Will government levelling up the economy only happen at London’s expense?

For a brief moment earlier in the year, it seemed that London had had its chips – and York could become the new capital.  For Greg Dyke, the newly appointed chair of Make it York, it seemed too good to be true. “I took this job and within about three or four weeks there was this article saying the government was thinking of moving the House of Lords to York,” recalls Dyke. “And I thought: ‘Job done!’ Not bad after about a month!” What followed was a frenzy of press speculation about just how much of government could be decanted up the A1, with not just the Lords, but the House of Commons and several government departments all strongly tipped for relocation. Whether there was anything more to the story than spin quickly became irrelevant. “After three months, of course, Covid hit, which changed the whole situation.” If you were to chose a poster child for the government’s levelling up agenda, you could do a lot worse than York. It may not have the extremes of deprivation of, say, Blackpool or Birmingham, but it does appear to have more potential than it has been allowed to fulfil.  Part of that potential is in the form of York Central, a 45-hectare site which comes with some high expectations. The York Central Partnership envisages that it “will power York’s economy into the future, helping to provide the homes the city needs and grow its economy by 20%”. “What’s important is to get the right mix there,” says Dyke. And, vitally, some good occupiers. The question is, must it do that at the expense of London?  York has often seen its fortunes wax and wane in contrast with London’s. For many centuries it was the religious capital of the country, with the Archbishop of York the highest cleric in the land. Go further back and in Roman times it was the capital, albeit the capital of Britannia Inferior. But in terms of real, political power, the last time a government department was housed in York was around 1300.  Changing that could help the city’s star rise again. “I’ll be very surprised if the House of Lords moves to York,” says Dyke. “All the members of the House of Lords I know live near London!” And it is, after all, their decision whether to move or not, rather than the government’s. “But I think a department moving to York is a real possibility,” says Dyke. “I think there is a good chance of that.” A mischievous twinkle sparkles in his eye, or maybe it’s just the reflection from the computer screen. “My suggestion would be the Treasury, because then you get the real money there.”  This would take some persuading, he admits. After all, he jokes, government departments like to gauge their importance by how close they are to Number 10. But until you start to unpick that, he insists, you will never truly reflect the country as a whole. You will always be London-biased. Dyke illustrates the point with the joke about the BBC weatherman reporting on severe storms across the south of England – “but the good news is they’re moving north”. “It is part of this idea that you have got to move more structures out of London.” Dyke has form in this respect. After all, it was because of him that great chunks of the BBC were moved to Salford. “We thought you could change that by basing the teams outside of London,” explains Dyke.  “What we did was we moved departments that moved with their own money.” The departments weren’t reliant on London for their keep. “So we moved a big chunk of buying power out of London, and from what I understand it’s worked pretty well.” But was it at the expense of London? “Well, of course, that was at a time when London was booming,” says Dyke. Other employers and wealth creators moved in to fill the gap. Whether that would be the case today is less easy to say, because of the catastrophic and still unpredictable impact of Covid-19. Dyke acknowledges that encouraging businesses to move out of the capital is hard work. “Whether you can get large numbers of organisations and jobs to move north, to move out of London, still remains to be seen.” But even if Rishi Sunak cannot be persuaded to flit, many other people will, Dyke says. For the simple reason that the quality of life is better. Housing is cheaper – although not as cheap as it once was. Dyke recalls buying his first house in York aged 24 for £1,200. “That same house is worth a quarter of a million pounds now, but in London it would be worth a million.” The city also has huge appeal for young families. The schools are excellent, he says, and the historic city itself is stunningly beautiful by anyone’s standards. And all that becomes even more important as people realise they don’t need to be in the office all the time. “If you only have to be in the office once or twice a week, well, you can get to and from York in one hour fifty minutes.” Or, in other words, as long as it frequently takes Dyke to get from Twickenham to King’s Cross to catch the train to York. So, will we see the levelling-up of York, or the levelling-down of London? “London will continue to grow, but perhaps not at the rate that it has for the last decade, as we encourage cities outside London to grow,” says Dyke, somewhat hedging his bets. The future of London now, Dyke says, will be determined by two things – Covid and Brexit. And both of them are unpredictable. “All cities have got the same problem now,” Dyke reasons. “I mean, what is the centre of a city going to look like? With the decline of retail and all those sorts of things. Someone has to reinvent the city centre and the town centre.”  As a younger man Dyke was deputy editor on a London-focused current affairs programme called, rather unimaginatively, The London Programme. One of its episodes in late 1979 was titled ‘Whither London?’, in which Dyke asked what sort of a future could London possibly have given the city’s seemingly irreversible decline. “And I think we got it 100% wrong! I don’t think anyone foresaw this boom that London was going to have.” So will the likes of York, Leeds or Manchester grow faster than London over the next five years? In other words, will this be at the expense of London? “I think they probably will.” Image © Shutterstock