roughly a rank-size pattern where the second city has half the population of the first city, the third city has a third of the population of the first city, and so on. But in the UK, the second largest urban area, Manchester, has a population of around 2.5 million compared to London, which has more than 10 million. Here, I’m using place names loosely to refer to the larger urban areas rather than the official administrative boundaries. The argument goes that the UK needs a true second city with a population of around four and a half million. This larger urban area would act as an economic counterweight to London and compete more effectively on the world stage. 

This is where I think the whole northern powerhouse/levelling-up agenda fell flat. It turned from a commitment to grow one huge city into a sprinkling of small amounts of money for every small town and urban area not in London. 

I understand why that happened; it is hard for politicians to stand up and say. “We should spend all the money in Manchester”, especially if they represent a constituency in Newcastle. However, it misses the key point of the economics of agglomeration argument. Places like Reading, Milton Keynes, or Brighton are more prosperous due to their proximity to London. Becoming the “Reading of the North” may not be the clarion call that Northerners want. Still, for most of them, it would mean a substantial improvement in their standard of living.  

There is only one logical place to grow a new metropolis in the UK, between Manchester and Liverpool. Combined, the two areas already have a population of almost 4 million and the distance between Liverpool and Manchester is less than the distance from one side of London to the other.  

And what is slap bang in the middle of this new Metropolis? Newton-le-Willows. 

Figure 2: London’s administrative boundary (blue) and the travel to work areas (green) overlain over Liverpool and Manchester.  Shows that while today, they are two separate cities with several large towns between them, their proximity suggests they could be merged into a single metropolis. 

A new town, a new capital

So, what I’m proposing is actually quite simple. Next to Newton-le-Willows, we build a new town, something the Labour Party is already proposing. Call it New Westminster. Along with this new town, we also built a new government campus with a parliament building, ministries, and housing for MPs, including the prime minister. We then move Parliament, and most of the Government to this new campus, with the 100,000 or so Civil Servants that live in London moving into the new town. 

Figure 3: Newton-le-Willows, halfway between Liverpool and Manchester, is in a strategically important location.  It is where the West Coast Mainline and the TransPennine Route meet, nearby the M6 crosses the M62.  Yet there is hardly anything there due to the greenbelt (perhaps soon to be greybelt?).  

People follow the Jobs

Governments of all colours have had a long history of trying to move jobs out of London, evidenced by the wide range of second-tier Civil Service jobs scattered around the country. For example, the DVLA are in Swansea, Active Travel England is in York, and the Departments of Transport, Health, and Work and Pensions have hubs in Leeds.  While these efforts do move some jobs out of the capital, they are the same example of sprinkling a little money over many different locations. None of these changes are transformational.  I would argue that scattering Civil Servants across the country is not conducive to the efficient running of Government. The Government is trying to get Civil Servants back into the office, but often they end up working remotely from the office because their teams are scattered across different offices. 

It is also telling, but it’s never the important jobs that are moved out of London. Ministers and senior civil servants always remain in London, so despite decades of moving jobs out of London, more civil servants work in London than in any other region.  It simply makes sense for Civil Servants to be near the action, and the action is centred on Parliament and Downing Street.  Move them, and the rest will follow.  Moving the Government would also mean moving more than civil servants.  There are many concentric rings of jobs around the Government, such as journalists, consultants, lobbyists, think tanks, etc., that will follow. All of these workers also have partners and children who would also move, and all these people need shopkeepers, hairdressers, teachers and so on to provide for them. So, the comparatively small act of building one new town would have a huge multiplier effect, creating a long-term migration of people from London to the North. At the same time, giving the Liverpool-Manchester area the critical mass needed to grow into a true metropolis. 

Good for Londoners

I also suspect that moving the capital out of London would benefit most Londoners. Those moving North would find that a London salary goes much further with Northern costs of living.  Especially from the significantly lower house prices.  For those remaining, the reduced competition for housing and office space would act like a pressure release valve on the London property market.  There is some evidence that London’s sky-high property prices are holding back economic growth in the city.  Thus, shedding one of the less productive parts of London’s economy may make space for more productive sectors to grow. 

You may or may not be convinced of my argument. Still, I hope that it does encourage you to think more about the importance of places, and remember to ask not just what politicians are going to do but where they are going to do it.