Dr Peter O’Brien, YU Executive Director
The 2025 Budget Statement, published last November, provided details on the Northern Growth Corridor. In advance of the Budget, news emerged about the appointment of Tom Riordan, as the Government’s first envoy for northern growth, who will work with Mayors, Ministers, businesses, universities and other partners to create an inter-city ‘growth corridor’.
Last week, the Government published details of the first stage of a Northern Growth Strategy, featuring plans for the Growth Corridor, centred initially on major improvements under the banner of Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR). Construction will start in 2030, beginning in Yorkshire, with upgrades to the lines connecting Leeds, York, Bradford, and Sheffield. In the spring, the Government has pledged to release more details about the Growth Strategy, which will encompass business and innovation, skills and employment, and housing and regeneration. Yorkshire Universities (YU) has welcomed these plans, indicating that the diverse, but cohesive, eco-system of universities in Yorkshire possess a range of complementary strengths and capabilities that could make a major contribution towards the Growth Strategy. This recognises the fact that the success of the UK’s knowledge assets rests on the success of the wider economy.
Public policy seeking to widen and deepen economic collaboration within and across the north of England is nothing new. In the past twenty years, we have seen The Northern Way under the tutelage of John Prescott. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition saw the Northern Powerhouse championed by George Osborne, alongside a parallel Northern Futures project promoted by Nick Clegg. The idea of strengthening an agglomeration concentrated on the largest city-regions in the North was also the focus of the City Growth Commission, chaired by the former Treasury Minister, and recent Chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, Jim O’Neill. The latest iteration has seen The Great North Partnership established under the collective leadership of the northern Mayors.
The concept of a Northern Growth Corridor has been given added impetus recently by the Government’s public commitment to provide significant national funding and finance into the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor. Current investments in rail infrastructure, such as the TransPennine Route Upgrade, have also contributed towards the growing momentum around a corridor in the North.
The North of England is comprised of different individual functional economic areas that share similar economic, social, and cultural characteristics. A sense of injustice, fostered as a consequence of managing the impacts of fundamental economic and social change, has bound the North together in making collective cases, using the concept of strength in numbers, to Whitehall and Westminster. It has also been beneficial when demonstrating how the North’s key assets and sectors, economic potential, and ability to attract and increase investment, are critical to the success of the overall UK economy. The ‘nuts and bolts’ of sub-national economic and spatial planning and governance are increasingly more suited to functional economic areas, in line with the current direction of travel for devolution in England.
The new Growth Strategy for the North suggests that we could be witnessing a more nuanced and pragmatic approach to spatial and infrastructure planning and economic development at a ‘pan-regional’ scale. Instead of defining or characterising the North as a single economic or political unit, it is more helpful to see how collaborations between political leaders in the North can work together towards achieving shared priorities and goals. Three Yorkshire Mayors, for example, who have come together under the White Rose Agreement, have been instrumental in the cementing the initial building blocks of the Northern Growth Strategy. This reflects the practical added value of working within a multi-level governance framework at a time when more powers are being devolved to regions and localities.
