While it seems levelling up has lost momentum, devolution is the one part of the agenda that continues. Here’s what other areas can learn from today’s York and North Yorkshire announcement.
February’s Levelling Up White Paper set out an ambition to deliver a devolution deal for every part of England that wanted one by 2030. Today, six months on, the first of these deals has come to fruition – for York and North Yorkshire.
🗣️ Director of Policy and Research @Paul_Swinney on York and North Yorkshire’s historic devolution deal, announced today.#LevellingUp #devolution #YorkshireDay https://t.co/FQLhQZ5wcJ pic.twitter.com/zYUxEA8WsT
— Centre for Cities (@CentreforCities) August 1, 2022
This is good news. The devolution aspect of the white paper was one of the best things in it and while the ongoing political shenanigans at the national level seem to have taken the momentum out of the levelling up agenda, the fact that this aspect of it has continued to be developed by politicians and officials is very welcome.
The first is that, as promised, there are rewards for areas that take on a directly-elected mayor. As England’s newest mayoralty, York and North Yorkshire will get control of a 30-year £540 million investment fund, the ability to set up a mayoral development corporation, and money for brownfield housing development, amongst other things.
The second is that there will be compromises between economics and politics in some areas. From a strict economic sense – based on commuting patterns – the area covered by the deal isn’t a perfect fit. This is in part governed by the nature of the geography of the existing mayoralty in neighbouring West Yorkshire. The Leeds City Region local enterprise partnership, created in 2011, included York, Selby, Harrogate and Craven, but likely because of local politics, the latterly formed West Yorkshire combined authority left these four out.
If every area is ultimately to be covered by a devolution deal, then pragmatically incorporating these four into a North Yorkshire arrangement makes sense – although it will bring with it its challenges too.
The first is the overlap in commuting patterns across the two mayoralties. In Craven, six times as many residents commute into Leeds and Bradford than they do to all neighbouring authorities in the proposed North Yorkshire deal (5050 commuters v 790 commuters in 2011). In Selby, Harrogate and York, more residents commute to Leeds than to any individual neighbouring authority in North Yorkshire (for example, in 2011 6,200 Selby residents commuted to Leeds. The next highest was York at 5,100). No geography will be perfect across all the devolution deals and there will always be overlap but this is likely to be one of the most extreme cases. Given this, the mayoralties of West and North Yorkshire will need to work together more closely than mayors elsewhere, especially on transport policy.
The second is the balance between urban and rural. The deal puts York in an authority otherwise dominated by rural authorities. York is the biggest contributor to the economy of the new mayoral authority, accounting for just under one third of economic output and just under half of knowledge-based jobs. If future mayors are to successfully support the growth of the economy in their area, they will need to recognise the importance of York, rather than ignoring it. In this respect, headlines of this new deal creating a ‘rural powerhouse’ aren’t especially helpful.
That a deal has been announced is an important step forward and the challenges are identifiable and manageable. The goal now should be to announce deals covering other parts of the country, most notably for Nottingham, which is the only one of England’s 10 largest cities not to have a mayor, and an expansion of the North of Tyne mayoralty to cover a better fitting geography, as trailed in the white paper. This is in addition to the announcement of the ‘trailblazer’ deals for Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, broadening the powers they both have. We watch on with interest.
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