Moving Treasury civil servants could help close north-south divide but only if its paired with massive investment - Andrew Vine

It’s one which, to their probable amazement, they will find is a place with great places to live, lovely countryside, good schools for their children, excellent health services and a resourceful, hard-working population.

All of us who live here know these things, but they are far from common knowledge among those who determine our fortunes from their desks in the capital. If that seems like a sweeping generalisation, or even an unfair caricature of intelligent people’s knowledge of vast swathes of the country we all share, consider this.

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Less than a year ago, in a meeting with a group of civil servants who had come up to Leeds for a few days, I was flabbergasted at how little they knew of this vague entity called “the North”.

Yes, they knew the facts and figures about it, but hardly anything of its nature.

They had no sense of its aspirations for the future, or its vibrancy, being surprised to find good places to eat out, a lively cultural scene, and above all how bright and cosmopolitan the city felt.

It wasn’t that they imagined it was going to be dark, smoky and industrial, like a 1950s photograph come to life, or its people still using tin baths in front of the fire, just that they expected it to be something less than London, a place of narrower horizons and lacking in ambition.

How odd it was to find people from our country’s capital so parochial in their outlook, as if nowhere else could possibly match it in any way. Not too long before, I’d encountered a very similar attitude from a family moving up to Sheffield from London because the husband’s job was being relocated.

His wife was anxious. Would the schools be any good? Is there anywhere to eat? Is there a Waitrose? Yes, I assured her, there are all those things and as a bonus we’ve even got this new-fangled electric lighting and running water as well.

That earned me a deserved ticking-off, but there’s a serious point here. The North remains an unknown quantity for vast numbers of people who live in or around London, which is an extraordinary state of affairs.

And when some of those people have vast influence over what happens in this mysterious place of which they know little, it’s a state of affairs as worrying as it is extraordinary. Which makes it imperative that the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, follows through on his intention, trailed over the last couple of days, to relocate significant numbers of the Treasury’s 1,500 staff to the North.

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Only by doing so will it be possible for officials to gain a proper appreciation of what we’re about, our strengths, our needs and the challenges we face.

Fact-finding trips are all very well, but the Treasury has to be invested in the North by being here. Its people need to get to know our towns and cities as well as they know the districts of London, for only with that knowledge will come real understanding.

They will see the areas that need a leg up, and share the frustrations of people trying to get to work on rotten train services, or businesses struggling to move goods around a congested road network.

They’ll ask themselves why it should be that their children’s schools receive less funding than the ones they attended back in London, and worry like every other parent about the effect that might have on their future.

It helps of course that Mr Sunak, the Richmond MP, has a northern constituency.

He understands what we’re about, and it can’t be a coincidence that the last Tory Chancellor to make a real effort to help was George Osborne, who also had a northern seat, albeit in an affluent corner of Cheshire.

Relocating civil servants could be a significant step towards closing the north-south divide – but only if it is accompanied by massive investment.

If there is any whiff of tokenism about the move, or a sense that those in the North have insufficient clout when money is being handed out, it will rebound on the Government.

Nor must it be any attempt at a substitute for Yorkshire devolution. Our county more than ever needs the powers and budget to determine its own destiny. Any attempt to retain central control – even delivered via an office in the North – will undermine faith in Boris Johnson’s pledge to create a more balanced economy.

And how desperately that needs to happen. Last week, the think tank IPPR North reported gross inequalities between regions like ours and the south-east, and now Lord Kerslake’s UK2070 Commission has echoed its findings.

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There’s going to be an awful lot for those civil servants to get to grips with when they arrive.