The Government cannot afford to ignore Sir Jake Berry on levelling up - Jayne Dowle

So why the silence on the North? It’s the question being asked by former Northern Powerhouse leader and former Conservative Party chairman, Sir Jake Berry, who, in a blistering attack, is accusing Starmer of ignoring us.

As we all reel battered from a tumultuous few months, the Spring Statement was the ideal time for the government to show it cares about the North by investing in jobs, infrastructure and opportunities, Berry argues, but this was sadly lacking.

Citing the PM’s backing of a third Heathrow runway, the Lower Thames Crossing and a rail link between Oxford and Cambridge, Berry rightly points out that once again, the North has been left to fend for itself.

Ruinously expensive, the Northern leg of HS2, cancelled by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, remains buried in the ‘too hard, too pricey’ pile, Berry argues, in his polemic for a national newspaper.

And rightly so, he points out the crumb thrown, fully electrifying the TransPennine Line, between York, Leeds, Huddersfield and Manchester, to provide faster, greener services, is not a new idea. It started way back in 2019, under the Conservatives.

Welcome though any rail upgrade is, it’s only half the story. There has been no recent talk of improving road links across the Pennines, or bringing better transport connections between the countless small towns and cities that would benefit from easier access to cities such as Leeds and Manchester.

No-one would argue that we don’t deserve better train services across the North of England. But this obsession with trains, although it squares with the government’s drive towards net zero, is something of a metropolitan thing in its own right.

When I speak to friends who commute into London, they can never understand why we in the North spend so much time driving to and fro; when I say it’s because trains only go so far and a meaningful bus service doesn’t exist in so many areas, they are puzzled.

It’s the lack of a whole vision however that is the most frustrating. If our young people aren’t educated well, they won’t leave school qualified to take the better-paid jobs with more prospects in cities.

The PM, who has made much political capital out of his recent experience watching Adolescence, the searing Netflix drama based on Jamie, a 13-year-old boy who stabs a classmate, clearly hasn’t clocked the locations. He should.

It was filmed in and around the former pit villages of South Kirkby and South Elmsall, with Minsthorpe Community College standing in for Jamie’s school. The interior scenes were shot at Production Park, a world-leading production facility in South Kirkby. This mindblowing proof of what happens when a government understands and invests, opened in 2015, funded by a Cultural Recovery Fund, a combination of grant and loan cash from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS).

It's an amazing place; my daughter performed there as part of an inter-schools dance and music competition when she was in Year Nine. But, with respect to Minsthorpe Community College, rated ‘good’ by Ofsted in 2023, the dramatic and disturbing fictional scenes filmed in the classrooms are staggeringly true to life. Commentators have been shocked; I wasn’t. I’m a parent in a similar former pit village and I’ve been a school governor.

Teachers helplessly out of touch and out of control. Pupils bullying and harassing each other. The sense, as one character remarks, that there isn’t much learning going on here. Too many of our regional schools are like this – primary schools included - yet all we hear from Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, herself the product of a tough Northeast upbringing, is that she’s considering curtailing free school meals and bringing in AI to help teaching staff.

The PM should listen to Berry. Levelling up might have been a buzzword that bolstered up the Tories, but his barbed attack contains many truths that this government cannot afford to ignore.