By Michelle Lambon-Wilks, Head of Education & Skills Sellafield Ltd

It’s an exciting time to be asked to take up the reins of Education and Skills at Sellafield Ltd.  As our business changes from a focus on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to remediation and decommissioning our legacy facilities, we continue to recruit large numbers of apprentices and graduates on an annual basis. The reskilling of existing employees is also coming to the fore.

We have a responsibility to ensure that the site is able to continue its 100-year clean-up work safely and securely, using innovative techniques employed by our skilled workforce and supply chain partners.

To carry out this nationally important work requires carefully managed, world first engineering projects, and most importantly, the development of our people, as well as the education of future workers, which is crucial to our success.

Ensuring we have a pipeline of the right skills is an area we identified a number of years ago. To develop that area, we have invested heavily in projects that benefit not just the industry but also support our communities and local economic priorities.

For example, in West Cumbria we have created a Project Academy, and helped to facilitate a University Technical College (UTC) and the National College for Nuclear Northern Hub. We also played a crucial role in the development of two new schools in Whitehaven, while in Warrington we have focused on engineering including support to the Warrington UTC. The list goes on.

Meeting the challenge

Sellafield in West Cumbria is the UK’s largest and most complex nuclear site, undertaking the unique and nationally important work of cleaning up the country’s highest nuclear risks and hazards while safeguarding spent nuclear fuel, materials, and waste.

With an annual £2.3 billion budget, Sellafield Ltd is the operating company with the responsibility for decommissioning the site, safely and securely, with the help of an 11,000 strong workforce and with the support of more than 40,000 people across a diverse and unique supply chain.

Achieving our purpose of creating a clean and safe environment for future generations will rely on us having a fully engaged workforce that includes the right people, in the right roles, at the right time.

As such we operate as a major employer in our communities.  This year, we have continued our commitment to training the next generation of nuclear experts through our intensive apprenticeships, graduate, and lifelong learning programmes.

Our investment in skills and providing meaningful employment means that we are actively engaged at all levels of education and training – currently we have over 1100 learners on our various schemes.

This breaks down into over 612 vocational apprentices, 330 graduates, 112 degree apprentices as well as a number of lifelong learning and industrial placement students.

The company is part of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) group, which is responsible for decommissioning the UK’s 17 earliest nuclear sites safely, securely, and sustainably.

The NDA has a proven track record in investing in career development, from apprentices and graduates, to training the existing workforce.

Investing in the community

Thousands of careers have started within the group over several decades and each year they invest over £45 million in apprentice and graduate development alongside investment in the wider skills infrastructure, both in site communities and the broader education sector. Currently, the NDA group has over 1,000 people following its early careers programme.

However, the work doesn’t stop there. My passion and focus over the next year will be centred on educational outreach. At Sellafield Ltd we are keen to work with our local stakeholders on reaching out and into deprived areas. And to help those that haven’t had the opportunity to reach their full potential and achieve their ambitions. 

We have seen first-hand the impact of place-based education initiatives and we want to be visible and accessible to our local communities.  I myself want to ensure parity for learners – every learner is important to us whether on work placement, industrial placement, on one of our educational programmes or as an existing employee on a development programme. 

I want to create a clearly understood talent pipeline from primary school through to retirement. And make the various opportunities to access our employment opportunities both visible and easier to understand for schools, parents, and learners alike.

If we’re serious about driving up productivity in the North of England, we need a highly skilled workforce, equipped with the tools to build the industries of the future. Investing in future generations remains the key to unlocking growth and levelling up.

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By Tom Bridges, Arup UK Government & Innovation Lead & Leeds Office leader

A year ago, the UK government set out its long-term ambition for increasing prosperity and opportunity through twelve national levelling-up missions, a far-reaching programme of devolution, place-based investment in research and development, and major urban regeneration projects.

In November’s Autumn statement, the Chancellor set out further measures to bring greater local powers and investment, with an emphasis on the North of England.

It is in places such as the Humber where the success or failure of levelling-up will ultimately be determined. While the region performs below the national average on economic and social indicators, it has huge growth potential.

With huge opportunities for growth in the Humber around advanced manufacturing, clean-tech, green energy, and digital and creative industries, and leveraging the assets of the area’s freeport and universities, it’s an exciting time for this part of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

The region’s unique geographical position, industrial capabilities, and innovative businesses have created a huge opportunity to lead the UK in the green industrial revolution and to net-zero.

Devolution is no longer a concept in the Humber. Local powers have been granted and collaboration is very much underway. The area has seen significant public sector investment, with £184.6m of Government funding confirmed in the last 18 months. Highlights includes the Humber Freeport with £15m seed capital, and £66m across the Towns Fund projects in Grimsby, Goole and Scunthorpe, with major infrastructure projects such as the East Coast Cluster focused on hydrogen and carbon capture, and the improvements to the strategic road and rail networks.

