Northern Powerhouse Minister Jake Berry branded 'disrespectful' over Yorkshire commuter claims

In an interview with BBC Radio Leeds, Jake Berry claimed that people were unlikely to travel from West to South Yorkshire for work.

The minister made the claims after the Government sensationally rejected calls for a One Yorkshire devolution deal last Tuesday.

In a letter to Sheffield City Region Mayor Dan Jarvis, the Communities Secretary James Brokenshire said: “The Government considers that the One Yorkshire devolution proposals do not meet our criteria for devolution.”

Speaking after the announcement, Mr Berry said: “Under the current legislation, One Yorkshire is not an economic geography which is recognised by the Treasury and I don’t think we can, without changing the law, proceed with the One Yorkshire deal.

“The judgement the Government made was that people who live in Leeds often don’t necessarily live in the same sort of economic travel to work area as people who may live as far south as Sheffield as anywhere in South Yorkshire, or even all the way over to Hull.”

The assertion prompted a backlash on social media, with Chief Executive of Doncaster Council Jo Miller citing travel to work data that suggested there are in fact a significant number of commuters who travel between those areas on a regular basis.

Ms Miller was referring to the latest Travel to Work data, which shows that around 32,000 people a day commute from South Yorkshire to West Yorkshire, with 18,000 doing the opposite journey.

This compares with just 4,500 travelling from South Yorkshire to Greater Manchester and 1,700 in the other direction.

Reacting to the minister’s words, Doncaster Council’s Assistant Director of Strategy and Performance, Lee Tillman, told the Yorkshire Post the government was failing to engage with “the facts and the evidence base”.

“It’s just about looking at the evidence and saying: ‘what does the evidence tell us?’” he said.

“And just purely from a Doncaster point of view - we know that broadly as many people commute outside the city region as they do within it.

“People feel that there hasn’t necessarily been full engagement with the facts and the evidence base. The evidence is pretty clear in terms of how people commute.”

He added: “It just feels a little bit disrespectful.

“It feels like actually let’s have a proper discussion about this, let’s have some proper engagement about this and it doesn’t feel like that happened.”

Some of the region’s MPs also rejected Mr Berry’s suggestion, with Keighley MP John Grogan pointing to the high use of public transport in the region, despite the limited capacity.

He said: “The commuter trains and buses of the County are bursting to the seams each morning as commuters travel across Yorkshire to work .

“The main inhibiting factor is not distinct economic areas but slow trains and congested roads.”

Conservative MP for Scarborough and Whitby Robert Goodwill added: “People from Scarborough go to work in Leeds that’s why we’ve had such a problem with the TransPennine rail links.

“We are affected from a transport point of view by the lack of investment, sometimes 40 or 50 miles away from Scarborough.

“Our key tourist trade comes from West Yorkshire, Hull and to a lesser extent Teesside, so it is important for us that the whole region works together to attract that investment.”