Personal news Klaxon as they say --- thanks for all the tweets, I'm going to be moving to London on January to split my time between Centre for Cities and The FT working on regional funding formulas. Hahahaha hahaha. No I'm not. But seriously,...

This year has been a bad year for the North moaning. It may be politically sensible (I'm not convinced but I don't know) but on many things the need for evidence and a coherent argument seems to be evaporating. Take housing for example,...

The North has much more affordable housing than the South. To my mind that means that the South deserves more government spending on housing. I can detect no fair rationale for the North's demands for more of the housing budget. Yet we demand more.

We could just assign more land for housing and let the market build more,... but we're hardly rushing to do that. We're scrapping around everywhere to assign less land for housing, just look at the GMSF mess this week, while asking for more money for housing. Money to do what?

Then the UK government comes up with its plan to reform housing allocations which would see housing requirements in the North reduced while increased in the South. And we? Moan that it doesn't encourage growth in the North. Growth that we seem to oppose most of the time anyway.

I don't know what Rishi Sunak going to do to remove the anti-North bias from the Treasury. If it's tweaking algorithms for spending decisions,... I'm not at all convinced. Schemes in the North are easily fundable on paper. It's the people (elected and civil service) who say no.

So moving a big chunk of the Treasury to Leeds would help. I think Darlington would be a bad idea. You want them somewhere where they can build such a strong culture and network of options and collaborations that they can dare tell Treasury London to piss off now and again.

The North's railways aren't electric, Leeds doesn't have a tram, Newcastle's buses aren't regulated, Manchester Piccadilly is still waiting for two new platforms,.... not because of some anti-North bias in funding formulas. But because of people making choices.

I would change the QR funding formula for university research budgets to get rid of London weighting which is economically illiterate. But that's probably the only real algorithm problem I've found the North being disadvantaged by. The rest of it is all people.

So there we go, as always the three biggest parts of my levelling up plan are,
1/ Let cities regulate the buses and invest more in (preferably boring) Northern infrastructure, focusing on our big cities, to capture agglomeration benefits we currently don't enjoy.

2/ Fix the way the UK government chooses where to spend money on R&D. Align the spending with where business spends. Get rid of London weighting in QR.

3/ Culture and digital. Look at where the culture money goes, look at where the national institutions are, where the new ones go. Compare London-centralissd TechNation project with France's federalised FrenchTech or Dutch equivalents.
.
That's it. Fix the people not algorithms.

And just for the moment, with local government so close to death (and actually, functionally dead in many areas of innovation now) just stop the continuing huge cuts to local government, cuts disproportionately impacting Northern cities, in the middle of a pandemic.

That's a change Rishi Sunak can announce any day he likes. If he keeps cutting local government --- and know that Leeds is still running at two net redundancies a day, every day --- there's not much chance of believing his intentions. The cuts have gone far too far now.

Two last things,
1/ Tories pushing through Metro Mayors and the right to regulate buses in big cities is progress. Progress has happened.
2/ The people who will benefit most from Northern growth are Southern renters. Strong Manchester = more space for families in Tottenham.

You can read more here. "Beyond BCR. Putting the politics back into transport appraisal" https://www.tomforth.co.uk/beyondbcr/