Boris Johnson: Now show the North the colour of your money – Andrew Vine

It sounds like hot air, because the words show little sign of being matched by deeds. And there is the growing suspicion that it’s all about mollifying the North by saying what it would like to hear without doing very much.

Boris Johnson’s assertion at last week’s Great Northern Conference that a quarter of London’s 92,000 civil servants will be moved to the regions by the end of this decade especially takes some believing.

Saying that something will happen at some unspecified point in the next 10 years carries with it the faint, but unmistakeable, clatter of a can being kicked down the road far enough into the future for assurances to be forgotten or overtaken by events.

Keeping policy vague in order to quieten a potentially troublesome audience is one of the oldest tricks in the book of political sleight-of-hand.

There are no specifics of where these civil servants – along with ministers and departments – will be based, or how such a move would be accomplished.

And my hunch is that no such details will be forthcoming any time soon. This is about trying to quell the clamour from the North for the investment and greater powers of self-determination we demand and deserve.

Those with longer memories might recall that we’ve been here before with promises to move the machinery of Government out of London so that it is far more attuned to the needs of the regions.

Let’s cast our minds back 16 years to 2004, when Tony Blair, still in his pomp and full of reforming zeal, commissioned a report from senior civil servant Sir Michael Lyons entitled “Review of Public Sector Relocation”.

It recommended moving about 20,000 civil servants out of London, which was about the same proportion of staff as Mr Johnson cited. It never happened, sunk by a combination of resistance from the Civil Service, practical difficulties over how the system would work and cost.

But it sounded good, a sop to the regions to convince them that their concerns about Government being too London-centric were being taken seriously.

The fact is virtually nothing has happened to give us here in the North much confidence that the Prime Minister’s much-vaunted levelling-up agenda is anything more than warm words.

Even allowing for the Covid-19 crisis that has upended all the normal business of government, there has been little progress.

On the contrary, we appear to have moved backwards. The downgrading of the Northern Powerhouse Minister’s role is not the action of a government that is full of enthusiasm for levelling up North-South inequalities.

Nor has the tussling with elected mayors over regional lockdowns been the behaviour of a government comfortable with real power being held outside London.

This is a Prime Minister who, for all his talk about the importance of the regions, holds power close to the centre. That has been apparent in the reluctance to involve local authorities in controlling the pandemic or operating test-and-trace systems, and it’s also there in proposed planning reforms that will strip councils of powers to prevent inappropriate developments in their areas.

Against that backdrop, and with the country staring down the barrel of a £2 trillion debt, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if Mr Johnson and those closest to him have quietly agreed that more investment in the North will be kicked into the long grass.

Lip service will continue to be paid to levelling up – at least until the next election is safely out of the way – but I really wouldn’t bet on substantial investment coming our way.

And that could also mean HS2 never reaching Yorkshire. With work on the first phase from London to Birmingham already seeing costs spiral by a further £800m, somewhere down the track there is every chance of an announcement that the second phase to Sheffield and Leeds will have to be put on hold until finances improve.

All of which means that our region has to push even harder for the help we deserve.

New investment in the North is needed more urgently than ever because of the economic damage wrought by Covid – and the possibility of a post-Brexit shock.

Warm words from Mr Johnson aren’t enough. A fairer deal for the regions has been part of his pitch to the North’s people since he ran for the Conservative leadership, and it helped win a big Commons majority.

Now he has to deliver. And, as with so much else about this government, this is a matter of trust. If we are to believe the Prime Minister, he has to show us the colour of his money.

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