Devolution in practice is gaining real momentum. There are plans for a Humber Economic Plan to be collectively developed by Combined Authorities in the region, with an accompanying Investment Strategy. A Net Zero Strategy will be produced by the Humber Energy Board and partners, with an observer from the Department of Energy, Security and Net Zero, supporting. The UK government is also considering relocating roles closer to policy issues they are addressing.

Arup has worked in the Humber for many years. Our firm has been involved in some of the most significant growth projects in the area, including helping to regenerate Hull’s city centre for City of Culture, designing Siemens Mobility new train manufacturing facility in Goole, supporting Grimsby to secure the first Town Deal in England, advising on the proposed advanced manufacturing park at Scunthorpe and working with Hull on improving water resilience through the Rockefeller Foundation 100 Resilient Cities initiative.

Most recently we worked with Metsä Tissue to create their first paper production facility in the UK in the region. We also supported British Steel as it unveiled its Low-Carbon Roadmap in 2021, to invest in a range of technologies to deliver net-zero steel by 2050, and significantly reduce its OC2 intensity by 2030 and 2035, which would put the Humber on the map in terms of green credentials.

There is potential for the Humber to act as a testbed and exemplar for boosting economic growth through decarbonisation. As it stands, the region accounts for 37% of the UK’s industrial and process carbon emissions.

Achieving decarbonisation milestones would give the Humber an opportunity to export its expertise globally too: 60% of the world’s population and two thirds of the world’s largest cities are in estuary or port regions, meaning the Humber experience can lead learnings internationally.

The Humber, like other regions, is competing for investment on the global stage. That is why it’s essential to have a shared vision and a shared, investor-focused voice.

We only need to look to the Siemens Mobility train manufacturing plant in Goole which will support as many as 700 jobs, the world’s largest offshore wind operations and maintenance centre developed by Orsted in Grimsby, or Reckitt’s £200m investment in its major science and innovation centre in Hull to see that the private sector is recognising the Humber’s potential.

If you travel merely one decade back in time, the Northern Powerhouse was launched as a partnership, a concept about growth and opportunity in key regions across the North of England. The investment seen by government, paired with local authorities and major businesses now striving towards shared goals, means that the prize is now closer than ever.

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In February 2020, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson committed to building Northern Powerhouse Rail across the Pennines and both legs of HS2. His government had, he said, “the guts to take a decision – no matter how difficult…that will deliver prosperity to every part of the country.”

There have been a series of changes to the route since then. The biggest blow came in November 2021, when the government axed critical sections of the Eastern Leg of HS2 as well as almost all of the promised Northern Powerhouse Rail new track in Yorkshire.

These cuts will – ironically – deliver less good value for money in the long-run.

As Tom Forth of Open Innovations has argued, all of the government’s own modelling has demonstrated that the now-scrapped section between Birmingham and Leeds delivered the highest benefit-cost ratio (BCR). The London-Birmingham leg will be the first to be built, despite being the worst value for money.

NPP Chief Executive Henri Murison writes…

The changes which have been to large-scale infrastructure projects such as HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail in recent years aren’t just a headache for transport planners, it’s hugely expensive – particularly when it comes to redesigning stations.

It’s also worryingly symptomatic of the UK’s wider problem with ambitious infrastructure investment as a whole, especially for projects outside London and the South East.

In recent decades, the UK has fallen into a bad habit: detractors demand sections be chopped off to save money, those changes require new designs which, in turn, drive up the cost of the surviving bits of route.

The uncertainty deters investment and development. Worst of all, it makes those remaining sections far less economically transformative. When we whittle down major infrastructure projects, we end up with a pale imitation of the original vision which does not deliver the productivity transformation we were promised and, ironically, is less good value for money. 

The original benefit-cost ratios for HS2 heavily relied on traditional transport economic modelling, which has a narrow focus on journey time savings. What they didn’t ever do was analyse the effect of delivering a real, properly connected Northern Powerhouse.

Our research commissioned ahead of the Oakervee Review took into account the multiplier benefits of boosting rail services across the North and building HS2 in full alongside investing in skills, education and extensive devolution. We found it could unlock a £1trillion jackpot and create almost a million more jobs within the coming three decades.  

After all, this was never about shaving a few minutes off the time to London. The main case for HS2 and is and always has been about capacity.

The lack of capacity on our rail network is a blight on our economy. HS2 unlocks capacity for the whole country, not just the cities along its route, which is vital for delivering efficient, reliable passenger and freight services.

