Cash boost for Northern areas including South Yorkshire
Rachel Reeves has announced up to £1.7 billion in new investment for city regions across northern England, aimed at boosting their growth-driving industries.
The funding forms part of a wider £2.3 billion “city investment funds” package unveiled in the Chancellor’s Mais Lecture, in which she said “huge gains” could be made by reversing the underperformance of major cities outside of London.
The cash will be handed directly to mayors through grant, loan and long-term capital to help densify city centres and increase housebuilding.
Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, the North East, Liverpool City Region and South Yorkshire are set to benefit in the north, with the West Midlands receiving funds elsewhere.
Ms Reeves said:
“For too long the North has been sidelined, denied investment and had its potential held back.
“Backing its industrial strengths like Manchester’s thriving digital sector and Sheffield’s cutting-edge defence manufacturing will boost the region’s economy and place it at the centre of our national growth.
“In a changing world we have the right economic plan: stability, investment and reform to build a stronger more secure economy.”
Plans set out by the Treasury include “hundreds of millions of pounds” for a new digital campus in Manchester, set to become a centre for government in the North West for nearly 9,000 civil servants and ministers.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said the campus “will put us among the world’s top tier of tech cities, creating high-value jobs for our residents and opportunities for our businesses”.
In Liverpool, £51 million will fund a new national cryogenics facility to support research in areas such as quantum computing, fusion and healthcare.
Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram said:
“Backing projects like the new national cryogenics facility at Daresbury puts us right at the forefront of the global quantum race, bringing high-quality jobs and investment into our area.”
Some £50 million will go towards South Yorkshire’s defence industry, known for engineering materials such as steel for gun barrels and nuclear submarines.
South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard said:
“The confirmation of £50 million for our Defence Growth Deal is a huge vote of confidence in the work we do here in South Yorkshire and our contribution to the security of this country.
“For too long, South Yorkshire and the wider North have been failed, not only a by a lack of investment in our people, our businesses, our ideas and our infrastructure, but by a lack of ambition itself from central government.
“But slowly, surely that’s changing.”
Giving the annual Mais Lecture at Bayes Business School in London on Tuesday, the Chancellor said the new city investment funds would give “regional leaders control over long-term self-sustaining capital, theirs to generate returns from, theirs to invest, backed by a commitment to business rates retention”.
She said she wanted to “liberate our regions from stifling Whitehall orthodoxies”, under which “the fiscal reward for local economic success flows straight to the Exchequer”.
Driving growth in every part of Britain was one of three “big choices” Ms Reeves set out in her speech, along with closer alignment with the European Union and accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence.