-
- guardian.co.uk, Monday March 12 2001 18.11 GMT
But, as a report undertaken for the Guardian by Professor Brian Robson of Manchester University says, cheek by jowl with the new penthouses, restaurants, and up-market stores, lies "the land of the forgotten ... the endless rows of impoverished terrace housing and half empty council housing where unemployment is horrendous, where houses sell - if at all - for under £10,000, where crime ... traps people in their homes, where drugs are common currency..."
Northern cities are increasingly characterised by the reverse of the north American "doughnut" phenomenon, in which original city centres become hollowed out and deserted. In Britain's north, vibrant rebuilt centres are surrounded by wastelands, with many trapped in a cycle of negative equity.
A long the M62 corridor, from Liverpool to Manchester and the Lancashire towns, 280,000 homes (100,000 of them private properties) are blighted, according to recent research by Birmingham University. The wider north-west already has more derelict land than anywhere else in the country - tens of thousands of acres eminently suitable for redevelopment.
Ministers are now committed to an ambitious policy of neighbourhood renewal, with a promise to pump hundreds of millions into deprived communities, linked to an array of performance targets. This all seems extremely promising. The government does take poverty seriously. But, as Brian Robson points out in his report, if government policy is now to focus on the neighbourhood and the general delivery of council services (fine for London, no doubt), it will miss some of the main causes of poverty and deprivation it is trying to ameliorate in the north.
Poor communities, he argues, do not emerge in a vacuum. Their fortunes reflect the wider economies of cities in which they exist. The challenge, then, is not to wait for that elusive "trickle down", but to act positively to channel city centre wealth to the outer ring. With government grants to town halls now skewed in favour of London and the south, because northern cities and conurbations are losing people, that task is not easy, although ministers are now - belatedly - considering switching some funds from south to north by revising a complex Whitehall spending formula. The government's equally ambitious regional agenda - creating eight development agencies (RDAs) and pushing up their budgets by £500m - has yet to have any impact because it was not quite clear what the RDAs were meant to achieve: the south-east RDA, for instance, sees its task as going for yet more growth at all costs to compete with the super-regions of Europe.
It wants to keep the big corporate headquarters, and research labs along the M4 and around Oxford, with the less-favoured regions taking the more mundane back office functions. Such a policy, not surprisingly, has pushed regions such as the north-east - and the cities of the north - further down the prosperity league table.
On the day that Professor Robson produced his report, government statisticians published even more sobering figures showing - yes -that the north-south divide had actually widened under New Labour. In its first three years, GDP per head in the north-east had fallen by a point to 23% below the national average - while London was almost 30% above. Not for nothing did the trade and industry secretary, Stephen Byers, speak of "unacceptably wide gaps" between regions. While no one doubts his commitment to the challenge, it will take more than brave words to push provincial cities and their wider regions up the prosperity league. As Richard Rogers, chairman of the government's urban task force, recently said, this should top New Labour's agenda for a second term - with a minister for urban affairs in the cabinet. He might not have to wait too long.