The next time you’re stuck behind a queue of articulated lorries on the motorway, remember that the freight could be transported far more quickly, not to mention in a far more eco-friendly way, if we put it onto rail instead.

So, while these projects do cost a lot, that money doesn’t go up in a puff of smoke. It goes into building a transport network that’s fit for the 21^st century, bringing us closer to net zero and boosting productivity – meaning that projects like HS2 end up paying for themselves many times over.

As George Osborne told the Andrew Neil Show: “You do need the big infrastructure projects. All the arguments that were made against HS2 were made against the M25, the Channel Tunnel, the original motorway system.”

And let’s not forget that those big numbers are spread out across decades. In the year to April 2022, the government spent £5.4 billion on HS2. We spent nearly ten times as much (£53.5bn) in interest payments on national debt.

There are also sensible ways we can find savings. For example, we can lease rather than buy the new trains, enabling us to address inflation in industrywide construction costs whilst keeping up the pace of completing Phase 1 between London and Birmingham.

Lastly, I promise that we will keep fighting tooth and nail to make sure that this region doesn’t miss out.

Bringing high-speed services to Sheffield and Leeds would create 50,000 jobs, support 8,000 new homes and deliver a £54 billion boost to the local economy – but we’re still yet to see the long-awaited Leeds review on how to make that happen.

The good news is that Rail Minister Huw Merriman, a trusted and credible voice on this issue, has said he plans to meet leaders in Bradford and Leeds in the coming weeks to discuss options.

The question remains, is the UK – the birthplace of modern railways – capable of finishing what we started?

While we dither, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and many more of our competitors are investing billions in their own networks.

I hope we don’t get left behind.

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By John Dickie and Henri Murison, chief executives of BusinessLDN and the Northern Powerhouse Partnership

Standing at the dispatch box earlier this month, the Chancellor pledged his economic plan would deliver “long-term, sustainable, healthy growth” across the UK. It was curious, therefore, that his Red Book contained no mention across its 122 pages of one project that would tick all of those boxes: HS2.

Earlier this year, Jeremy Hunt confirmed the government’s commitment to delivering HS2 and ensuring it runs all the way to Euston. But we now know that the completion date has been pushed back significantly, ostensibly to cut costs.

The sums behind the argument that delaying construction of HS2 will save money simply do not add up. Spending less now will only increase costs over the long-term while delaying the benefits for people and businesses across the country. It also puts jobs in the supply chain, like at Hitachi in Newton Aycliffe, at risk. 

The UK has a long history of projects that have been delayed or shelved to save money in the short-term only for them to re-emerge at a later date with a more expensive price tag. Construction costs inevitably go up – especially at a time when inflation is high – so taxpayers will ultimately end up paying more. This assessment has been confirmed by a leaked Department for Transport briefing document which drives a coach and horses– through the idea that a delay will save money.

According to this memo, the line to Manchester is two decades away, and there is still no certainty about how to get services to Leeds as promised. Meanwhile, HS2 will terminate outside central London for a similar time frame despite the fact that the area around Euston looks increasingly like one massive construction site. It is also not clear at all how HS2’s final southern stop for that period – Old Oak Common – and the Elizabeth Line that serves it will cope with this deluge of new HS2 passengers .

These delays would deprive people in the North and London of HS2’s true benefits for a generation. Instead of trimming and stalling the project, we need a laser-like focus on ensuring that people and businesses across the country can seize the opportunities it offers as soon as possible. The alternative is yet another generation with the economy consigned to be stuck behind a stopping service rather than the capacity and growth on a new line.

Political dither and delay comes at a time when the government wants to attract investment into the UK but this decision is instead sending the worst possible signal. Businesses are having to cancel plans, lay-off staff and not get a return on their investment. Why should they believe there won’t be yet more further changes and continue to invest in opportunities around the new stations? Or indeed why should they invest with confidence on the basis of any infrastructure projects in the UK?

The country needs this project to remain on track through swift and efficient delivery to drive long-term growth and decarbonisation. Slowing down construction of sections will do little to help levelling-up, particularly in the North and parts of London as well. 

Growth is the only sustainable way of increasing prosperity, improving public services and ensuring the nation’s finances are on an even keel. 

With shovels already in the ground, the UK cannot afford yet another delay. Ministers should lift this handbrake on our economy and instead accelerate delivery of HS2 to create a world-class, new capacity-boosting rail line that will transform connectivity between our major cities, including Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and London.

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By Jessica Bowles, Director of Strategic Partnerships and Impact at Bruntwood and Visiting Fellow at the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place.

Powerful local leadership is a necessity for a successful economy, and it needs the tools and resources to govern effectively.

