Schools and skills as important as North’s new rail links – Andrew Carter

However, as the Chancellor said last week during his statement on the Spending Review, the economic crisis is only just beginning.

Since March we’ve seen the biggest fall in national GDP since records began, and hundreds of thousands of firms – and jobs – are now being kept on life support by the Government’s measures.

Overall, the future looks bleaker the further north you go. Since March the number of people claiming unemployment-related benefits in some northern cities and towns has risen about twice as much as in places in the South.

This situation has been made worse by the fact that huge swathes of the North have had to remain under the strictest lockdown rules for much of the year, and are likely to continue to do so into 2021.

Many of the places hit hardest by Covid-19 are the very same ones that Boris Johnson pledged to level up on the general election campaign trail last year which, as a result, turned blue for the first time in generations.

The job of levelling them up was hard last December when the Prime Minister won his majority, it’s even harder today.

Last week the Chancellor gave us a glimpse into how the Government plans to build back better from the pandemic and level up the cities and towns of northern England. Predictably, his most eye-catching promises were for huge infrastructure spending: £100bn worth of new capital investments, including £19bn for new transport investment.

Politicians have always liked big transport and building projects. The lure of the classic hard hat photo op often proves too hard to resist because it is a very visible way of showing the public that Government is delivering something tangible.

But the reality is that transport problems are not the main reason why most cities and towns struggle, and investing in infrastructure is not the best way to level them up. Instead, the Government needs to look at a more fundamental issue: our education and skills system.

The education divide is the main reason why many places across Northern England and the Midlands have fallen so far behind places in the South. In Bradford, for example, there are around three times more people without any qualifications than in Exeter.

This helps explain why average pay is much lower in Bradford, and why more people have lost their jobs there due to Covid-19 than in Exeter. While educational attainment levels remain so low in so many places, grand transport plans to connect people with jobs will prove fruitless because people still won’t have the skills or experience needed to actually get those jobs.

Added to this, few companies will locate or create good jobs in places where people lack the skills those firms need to grow and thrive.

Despite this reality, the money that the Government is planning to invest in education to build back better is dwarfed by the amounts being spent on transport.

If the Government wants to deliver real change for the North of England and the Midlands, it is absolutely imperative that it puts education, particularly adult and further education, on an equal footing with transport investment.

The biggest challenge for post-Covid Britain is to upskill the vast majority people who aren’t of school age but will be working for the next 40 years or more.

The Government has made encouraging steps in the right direction with the promise of a free college course for anyone who doesn’t have A-level or equivalent qualifications. To level up the cities and large towns of Northern England, I’d encourage it to go further and extend the offer of a free course to everyone who has lost their job due to Covid-19.

We’re now one fifth of the way through this Parliament and unemployment will rise even higher in 2021 as more and more businesses fail due to the pandemic. Because of this, the need for the Government to improve adult education and skills becomes increasingly important.

If the Government hopes
to deliver real change for Northern England and the Midlands it needs to have the same levels of ambition for education as it does for infrastructure, because a good job is far more transformational to a person’s life-chances than a fast train.