enior Labour and Conservative politicians have used a conference in Newcastle to outline their competing visions for levelling up the North.
Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy and Levelling Up Minister Neil O’Brien were among the speakers at the first Northern Agenda Live event organised by Chronicle and Journal publishers Reach and held at our offices in Newcastle city centre.
The event also heard from other politicians, academics and business figures from around the North who debated issues such as health and wellbeing, northern identity, the green agenda and education and skills.
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Ms Nandy – a former Newcastle University student who started her speech by saying “you can leave Newcastle but it never leaves you” – criticised the Government for making northern towns and cities compete for money controlled by Whitehall rather than allowing communities in the region to drive its own recovery.
She said: “So the centre of our mission – the absolute core of what levelling up means to us – is to bring good jobs back to every community. This is it. The defining mission.
“We have begun the process of laying out our plans on how we will do this, ensuring jobs and opportunities are spread fairly across the country.
“We are promising £28bn a year, every year, in the next parliament to rebuild our coastal and industrial towns so young people do not have to move hundreds of miles just to find good work or prospects.
“That means fair investment and better decision-making, closer to people, to create the transport and digital connectivity which connects people to jobs, opportunities, families and friends and allows businesses to roam further afield.”
She added: “Imagine what we could achieve with a Government which backed us.
“We could build good jobs in every community, there’s a global race to create these jobs and we will invest to bring them here so that young people can power us through the next generation like their parents and grandparents powered us through the last.”
Earlier Levelling Up Minister Neil O’Brien had used the event to highlight Government funding for things like the Grainger Market in Newcastle, the new Northumberland rail line and the planned Britishvolt gigafactory near Blyth.
He said: “The UK is one of the more geographically-unbalanced economies in the world and geographically more balanced economies are stronger. It’s not hard to see why.
“If you have an economy where some bits of it are overheating people can’t afford to buy a house because it’s too expensive, you can’t get on the train in the morning and everything is overloaded.
“If at the same time you have bits of the country crying out for investment, crying out for new jobs and you have underused assets and surplus land then there has to be a win/win opportunity from the levelling up agenda.”
The event – part of the Northern Agenda title which brings together political and public affairs coverage from Reach newspapers and websites around the North – had been opened by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.
He said: “Say what you want about the Levelling Up White Paper but it’s hard to deny it is an ambitious and long-term plan, putting the North-South divide and regional inequality at the heart of the political debate.
“Yet for levelling up to succeed and for the White Paper to become a reality the Government must start turning those ambitions into real delivery with Cabinet support.”