I’ve spent a career trying to figure out how we best create successful cities – first as a civil servant at the Department for Transport, then at Manchester City Council, and as an executive committee member of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, the organisation bringing businesses together with local leaders to drive productivity and growth across the North of England.

Productive, prosperous economies all need the same key ingredients to thrive. An efficient transport system and access to an educated, skilled labour market are essential – but the thread that ties these elements together is the ability of local people and places to set their own agenda and decide on their own priorities.

Since Greater Manchester’s devolution deal was agreed in the early days of the Northern Powerhouse project, the government’s commitment to devolution has waxed and waned, with other major constitutional issues and global health emergencies taking up Whitehall’s core capacity. Nearly a decade on it feels like devolution is properly back on the agenda, with recognition from both the government and opposition that the UK’s centralisation problem is acting as a barrier to growth.

In the Budget this month Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, announced details of trailblazer deals for Greater Manchester and the West Midlands: multi-year single funding settlements that give the mayors of both authorities greater long-term flexibility over their priorities, including keeping 100 per cent of the income from business rates.

A week after the Budget I was in Liverpool to discuss these latest developments in English devolution. Standing in the sunshine on the bustling Albert Dock, which might have been demolished in 1980s without Michael Heseltine’s hugely successful regeneration project, gave me a powerful reminder of how much has already been achieved. We were there to launch a new report from the Northern Powerhouse Partnership – a blueprint for how to devolve tax to the regions of England and truly empower mayors and council leaders.

It won’t be an easy process, and there is resistance in some quarters. Westminster’s old mindsets and habits die hard, and it was reported recently that officials in central government found it “psychologically tricky” to accept that devolving more powers and responsibilities to local areas would result in better decision-making.

That is perhaps unsurprising, given that the UK has long been one of the most centralised countries in the developed world, with ministers and officials in SW1 setting all but a tiny fraction of taxes and hoarding control over key decisions. According to statistics from the intergovernmental Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 2021, taxation at a local or regional level amounted to 16.2 per cent of GDP in Canada, 13.3 per cent in Germany, 9.4 per cent in the US and just 1.7 per cent in the UK.

The result has been what Andy Street, the Mayor of the West Midlands, described in January as a “begging bowl culture” – local government beholden to changing winds and constant churn in central government departments in London, with little to no control over their own economic destiny. When a place wants to improve bus services, build a new tram system, train its workforce or invest more in innovation, more often than not it needs to ask the central government for the money – and the government doesn’t always say yes.

^{West Midlands Mayor Andy Street and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham}

That needs to change, and Hunt has already said that “we need to move more decisively towards fiscal devolution”. Firstly, implementing a tourism tax is straightforward and would bring us in line with much of Europe, bringing in roughly £5.5m a year for the Lake District alone to support culture and protect the natural environment.

Secondly, we should consider copying France’s example of a ring-fenced versement mobilité tax, and devolve 1p of employers’ National Insurance contributions to fund local transport services and infrastructure. This would ensure that businesses get the transport system they need to grow and succeed.

Thirdly, devolving property taxes such as stamp duty and a reformed business rates system could transform local government financing and massively reduce councils’ reliance on Treasury handouts.

Together, these changes would bring decisions closer to the communities they affect, giving local leaders greater independence, flexibility and control. Local leaders know best what projects and policies their areas need. Skills and transport policy will be radically different in Cornwall to the policies needed in Newcastle, Leeds or Sheffield, cities which themselves will have vastly divergent requirements.

Local control would also make for better policy implementation. At a national level, ministries are too separated and too complex to see everything everywhere. Joining the dots between housing, health and employment, for example, can be a thankless task for government departments that are used to guarding their own patches and don’t have a culture of working to resolve issues holistically. Making those pieces fit together is far easier at a local level. Whitehall has to recognise that it can’t successfully micromanage the affairs of more than 300 diverse local authorities and local economies from an office in the South East.

Places aren’t all the same, and each place needs tailored policy to fit its own specific needs and opportunities. Giving them flexibility over their priorities allows businesses and the public to work together in a more effective, innovative way. Devolution was never a single shot, it’s a long-term process of change. Fundamentally rewiring public financing and rebalancing the British state won’t happen overnight, but it’s vital to our future prosperity.

We’ve come a long way from where we started – but there’s still a long way to go. 

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By Professor Charlie Jeffery, Vice Chancellor and President of the University of York

Another report on under-investment in the north was published last week, this time from IPPR North, just in time for the 2023 Convention of the North, held in Manchester on 25 January.

The IPPR report had a nifty soundbite: if the North were a country, it would, with Greece, be propping up the OECD league table on economic investment.

