This Government has rightly prioritised growth across the whole country, developing industrial strategies and securing new trade deals along with record levels of corporate investment in sectors such as renewable energy and AI.
What does that really mean for communities like Rossendale and Darwen, small towns with low productivity where the cost of living and housing crisis has hit hardest?
In order for the government to meet its promises, growth must deliver tangible benefits: good jobs, opportunities for young people, clean and safe towns, affordable housing, thriving local businesses, more money in people’s pockets and public transport which actually connects people to where they want to be.
Too often, investment planning reduces the role of small towns to feeding people into the great city machine, assuming they need nothing more than ‘better transport into the city’.
Despite intent to support regional rebalancing, embedded practices too often default to over-reliance on simplistic and short-term benefit/cost ratios. It is perfectly understandable that when looking for growth we first go to places where it can be achieved most easily, at scale and at the lowest cost. If we continue in this vein however, all the money will be gone before we get anywhere near the likes of Rossendale and Darwen, because in places like my home, delivering growth is not easy. It is complex, bespoke and needing sustained focus.
There is rarely a silver bullet, and if there is one it will be tough to deliver. However, the long-term benefits are huge. Not just economically but in terms of health, housing, crime, environment and general wellbeing. Too often, as things stand, we don’t fully value these outcomes.
If we are really going to see the benefits of growth and investment in places like Rossendale and Darwen we need to address this head on.
The Green Book, which sets out how government decisions on major investment programs are appraised, was last reviewed in 2020, and is subject to another review now. The issue does not stop with the Green Book, however. It is a simple human temptation to take the quicker and easier option. The great failure of the last government’s ‘Levelling up Program’, for example, was to abandon any sort of strategic approach in favour of headline-grabbing interventions secured by bidding competitions.
We must ensure all appraisal processes, including departmental models, recognise the long term nature of key interventions and properly value all the impacts of investment in our small towns. Green Book best practice must be updated to focus on strategic objectives, with strengthened place-based systems of evaluation and public transparency.
More fundamentally, our strategies must insist on doing the hard things whilst giving the fiscal flexibility, regulatory framework and sustained leadership to deliver effectively. The question ‘what does this do for our most deprived and left behind areas?’ should be embedded in every investment strategy and decision process.
Devolution and local leadership could and should play a vital role in this, but only if we do it right. It has been well argued that to close national productivity gaps we need to focus investment toward the cities and devolved authorities with the greatest ability to get things done. Such programs must be in parallel with targeted investments in deprived towns and in line with a regional strategy, founded on the principle of growth for all, that cuts across devolved areas. This strategy must be supported with the flexible funding and delivery capability to respond to specific challenges and opportunities. We cannot continue to justify Government investment flowing into the likes of Manchester whilst the towns of Lancashire don’t even appear in the picture.
For example, the Trans-Pennine Route Upgrade is a great project, but all it currently does for Rossendale and Darwen is take trains past us a bit quicker. It could instead be one part of a much wider project enabling a ‘growth corridor’, with a fundamental requirement of the investment to deliver a positive impact on small towns and rural areas.
Such an approach would need to be delivered through a partnership of local authorities and other agencies with mayors sharing accountability. It would require a fully place-based appraisal mechanism, flexible funding and long-term delivery capability. This sort of holistic approach could deliver something far more impactive and larger than the sum of its parts.
We have tried this before, but too often programs would retreat to doing the same easy thing over and over again, or lose strategic focus and just deliver a lot of ‘nice to haves’, or be pulled back into spending orthodoxies by risk averse oversight.
This Government must take the challenge on again. Our new default must be to put left behind areas like Bacup, Whitworth, Rawtenstall and Darwen first. We simply cannot afford to fail those communities that need change most.
Rebalancing the economy means spreading growth to left behind places and communities
