You’re an MP going on @R4Today, desperate to say the #redwall has fallen because too many Govts have focused on creating jobs in big cities rather than locally.

Take a breath.

Look at the census data.

Definitions: The chart looks at the 55 largest cities and towns in England, and splits them into:

*NORTH & MIDS*

Large northern cities e.g. Manchester, Leeds
Large towns and smaller cities e.g. Barnsley

*SOUTH*

London
All other southern cities e.g. Reading, Plymouth

Right, back to that chart.

Large towns and smaller cities in the North haven’t seen much jobs growth since WWII. In 2011 (latest census) they had 12% more jobs than 1951. This compares to an increase of 91% in cities and large towns further south.

But let’s take out the southern cohort, who have been the real winners in terms of jobs.

Now we see that the smaller places further north have performed much better than the largest cities (where jobs were *DOWN* 5%). And they even did better than London for much of the 60 yrs

Key message: Over this timespan, big cities have been the losers in terms of jobs, despite what we are repeatedly told.

If you want to go down that line of argument my right honourable friend, then your beef should be with Brighton and Milton Keynes, not B'ham and Manchester.

There has of course been a big change in the mix of jobs. In '51, the economies of large towns and smaller cities in the North and South looked very different.
But fast forward to 2011 and they are much more alike - the split between manufacturing and services was very similar.

This may explain changes in voting.
Those northern places were once dominated by production, which traditionally was more unionised. But this hasn’t been the case for many years.

Their economies are very different though. Southern places have larger shares of high value service jobs.

This impacts wages.
It impacts the high street (more £ to spend).
And it impacts job progression opportunities.

Which brings us on to ‘we need to stop the young people leaving’ argument. More recent data shows that big cities are the biggest winners from the university process, and a number of smaller cities lose.

The chart shows that Manchester gets many more graduates out of the system than 18 year olds it puts in. In Doncaster it’s the opposite.

The chart is from this report: https://www.centreforcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/16-11-18-The-Great-British-Brain-Drain.pdf

The simple answer to this is ‘get more high paid jobs into these places’. But what influence has policy got over this? For decades ministers have pretended they have a lot of power to do this. They haven’t had much success at wielding it…

ENDS