It followed on from others focused more specifically on R&D investment published by the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, Nesta, and Transport for the North. The message in all these reports is the same: economic imbalance between north and south will continue as long as there is an investment imbalance.

The golden octagon

This was a conversation the N8 Research Partnership picked up at the Convention of the North, working with the Northern Powerhouse Partnership. The N8 consists of eight universities across the north focused on mobilising their top quality research for economic innovation. It is the north’s “Golden Octagon”, just as vital for the UK economy as the “Golden Triangle” in the south.

So why are universities like those in N8 so important for the economy? We discover new knowledge through our research, and steer that knowledge partway, and sometimes all the way, into economic applications – products and services based on our ideas and technologies. We educate students in that cutting edge knowledge so they are equipped to use it, and drive on its application when they enter the labour market. And we convene, connect and attract: bringing together people and organisations; anchoring relationships between public and private sectors in the places we are based; and clustering economic activity around the innovations that emerge from research and the talents of our graduates.

When that works well you see, around our universities, a strong start-up culture connecting to and enriching the supply chains of existing businesses. Venture funding to support that start-up culture and scale up new business. Judicious public funding, national or local, to help attract, develop and retain businesses and talent. Inward investment as others from within and beyond the UK are attracted to a research and talent-led ecosystem.

In other words, you wouldn’t see these cluster effects without the research and the graduate talents that come from our universities.

Two way clusters

The question is: can this organic process be steered, nurtured, or accelerated more purposefully? I think it can – and increasingly, I detect, so does the government in Westminster.

For example, the York and North Yorkshire Devolution Deal has a unique element: a commitment to bring national and local partners together to further develop the bioeconomy cluster around the University of York – the BioYorkshire programme – by exploring how to capture public and private investment and to put it to work in a shared public/private investment vehicle.

One commentator called this a prototype for the devolution of R&D policy. Shouldn’t this be a core part of the devolved portfolio of mayors and combined authorities in the north, part of their levers for attracting investment and driving growth?

Additionally, the possibility for greater devolution echoes some of the thinking of the Science Minister, George Freeman. He has a list of 30 innovation-led clusters, fed by universities across the UK, with several in the north, including BioYorkshire, that he would like to see grow. He has also set out a vision of ‘cluster development corporations’.

These would be different from conventional development corporations, which focus on regenerating a former industrial site for new purposes. Clusters are not sites, but systems, distributed across different locations.

What Freeman is signalling is the ambition to bring together foundational public funding, national and local, to help anchor long term private sector commitment – such as the patient capital in UK pension funds which Solvency II reform offers an opportunity to leverage – so that it then draws in complementary investment: venture funding to incubate businesses; developer funding to give them somewhere to go when they scale up; and various locational sweeteners to get other businesses, within and beyond the UK, to relocate to the cluster.

This is a different way of thinking about investment – not just into a university, or a promising start-up, or an inward investment opportunity – but into the development of the cluster as a whole.

It is about thinking strategically, moving away from fragmented to more concerted decision-making. It is about moving away from that begging bowl and scattergun culture of government funding competitions recently criticised by Andy Street – something we heard about repeatedly at the Convention for the North.

So here’s a challenge for us in the north. Let’s make the argument for a devolved approach to R&D. Let’s build those cluster development corporations, let’s leverage the private sector into co-investment, let’s build a strategic approach to R&D investment – and begin to close that north-south investment gap.

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By Tristia Harrison, Chief Executive Officer at TalkTalk

Success demands luck as well as judgment.

We knew when we moved our HQ from London to Salford five years ago the North West region was already positioned for great things.

World famous Universities. Alumni who tended to stay. A cultural heritage bar none. Good ambitious local government. Favourable geography and infrastructure. And, of course, the famously resilient, funny, independent minded people.

However, we could never have quite predicted how high the North West star would climb, because, for sure, there is no better place in the UK to run a business right now. There has never been a better time to be in the region.

Greater Manchester is the fastest growing tech hub in Europe, and a place Lonely Planet recently said the city was not to be missed as a tourist in 2023.

The mixture of a vibrant city like Manchester, with great accessible places to live across the North West region, is a potent mix for a tech company like ours. And many others clearly think so too. Government departments, regulators, large tech companies, professional services firms and start-ups are all setting up HQs or big new offices here.

However, there is a danger. One that comes with every fast growth spurt. The risk is that we don’t build the fundamentals, and we fail to take everyone with us on the journey. We need to include everyone.

There are around 2,500 new tech jobs coming to our region in the next two years, but there’s a danger there aren’t enough people to fill them. How can this be? In the current economic climate, surely people will move mountains to come and find the work. It’s a simple answer.

