‘As an unabashed socialist, I am concerned with the distribution of wealth, but if you don’t create any in the first place it is a bit of an empty discussion.” For a decade I’ve repeated those words of Richard Leese, who was for 25 years the leader of Manchester city council, in policy discussions across northern England. I have never slammed them down while shouting, “This is what we believe” as Margaret Thatcher did with Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, but I might start.
Greater Manchester, a city region with a population of nearly 3 million people, generates far too little wealth to make its redistribution a meaningful discussion. Unusually for a rich country, the taxes raised in Greater Manchester, just as in other city regions such as West Yorkshire, Merseyside and the West Midlands, do not meet the cost of providing local public services. Taxes raised in the south-east of England cover the gap.
The legacy of Leese, his chief executive, Howard Bernstein, and many thousands of people they worked with was to help Manchester work towards paying its way. Since 2004, as far back as the data goes, Greater Manchester has had the highest productivity growth of any other big city region in England.
Transport has been a huge factor in that success. Metrolink trams started running in 1992 and the system has grown to become the most-used such network in Britain. The newly integrated and locally controlled buses and trams of the Bee Network are building upon this, by bringing people back to public transport after four decades of decline since Thatcher’s disastrous deregulation. There is still a long way to go: the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, is working to add some rail services to the Bee Network by the end of next year and has longer-term ambitions to build some form of metro – the city is the largest in Europe without any such system.
In West Yorkshire, our mayor is also bringing buses back into local control, starting in 2027. But beyond that we have much less to celebrate. As Metrolink trams started running in Manchester we were deep into planning a three-line supertram system of our own. The UK government provisionally approved the scheme and funding for it in 2001.
In 2004, Leeds Supertram was paused. Alistair Darling, then transport secretary, demanded a smaller and cheaper scheme and when amended plans were submitted a year later, he cancelled the project. His suggested alternative was a “state-of-the-art bus system”. A proposal was developed locally, committed to with national funding in 2012, and then cancelled in 2016.
Other investments in our region have met the same fate. Labour’s 2010 HS2 plans included Leeds. George Osborne backed them in 2014 and added plans for “Northern Powerhouse Rail” from Liverpool to Hull via Bradford on a new high-speed line. Those ambitions are long gone. HS2 to Leeds was first delayed and then cancelled in 2021 along with a new railway through Bradford.
The apology to our two cities was a promise to build West Yorkshire mass transit, a tram system linking Leeds and Bradford. Now, after four years of studies and consultations, that scheme was this week delayed by at least three years. Trams will not run in Leeds or Bradford before the late 2030s. We are promised that this remains a delay and not a cancellation, but we have heard that many times before.
Poor connectivity is holding back our cities and our region. Opportunities in fast-growing sectors of the Leeds economy – such as financial and legal services, health technologies and data processing – are accessible to too few people, especially at the start of their careers when in-person interactions matter most. Businesses grow less quickly, create fewer great jobs and leave too many talented people underemployed.
Cultural venues such as the Halifax Piece Hall and the magnificently refurbished Bradford Live struggle to attract big enough audiences to cover their costs, and spread less joy as a result.
As a result of delays such as this week’s, every big city region in Britain except London is in the bottom third of European cities for productivity. If we cannot fix how we build, we have little hope of turning that around.
To fix this, we must fix how Britain builds. The details will be complicated, but the guiding principle of the solution is stunningly simple. We need the British government, its experts, and our national institutions, overwhelmingly in London, to get out of the way.
We have seen this work in Britain. Manchester’s Metrolink extension to its airport was delivered on budget and a year early because Whitehall handed over the cash and let the local team build. In France, where such schemes are funded through local taxes and national legal barriers to building are much lower, things work even better. French cities build transport schemes, with their own money raised through higher local taxes, over twice as quickly and at below half the cost.
We should all be concerned with the distribution of wealth, but we should be at least equally concerned with the infuriating and longstanding barriers to having more of it to distribute.