Behind its imposing town hall lies a 19th-century stone building that many in Barnsley believe points the way to a brighter future.
Soon, it could be home for a youth choir that has beaten all the odds to become one of the best in the world. More broadly, the hope is that by delivering a permanent base for its 560 young performers it will serve as a catalyst for greater ambitions and inject confidence in a town struggling to transcend its post-industrial malaise. A third of Barnsley’s children live in poverty.
“It’s about creating equity of opportunity. The reality is that a child born in Barnsley has very different opportunities to one born in Guildford,” said Mat Wright, artistic director of Barnsley Youth Choir, gesturing excitedly towards the building.
On Thursday, Jeremy Hunt will give his autumn statement alongside expected confirmation that certain levelling up bids have triumphed. Among the chancellor’s bulging in-tray lies a request for £3.5m to turn the building into an internationally recognised Northern Academy for Vocal Excellence.
But optimism in the town is muted. While levelling up – the “defining mission” of Boris Johnson’s government – was surely conceived for the likes of Barnsley, the town has yet to receive a penny. Earlier funding rounds have seen seemingly winning bids rejected.
To make matter worse, the government chose to exclude the former mining town from the top tier of places most in need of help. It has not gone unnoticed that Richmond, the relatively prosperous rural Yorkshire constituency of prime minister Rishi Sunak, secured highest-priority status.
A sense of bitterness is palpable throughout the town. “It’s hard not to conclude that levelling up is about providing relatively small pots of money for newly elected Tory MPs to give them something to point to on their election leaflets,” said Barnsley Central’s Labour MP Dan Jarvis in his constituency office on Friday morning.
“Regardless of the political colour of the government, they’ve got to be a bit bigger and grown up,” he added, shrugging as if struggling to comprehend Whitehall’s enduring dismissal of one of the country’s most deprived communities.
Across town, Steve Houghton, leader of Barnsley metropolitan borough council, is in similarly pugnacious mood. “Barnsley’s been ignored; the deprivation’s here, the need’s here. What are we doing wrong? Our bids are for young people, it’s for their futures.”
This Thursday is being seen by some as deciding if levelling up will be remembered as little more than a slogan. Ten months have passed since a white paper was released, with the grand promise it would ensure “all parts of the country share equally in our nation’s success”.
Jarvis asks how that squares with Barnsley’s legacy of failed bids. In 2021 it attempted to use levelling up to improve its bus network, a move rejected without an “informed response”. Six months ago it tried with another much-needed bus improvement project.
“The government initially said £3.6bn was available, a massive boost for the regional economy. We didn’t get a single pound. They flip-flopped between saying it wasn’t ambitious enough and too ambitious,” said Jarvis, a former mayor of South Yorkshire.
Barnsley’s connectivity, vital for investment, is poor. Northern Powerhouse Rail, the package of regional improvements billed as a means “to support the transformation of the north’s economy” is now in peril and under review. No detail has been provided of a commitment to improve the network between Sheffield and Leeds, which is crucial for Barnsley, as it lies between them.
The latest blow is the recent closure of the nearby Doncaster Sheffield airport. Jarvis says they submitted a freeport proposal for the site, and that despite the Treasury’s own analysis scoring it better than some of the successful bids, it had been rebuffed.
The deepening cost of living crisis amplifies the pain of each rejection. The failure to upgrade public transport forces residents into cars at a time of rising fuel costs. Much of Barnsley’s housing stock is draughty and requires more energy to heat. The cumulative impact helps explain why inflation is running at 10.8% in the town, compared with 9.1% in London.
Sarah Norman, the chief executive of Barnsley council, says Whitehall’s repeated rejection of its proposals is even more baffling when the town has proved it can make investments thrive. A shopping centre – Glass Works – has revitalised the town centre; a focus on its schools has seen them rise from second bottom of the league table to above the national average.
Yet students at its sixth form college say that despite rising standards, about half of their peers were resigned to staying in Barnsley and entering a low-wage economy.
“You can work at McDonald’s on minimum wage, but there’s no good jobs here,” said Mason Goldsworthy, 17, who wants to go to university and forge a career in cybersecurity.
Norman said: “It’s about how we encourage young people in Barnsley to really think of the kind of futures that young people born into wealthier places think is normal.”
Building aspiration in Barnsley faces myriad challenges. The Centre for Cities thinktank ranks the health of 63 urban centres. It puts Barnsley near bottom in several categories.
The town has practically the smallest working-age population with high-level qualifications, markedly poor productivity and a low level of innovation and startups.
Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at the thinktank, said the lack of business startups is a trait seen in other former mining towns, and suggested that the mindset of toiling for an employer might be embedded in its psyche.
With the UK poised for fresh austerity measures from the chancellor, Swinney pointed out that Barnsley had been particularly brutalised by previous rounds of cuts. “Between 2011 and 2017/18 our research shows that local government was hit the hardest of any government departments. Within this, urban local government in the north of England was hit the hardest and within that, two places were the hardest hit: Barnsley and Liverpool.”
Levelling up was meant to help repair the scars. The lofty rhetoric of the government’s white paper in February this year has, say experts, amounted to precious little.
“Ultimately the end goal has to be about putting policies in place to make a difference. Sadly there’s very little evidence of that having happened since publication in February,” added Swinney.
Brexit has also deepened Barnsley’s pain. Had the UK remained in the EU, South Yorkshire would have received £900m in assistance, a sum the government pledged to honour. Analysis by Jarvis indicates just £38m has been received.
Also frustrating many in the region is the government’s failure to grasp the argument that levelling up the north would generate greater prosperity for the entire UK.
“Look at it from a hard-nosed business perspective; you’ve got to do something about the north. We are underperforming economically and there needs to be an intervention. We don’t want to be a benefits town,” said Houghton.
For now, all eyes are trained on whether Whitehall backs the vocal academy bid. What began as a social experiment in 2009 – confirming that global excellence can be forged in Barnsley – has become a test of the government’s wavering commitment to the aspirations of the north.