Because although these are great attractive jobs, we can’t keep relying on the same recruitment pools. There simply aren’t enough of the usual suspects to keep the tech industry afloat in 2022, and nor should we – even if it’s the easiest thing to do.

Companies like ours will wither on the vine if we try to solve new problems with old mindsets and ideas. We are migrating our four million customers from copper wires to fibre optic cables. It’s hard, harder than any company in our industry thought it would be. It’s like exchanging a horse for a motorbike. Faster, and needing a whole new set of rules, language and skills.

^{TalkTalk HQ in Salford}

You can’t do that only recruiting people who’ve worked in the industry for 20 years. They won’t always ask the right questions – or think of a new way. We need to be recruiting from all backgrounds. Not just because it’s the fair thing to do – which of course it is – but also because it’s a business necessity. So how can we get new types of people in?

I wish it was always a really fast quick process – like turning on a light switch. Sometimes it is – take the Kickstart scheme-the Government’s initiative to get young people on universal credit into work after the pandemic. We took on over 100 Kickstarters during COVID – many of whom still work for us now. A great example of innovation out of necessity from government.

Both the government and the opposition are putting skills and innovation at the centre of their economic plan. It has to be a government priority, because bringing in new talent streams is a project that takes passion, time and effort – three things that are the hallmarks of education – and that’s where we have to look. Our education system will be the thing that brings the so called non-obvious talent from the back to the front of the queue.

Analysis by the Northern Powerhouse Partnership last summer found that the attainment gap between north and south was growing both at GCSE and A-Level.

And last week Guardian analysis of census data revealed a worrying north-south skills divide, with nearly half (46.7%) of people in London holding a degree or similar qualification (level 4 or above) compared with less than a third (28.6%) of those in the north-east. The figure is 35.8% for the south-east.

This is deeply worrying for businesses like TalkTalk, not to mention a serious problem for Northern productivity. We cannot unlock the North’s full economic potential without addressing fixing these divides – and locally-led initiatives are proving extremely effective in this area.

^{Kickstarters at TalkTalk}

We are one of the main corporate partners for UA92, just a mile or two away from our HQ in Salford. I would say it has started a quiet revolution in how we educate our children and young adults.

Schools are teaching basic coding – which is brilliant to see. But by and large the technical and “business” education we are giving our young isn’t keeping up with the pace of change and the development of the industry. That’s not the case at UA92. It’s taken a practical, results-orientated approach to solving this problem.

A question they have asked themselves mirrors many of the problems we see in business. How can we attract more than our fair share of students who had free school meals, at the same time as equipping them better for the world of work than other universities often do?

The answer they have found is by introducing several innovations to give people who aren’t the usual suspects the best chance for success.

Studying at the same time of day – morning or afternoon – to allow you to work. Having six start dates a year. Working with modules not final exams – which mirrors far more the way businesses work. Having a business mentor for every student. Trialling new things like digital apprenticeships. Taking affordability seriously.

We are proud to be a partner of UA92. We provide guest lectures, work experience placements, and mentoring to students – as well as sponsorship to students and subsidised broadband.

UA92 readies their students for the workplace not just in technical skills, but also in character, personal organisation and process management – combining the “soft” and “hard” aspects of everyday business life.

We are well aware that, on our doorstep in Salford, we have thousands of young people who could potentially come and work for us. Not enough do. Part of fixing that is the direct responsibility of business, not just of higher education institutions.

We work with schools in our area. Ten women in our company mentor ten girls at a local secondary school. A direct relationship is so important. We also work with the EY Foundation to provide employability workshops for local school children who are in receipt of free school meals.

We are part of the North West Tech Talent Consortium – a group of tech companies who work together to address the challenges we face around supply and demand in tech talent in the city region. Businesses, universities and other organisations are collaborating as never before in the North West.

Our corporate motto is “For everyone”. It was originally conceived to state how feel everyone should have access to good quality broadband. Our success of the business was built on challenging the status quo.

We shocked our industry back in 2003 by giving away broadband if you already had a landline with us. However, it allowed people to get online who previously couldn’t afford to do so.

If we take a similar innovative approach to skilling our young people for the workplace – it will be good for business, and good for society too.

The post How can we make a career in the North’s tech industry open for everyone? appeared first on Northern Powerhouse Partnership.

By Henri Murison, Chief Executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership

Could the North finally be starting to take back control? No, I don’t mean Brexit (but more on that later) – I mean devolution.

For many years devolution was rarely discussed outside local government. Recently, however, something has shifted.

Businesses are seeing the benefits of empowered local leadership for their own priorities. Activists are becoming louder in their calls for decision-making to be brought closer to communities. They want locally-led, joined-up policy-making that understands the unique opportunities and challenges of each city region.

