Sir Keir Starmer needs to offer detailed solutions to the concerns of Yorkshire voters - Andrew Vine

In the rural areas of North and East Yorkshire, there will be concern about the future of farming and the exodus of young people from the places they grew up because houses are too expensive.

And across town and country there are certainly shared concerns – declining public services, ever-lengthening waiting times to see a GP or get a hospital appointment, frustration at poor public transport and consternation at dying shopping streets blighted by never-ending business closures.

The closer an election gets, the more people want answers to the problems they see all around. Rishi Sunak and his Government will spend the months ahead trying to provide them, and this week Labour begins to do likewise.

After years of being deliberately vague about what he would do in office while allowing the Conservatives’ internal strife to do his electioneering for him, Sir Keir Starmer is going to publish the document that will form the basis of Labour’s election manifesto.

Despite its lead in the polls, and the spectacular by-election win in Selby and Ainsty that points towards traditional Tory heartlands being willing to give Sir Keir the chance to govern, he needs to offer detailed solutions to the concerns of Yorkshire voters if they are to put their faith in him.

Woolly generalities won’t do. Yorkshire had its fill of those during the Boris Johnson years and won’t fall for anything like them again, whoever is making the promises.

Labour is laying great emphasis on being financially responsible, with the pledge it won’t borrow to fund day-to-day spending and will reduce the crippling national debt.

That amounts to getting its punch in first to counter Conservative accusations that Sir Keir is an old-fashioned tax-and-spend Labour leader.

But common sense tells Yorkshire voters that massive amounts of money are going to have to come from somewhere to fix Britain’s problems.

The crisis engulfing schools built from concrete crumbling to such an alarming extent the buildings may be unsafe for pupils and staff is illustrative of that. As he sets out his programme, Sir Keir has to show that he understands the weight of expectation there is here in the north that problems will be fixed, and has the policies to do it.

If, as seems likely, the red wall seats of West and South Yorkshire that turned to the Conservatives in 2019 return to their traditional allegiance, voters will expect all the broken and unfulfilled promises about levelling up made by Boris Johnson to be addressed.

Regional inequality holds Yorkshire and the wider north back, sabotaging the futures of our young people, making life harder than it needs to be for business and acting as a brake on economic expansion.

Labour needs to spell out how it will rebalance the economy to give the north a fairer deal and unleash its potential to prosper not only for the sake of Yorkshire’s people, but to the benefit of the entire country.

It needs to come up with firm proposals for how it will get the region’s transport networks moving properly, especially the dismal trans-Pennine rail links.

And what is it going to do about the precarious state of local government finances? Only last week, Kirklees Council warned that severe budget cuts are necessary if it is to balance its books, and every other council in Yorkshire is facing similarly difficult choices.

And, of course, there is the eternal question of what to do about the NHS, which is facing arguably the greatest structural crisis in its history, with one in 10 of the country’s population on a waiting list for treatment, delays increasing all the time, and doctors striking for big wage increases. Against such a backdrop, the voters of Yorkshire will rightly ask how improvements are to be achieved if Labour is essentially intending to stick to the financial restraints being followed by Mr Sunak and his colleagues.

If Sir Keir is to win the election with a majority that allows him to govern decisively, he has to persuade Yorkshire voters. And if they aren’t convinced by what he says this week, a Labour victory is far from a foregone conclusion, whatever the opinion polls say.