For decades, politicians and civil servants in Whitehall and Westminster dominated but now mayors are in the ascendancy.

At the start of December, Gordon Brown, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves came to Leeds to unveil Labour’s plans for devolution, which they said would constitute “the biggest ever transfer of power from Westminster to the British people”.

It was a big moment, one which signalled an opportunity for genuine political consensus. A few days earlier Jeremy Hunt had told the Northern Echo, ” I want to explore what we could do where we’ve got really inspired local leadership to set elected mayors and council leaders free…our structures in the UK are very centralised and usually it ends up with someone having to come and ask the Treasury for something.”

Both Labour and the Conservatives have put devolution at the heart of their offers to close the North – South divide. The remaining question is who is better placed to deliver on those promises.

Of course, this isn’t a new idea. A number of prominent politicians from across the political spectrum, including David Miliband and Michael Heseltine, have long been advocates for the devolution and wider decentralisation agenda.

Most recently, when George Osborne was Chancellor, he signed a series of ground-breaking devolution deals with city regions across the country, creating the first metro mayors in 2017.

“Global cities have powerful city governments” he said, and if we wanted to build the Northern Powerhouse as an international brand, if we wanted to give each place “the different specific things it needs to get growth going”, then we needed a champion for each place – a mayor.

Many of that first generation of mayors are now in their second term. While still somewhat hemmed in by Whitehall, there’s no denying they’ve have had an impact, whether in bringing down bus fares or improving skills provision.

And they’re only just getting started. The M62 Mayors Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram and Tracy Brabin have been joined down the M1 by Labour’s Oliver Coppard in South Yorkshire – together they’ve been a powerful coalition fighting for better rail infrastructure, including Northern Powerhouse Rail across the Pennines.

Meanwhile, Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen is a rising star in the Conservative Party, bringing his own brand of Johnsonian boosterism to the region.

There’s a new mega-deal on the cards for the North East, where my own political career and ambitions started (and ended). While the region already has a mayor, this would create a much bigger, more substantive coalition of councils together into one economic entity.

Elsewhere in the North, a new devolution deal for York and North Yorkshire could see a new mayor handed £540m in gainshare funding over a 30-year period. Access to this funding has to be one of the most compelling reasons for councils (and voters) considering becoming a metro mayoral authority.  

Breaking the dominance of Whitehall is also hugely important for making sure the idea of Global Britain becomes more than just rhetoric. While researching our report into inward investment this year, we found that the North’s story was one that international investors recognised and understood, one they could work with. That strategy seems to be working – foreign direct investment into the Northern Powerhouse has soared 72% in the last five years.

Who should decide where buses or trams go? Who should decide what skills we need to be equipping our workforce with, in order to fit the needs of local businesses? Who knows where investment for local research and development assets would be put to best use?

In the new year the Northern Powerhouse Partnership will be taking a closer look at fiscal devolution – both the opportunities and challenges it raises. Clearly, it would see reductions to what the Treasury itself receives, and we need the right stabilisers in place for areas with the lowest tax revenues.

After all, if ultimately we want to become less reliant on Whitehall, we must be able to pay our own way.

I want to make the case for devolution as a transformative economic policy, as well as a path to genuine political reform, with metro mayors helping reconnect people to power.

Which brings me back to Brexit. When the UK (including many here in Yorkshire) voted to leave the European Union in 2016, it went much deeper than just a disdain or distrust of Brussels, stoked by the money of those like the businessman Paul Sykes. It was about a feeling of powerlessness which had built up over decades, of being ignored by the powers that be who think they know better.

Post-Brexit, that feeling hasn’t gone away, not least because the promises made by those like Johnson turned out to be ones he himself couldn’t keep.

If we want to heal divisions, we need to empower communities and reconnect them to a sense of shared destiny, over which they can have a proper say. People must feel able to change their destiny, rather than just accept it.

This is the only way to fix our broken political system and truly ‘take back control’.

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By Henri Murison, Chief Executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership

This week Rishi Sunak outlined his plans to overhaul the civil service in a bid to tackle what he called “groupthink”, calling for senior civil servants to spend at least a year of their careers working on secondment outside Whitehall or in industry.

He’s not the first to make this point. Since the 2019 General Election, there’s been a lot of discussion about how to bridge the divide between Whitehall and the rest of the country, with the government pledging that 50% of senior civil servants will be based outside the capital by 2030 as part of their levelling up agenda.

They have already made a start with a Darlington campus for the Treasury, new offices for BEIS in Salford and the Department for Transport in Leeds, as well as more department moves expected imminently.

But the government isn’t the only one making moves up north. In recent years there has been a wider trend of businesses and other organisations ‘northshoring’, looking to capitalise on our talent pool, lower operating costs and huge commercial opportunities in sectors such as digital and the net zero transition. 

TalkTalk moved its headquarters to Salford in 2019. Last year the Bank of England announced it was opening a northern hub in Leeds. The new HQ for Rolls Royce’s small modular reactor business is in Manchester.

^{TalkTalk’s offices in Salford}

It’s fantastic to see businesses taking regeneration into their own hands, creating opportunities for local people. It sends the message to young people that they don’t need to move to London to get a decent career.

Look at what the arrival of the BBC in Media City has done for Salford and Greater Manchester over the past decade. Channel 4 should do something similar for Leeds.

I support any plan to bring more jobs and opportunities to the north – but it’s worth saying that moving civil servants around the country is far from the be all and end all when it comes to levelling up.

My advice to Rishi Sunak would be to include secondments at combined authorities or local government as part of his plan, encouraging better understanding and collaboration between Whitehall and the regions.

We also agree with those like Energy Minister Greg Hands MP who spoke up for the suspended fast-stream graduate recruitment programme, making use of talent from our world-leading universities alongside creating alternative career pathways in the form of apprenticeships.

However, civil service relocation – necessary though it may be – cannot be a substitution for real devolution. If this government is serious about moving the power beyond Whitehall, it needs to devolve further real powers to metro mayors. This would allow us to reduce headcount in Whitehall, making a considerable saving on salaries, as well as on London weighting while bringing decision-making closer to local people.

Photo credit © Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

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By Richard Bonner, Northern Cities Executive at Arcadis

The Levelling-up Bill will be one of the flagship bills of the Parliament and it promises to be one of the most controversial, requiring all of Michael Gove’s skills to steer it intact through Parliament. Spanning local government reform, a new local plan process, protection of rights and alfresco dining, the Bill will have something for everyone to get upset about.

Whilst the levelling-up elements of the legislation, including the County Deal devolution and the establishment of levelling-up missions, should proceed reasonably smoothly, some of the proposed planning reforms could be far more challenging.

In particular, the reform to environmental assessment will involve substantial changes to speed-up infrastructure delivery as promised by government in the Energy Security Plan. Reforms to section 106 could also be tricky albeit that consultation has already taken place. By bringing all of these provisions together, Government risks losing the clarity of the Levelling-up mission that was such a vote winner in 2019.

Levelling up and Regeneration Bill

• We want to see the capacity from Government to support additional devolution deals (such as in York / North Yorkshire), as well as enhancing and deepening deals already in place, including in Greater Manchester.
  
• Local Value Capture is positive, equipping more communities to benefit from the development in their areas. However, the question remains as to whether that is enough to provide necessary social infrastructure such as GP surgeries, schools, transport.
  
• Measures to speed up planning process and enhancing local powers could be positive, if well implemented creates more local control and delivers housing communities need not what developers want to build.

Support for Business

• In the recent Arcadis International Construction Cost report pointed out, we are seeing significant inflation over the short and medium term, creating many problems in shaping investment decisions.
  
• We are pleased that there is focus on investment to support productivity. The devil, of course, in the detail but it is vital to secure the productivity gains needed to drive the Northern economy and investment.
  
• It’s encouraging to see the introduction of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement Scheme, giving more of our citizens the chance to retrain, and improve their skills. We see this as an opportunity to bring more people into the workforce, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, which is critical to improving productivity.

Transport

• It is critical that the transition to Great British Railways (GBR) focusses on improving passenger / customer experience and delivers the benefits of more simplified and intuitive ticketing. 
  
• A key measure of success will be how GBR meets the ambition of engaging with local leaders. For example, during the 2018 timetable introduction chaos our metro mayors had very limited ability to engage and address the issues in their metro areas. That needs to be improved so that we coordinate across the systems.
  
  
• We note that investment in decarbonisation is included but this needs to be better integrated into the Energy Strategy.

Energy

• While the government’s approach to energy transition and security is positive overall, there is no real engagement or strategy on demand reduction, such as in housing, commercial premises, industry and transport, which will be critical to reaching our net zero ambitions.
  
• The Future System Operator announcement is important to create the modern networks needed to deliver major transitions and to realise the benefits of investments such in offshore wind and hydrogen in the North East or as HyNet in the North West.

Lastly, there has been a lost opportunity in the momentum and support that the Government could offer in maximising the R&D mission and how we can accelerate our innovation hubs by bringing public and private sectors together in places such as Leeds and Manchester.

Overall, the Queen’s Speech announcements felt limited in their scale and ambition. There appeared to be lots of scraps of policy that deals with some of the short-term political necessity, with more detail needed in the Levelling-Up and Regeneration proposals. 

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